Outlaw in India (8 page)

RADJI MOVED HIS KNIGHT
and took my pawn. “When do we go to
Varanasi?”

He looked up at me with great expectation. I wondered what the centuries of
people standing in front of him would have looked like. I imagined a whole bunch
of men with really long beards standing in rice fields.

“What?”

“Varanasi. When do we go there?”

My mind raced. Oh, yah, I had promised him I would take him there. But that was
when I thought he was dying. Surely he didn’t expect me to take him now? “Umm .
. . let me think . . .” I took his knight with my bishop. I was surprised he
didn’t see that coming.

“Will you keep your promise?” He took my bishop with his
bishop. The little sneak, he tricked me by distracting me.

“Of course I will keep my promise.”

I studied the map. Varanasi was far inland. It was far from any coast. It sat
on the Ganges River but if I wanted to sail up the Ganges, which I didn’t want
to do, we’d have to sail all the way around India first, into the Bay of Bengal
and enter Bangladesh. Nope, didn’t want to do that. How else could we get there?
By bus? By train?

“We can walk,” said Radji, as if he had been reading my mind. I was pretty sure
he was.

“No way! It’s too far. It would take forever.”

“No! No. Just six months, maybe. It would be a pilgrimage.”

“Radji. I promised to take you to Varanasi but I didn’t promise to walk there.
We’ll probably take the train.”

He dropped his head. “They won’t let me on the train.”

“Yes, they will. I will make sure of it.”

I needed to think. On one hand, it seemed like a heck of a lot to do, to go all
the way to Varanasi just so that Radji could step into the river. On the other
hand, it could be kind of exciting. My guide book said that Varanasi was
thousands of years old, one of the oldest cities in the world. It was a holy
city where people went to die. The Ganges was believed to be a goddess in the
Hindu religion. She was pure and would cleanse you, body and soul—even though my
guide book said the river was horribly polluted.

I knew that Radji was kind of tricking me—I had promised to take him there only
after he had died,
if
he died—but
I respected him for
tricking me, because that’s what I would have done in his shoes. In fact, there
were a lot of things about Radji that reminded me of myself. I thought we were
very much alike.

But there were problems with taking a bus or a train. Where would we hide the
sub for so long? And though I could probably take Hollie on a train, what would
I do with Seaweed? I knew he would hang around the sub for several days as long
as he could see it. But I was uncomfortable leaving him for any longer than a
few days. And the sub would have to be really well hidden. I would have to think
about it a lot first.

In the meantime, I wanted to visit Old Goa. There were interesting ruins there,
including some of the earliest Christian churches in India, from when the
Portuguese had come to the subcontinent hundreds of years ago. We didn’t have to
return to sea to get to Old Goa, but we did have to enter the harbour again,
sneak past that destroyer and sail up another river. I figured we could follow a
barge downstream and scoot across the harbour at night on the surface with our
lights on. That was actually legal
if
we flew the Indian and Canadian
flags and let the coastguard inspect us. But we’d get stopped for sure if they
saw us, and they’d probably force us to moor the sub for a couple of weeks while
they inspected it, and who knows what would happen then? They’d know we were the
sub they thought they had sunk, and maybe they’d even arrest us. I’d rather just
sneak across the harbour pretending to be a boat.

We waited for twilight then pulled out at periscope depth
behind a noisy barge. Radji took his spot at the periscope. He was feeling
much better. So was Hollie, who spent a lot of time licking his paws and rubbing
his face with them. Seaweed sat around looking bored. I knew he wanted out but I
didn’t want to let him out until we had cleared the harbour and were on our way
up the river that flowed past Old Goa. I didn’t want to leave behind any of my
crew in India.

The ride downstream was faster than the ride up. It wasn’t as late as I would
have liked when we entered the harbour but at least it was dark. A few hundred
feet from the river mouth the barge veered to port, so we surfaced, turned on
our lights and veered to starboard. We could see the destroyer sitting out in
the centre of the harbour, lit up like a giant Christmas tree. I was comforted
by the thought that she’d never fire a missile into her own harbour. And since
we were riding the surface just like any other vessel, she could only detect us
visually, which was unlikely in the dark. The greater danger was of someone else
spotting us and reporting us. But with any luck we’d be on the other river
before a chase could begin.

Radji was really helpful crossing the harbour. He kept his eyes peeled on the
water the whole time and gave me constant reports. He could identify vessels
fairly well since he had been living in a harbour for quite a while—how long
exactly I didn’t know because he wouldn’t tell me. “There’s a ferry crossing in
front of us.”

“How far?”

“Far. Maybe five miles?”

“Yes, I see it on radar. Actually, that’s just a mile. It’s
hard to tell sometimes, especially at night. Keep checking the destroyer, okay?
If you see any lights moving away from her let me know immediately. That will
mean she’s putting boats in the water. If she does that, we have to disappear
quickly.”

“Okay.”

The mouth of the river was about ten miles from the mouth of the harbour, which
was four miles wide where it opened into the Arabian Sea. I steered to hug the
shore as we crept around the point at Dona Paula into the river that would bring
us to Old Goa. Luckily, no one challenged us. If anyone spotted us we would
never have known anyway.

We went up the river in the middle of night. There were lights on the
riverbanks here and there but the water was dark. We tied up beneath an old
wooden dock in a small industrial area, just below where the map said Old Goa
was. I took a quick peek when I let Seaweed out and tied the sub to the posts.
The portal was jutting up only four inches; the hull was completely submerged.
It was a decent hiding spot beneath the dock, between old barges and old
machinery. It sure didn’t look like there would be ruins and churches here, but
the book said there were. We had tea and toast and went to bed. I listened to
Radji cry out again before I fell asleep. It was the same as before; he was
crying out to stop someone.

In the early afternoon we snuck out from underneath the old pier, climbed the
bank and went in search of Old Goa. We found it right above the industrial zone
after we passed
through some trees. It appeared as if in a
fairy tale. There were ancient ruins and a gigantic cathedral—the church of St.
Francis of Assisi. It was incredible inside and out. So were the ruins. For
hours we wandered around in the hot sun, exploring alleyways between fallen
stones and vast open courtyards and crumbling walls. But the St. Francis church
was really special. It was in great shape. It was the biggest church I had ever
seen, and the first one Radji ever entered. No one stepped in our way to stop
us, although I put Hollie in the tool bag when we went inside. We lit candles
and stared at paintings and stained glass windows and statues. Radji asked me a
lot of questions, which I found kind of hard to answer. He was particularly
interested in angels, and he couldn’t understand why there was only one god.
Outside, we bought bottled water, chai and snacks at roadside vendors, sat in
the shade and ate them. It was a very relaxed and enjoyable afternoon.

By evening, we were still sitting in the shade of the great church, playing
chess, when we were interrupted by a rather strange old lady. She was dressed in
white linen, like a saint, and wearing an extremely wide-brimmed hat. Her face
was old and wrinkled. Her eyes were blue and shiny. She stopped to watch us play
and seemed lost in concentration.

Finally, she spoke. “Well, look here—east meets west.”

I looked up at her. “What?”

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“I’m from Newfoundland. Canada.”

She nodded with approval. “And where are
you
from?”

Radji raised his head from the game very reluctantly. He looked at her but he
couldn’t believe that she was actually speaking to him, and so he dropped his
head again.

“He’s from Kochi,” I said.

“Is he? Well, my name is Melissa Honeychurch. I live not too far away from
here. You two are an unlikely pair. How did you meet?”

I stared more closely at her. I wondered why she wanted to know. I also
wondered how to answer her. “We met in Kochi.”

“And you’re travelling together?”

“Umm . . . yes.”

“And how are you travelling?”

Now she was getting nosy. I wished she would stop asking questions. “By boat,”
I said. I dropped my head and hoped she would just go away. But she didn’t. She
kept watching the game.

“He needs a bath,” she said suddenly, as if it were her job to go around and
tell people when they needed a bath. I looked at her and thought: what a strange
person. She looked right back at me. “You do, too,” she said.

MELISSA HONEYCHURCH DIDN’T
mind telling people what she thought,
whether they liked it or not. She wasn’t afraid of anybody. I liked that about
her. I didn’t like that she was so bossy though. But something she said caught
my attention. She said she lived in a lovely old house on a lovely piece of land
beside a lovely river. She said she kept an English garden and that she had an
ancient wheelbarrow, a Jaguar she kept in a garage and a riverboat she kept in a
boathouse, but that the boathouse needed attention and she was too old to do it
by herself.

“A Jaguar,” Radji asked?

“It’s a car, not a cat.”

It was the boathouse I was interested in. “Would you
consider renting your boathouse to us for a week so that we can go to
Varanasi?”

“Rent my boathouse? Why on earth would you ever want to rent my boathouse?” She
looked at me suspiciously. “Why don’t you just keep your boat outside like
everybody else? And you look awfully young to have your own boat. Wherever are
your parents?”

“My mother died when I was born. My father lives in Montreal. I live on my
boat.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Well, something doesn’t add up here. I don’t know what it is. Why don’t you
just keep your boat outside like everybody else?”

I didn’t want to tell her why exactly. “I just don’t want anything to happen to
it.”

She frowned and shook her head. “No. There’s more to it than that.”

I just stared at her. If she didn’t want to rent it that was okay.

“I’ll tell you what, young man . . . what is your name?”

“Alfred. And this is Radji.”

She smiled at Radji and he smiled back, but it didn’t look like a real
smile.

“I’ll tell you what, Alfred. I’ll make you a deal.”

“A deal?”

“Yes. I’ll let you use my boathouse for as long as you like
if you will go to Mumbai and bring my brother back to me.”

“Why doesn’t he just come by himself?”

“He can’t; he’s deceased.”

I wondered what his disease was but didn’t want to ask. “How long has he been
sick?”

“Many years. I don’t know exactly. It doesn’t matter now. I never met
him.”

“You never met him?”

“No. We had the same father but different mothers. I always meant to go and see
him but . . . well, life just flows on, you know, like a river. But now it is
time for him to come to me. There is nowhere else for him to go.”

“Are you sure he wants to?”

She looked at me strangely. “Well, that’s what he said he wanted. He wrote me a
letter awhile back, when he first became ill.”

“Oh. So . . . how would we pick him up? And why don’t you just go
yourself?”

“I never go to Mumbai. I once had a very bad experience there. I’ll never go
back. I have an address where my brother has been kept for three years now. A
Mr. Singh is keeping him. You could take the overnight train and be back in a
day and a half.”

“And if we do that you will let us use your boathouse?”

“For as long as you like.”

“How far upriver do you live?”

“Oh . . . thirty-five miles or so. The roads are not too
bad.”

“Do you know how deep the river is?”

“How deep the river is? Well it’s deep enough for a boat, that’s for sure. How
big is your boat?”

“It’s twenty feet long.”

“Oh, that’s nothing. I’m sure you don’t need more than five or six feet for a
boat of that size. The river is plenty deep for that.”

I wasn’t so certain. But I sure would love to leave the sub inside a secure
boathouse while we went to Varanasi. “Okay. I agree.”

Melissa broke into a smile. I wondered what it would be like helping her
brother onto the train. He must have been pretty sick if he couldn’t make the
trip by himself. Or maybe he was just too old. I sure hoped his disease wasn’t
contagious.

Melissa said she would tie a red scarf to a post at the bottom of her property.
We couldn’t miss it. I told her we liked to sail at night and would arrive early
in the morning. She stared at me as if I were a creature from another planet.
“You are a strange young man,” she said, then wished us good sailing and
left.

I took Radji’s queen with my knight, forced his king into a corner and
checkmated him with a pawn. Radji took a deep breath, shook his head with
disbelief, like a farmer whose field had been spoiled by rain, then put the
pieces inside the folding board. We headed back to the sub. It was twilight
when we came over the bank and saw two men fishing on the
old wooden dock, directly above the sub. Rats. We were hungry and tired. We
wanted to eat and catch some sleep before sailing upriver. But first we had to
sit on the bank and watch them catch a couple of small fish and put them into a
bucket. It felt like the twilight was going to last forever. They tied up their
lines, stood there in the dark and chatted. I felt like going down and telling
them to hurry up. Finally they left and we could go down, crawl under the dock
and into the sub. We had a plate of beans, bread and sardines. We washed it down
with tea and went to bed.

In the middle of the night I woke Radji and told him to get up and take his
post at the periscope. I knew he was tired, and I knew that he was only ten, and
part of me wanted to let him sleep, but another part of me believed that since
he had stowed away on my sub, he had to earn his keep. It was not a free ride.
That was the part of me that was the captain. Besides, I figured it was good for
him.

I gave him a glass of juice first. Then we took our places, I started the
engine and we headed upstream with the portal just a foot above the surface and
the hatch wide open. Seaweed rode on top of it. As with the other river, the
banks were often bare, sometimes tree-lined, or industrial or strewn with
barges. There were very few houses close to the water. Perhaps upstream there
would be. All the same, I told Radji to keep a close lookout for people. If we
were spotted I wanted to know, although I didn’t know what sense anyone would
make of a
seagull riding upstream on what probably looked
like the top of a metal barrel. In the dark they probably wouldn’t see anything
anyway.

The first twenty-five miles were easy. With the engine running we cut eighteen
knots through the water. The river was flowing against us at three knots, so our
true speed against the bank was fifteen knots, but with all the twisting and
turning it took about two hours to cover twenty-five miles. Then it became
trickier because it grew shallower. I had to watch the sonar screen closely and
zigzag in places, and that slowed us down quite a bit. The last five miles were
particularly difficult, and took us another two hours, so the sun was already
coming up when Radji spotted the red scarf. He called out excitedly when he saw
it. Looking out through the periscope was Radji’s favourite thing to do, next to
playing chess.

I came as close to the bank as I dared. To do that, I had to pump air into the
tanks and bring the hull above the surface. Now we were exposed. I saw the roof
of Melissa’s house and I saw the boathouse. It certainly needed work; it was
leaning to one side like a rotten pumpkin. But it was big enough, although we
would have to surface completely to get inside. I moored the sub to the
boathouse and dropped anchor too, just in case the river felt like pulling the
sub away and dragging the boathouse along with it. I had learned not to trust
rivers.

We inflated the kayak, climbed in—all four of us—and paddled a few feet to the
bank. We jumped out, I pulled the
kayak up onto the grass and
we wandered over to Melissa’s house. It was a white, one-storey, mortared house,
yellowed with age, with a red, clay-tiled roof and tall windows that opened out
like French doors. It looked like a vanilla cake with pink frosting. There was
grass growing in the eavestroughs. There were flowers and weeds growing all
around the walls of the house, and they looked like good places for snakes to
hide. I wanted to remember to ask her about that. Something moved on the roof.
Looking up, I saw monkeys in the trees.