Felix would have told him that none of this mattered—however fascinating it was, scientifically. In the end we were what we were, and it made no difference how we’d got there. But that wasn’t such an easy mantra to recite when you’d travelled halfway around the planet, with no clear idea why. Prabir had resigned himself to his inability to reason away the dread he felt at the thought of Madhusree setting foot on the island; whether or not it was out of all proportion to any real risk she faced, he couldn’t expect to shake off the past so lightly. But he wasn’t even sure what fear, or what drive, the fulcrum of Teranesia had rendered so powerful. Was he still trying to impress his dead parents with his dedication? He’d always relied on his memory of them for guidance—and their imagined approval had always been the one sure sign that he’d done something right—but he didn’t believe that he’d reduced Madhusree to a pawn in some game with the ghosts in his head. Still less could he accept that everything between them revolved around the obscure Mendelian fact that she was the only living person who could carry half his genes into the future. Madhusree wasn’t only his sister; she was his oldest friend and staunchest ally. Why wouldn’t he take a few weeks’ vacation from a job he hated to look out for her in a dangerous corner of the world?
Prabir turned away from the hospital and started back towards the city. However much he might have loved, admired and respected her if they’d met for the first time under Amita’s roof—if she’d been adopted from some other family entirely, but still chosen to flee that madhouse with him at the first opportunity—he was almost certain that he would never have been willing to follow her all the way to Teranesia.
Prabir had flown into Ambon once before, but he had no clear memory of the descent. This time, at least, it was startlingly apparent—as it had never been from sea level, approaching in the ferry—that the mist-shrouded island was actually a pair of distinct volcanic bodies, connected in geologically recent times by a narrow isthmus of silt. Ambon Harbour was the largest part of what had once been the strait between these two separate islands; if it had penetrated any deeper it would have come out the other side.
Pattimura Airport lay on the north-west shore of the harbour; Ambon City was ten kilometres due east. Prabir watched one speedboat crossing the water, overloaded with people and luggage, and decided to take the long way round.
Waiting on the highway for the bus, he felt self-conscious in a very different way than he had in Darwin; he was almost afraid that someone might recognise him and ask him to account for his long absence. That wasn’t very likely; the people they’d met here had been friendly enough, but with his broken Indonesian and the family’s infrequent visits, he’d never really had the chance to get to know anyone.
The trip around the harbour took almost an hour. The water looked much cleaner than he remembered; there’d usually been a plume of oil and floating garbage stretching out to surround the ferry before it had even entered the harbour.
He alighted in the city and set out for the hotel. The streets were cobblestone, recently refurbished, lined with tall palm trees at regular intervals; the whining scooters he remembered being everywhere had apparently been banished from the city centre. There were no billboards, and no intrusively modern signs on the shops; an almost uniform row of white stone façades shone in the sun. The whole thing was probably a calculated attempt to re-create the style of the Dutch colonial period for the tourists, most traces of the real thing having been comprehensively bombed into dust during World War II.
He’d never learnt his way around Ambon as a child, relying on his parents to shepherd him. He recognised none of the buildings he passed, and he had no real sense of where he was in relation to the shops and markets where they’d bought provisions. But the angle of the light, the scent of the air, were enough to evoke a discomforting sense of reconnection. He didn’t need to see the past re-created brick by brick to feel the tug of it inside him.
A small group of people in brightly coloured, formal-looking clothes stood at the edge of the main square, arms outstretched at their sides, eyes half closed, perspiring heavily, singing. Behind them, a sagging cardboard sign bore a few dozen words in Indonesian. Prabir was too tired to dredge his memory for an uncertain translation, and when he saw a citation at the bottom—book, chapter and verse—he decided not to bother fishing out his notepad for help.
Hordes of evangelical Christians from the US had descended on the region in the wake of the civil war, but they’d had far more success in West Papua, where even the current President had been converted to born-again psychosis. Prabir wasn’t sure why the Moluccans had proved so resistant this time round; they’d been a pushover for Spanish Catholicism, then chucked it all in for Dutch Protestantism—though that must have been at least partly a matter of trying to get along with whoever held the guns to their heads from year to year. Maybe the Americans hadn’t tried hard enough to conceal their phobia of Islam, which would not have gone down too well here. Relations between Christians and Muslims on Ambon had suffered almost irreparable damage in the early years of the post-Suharto chaos, with provocateur-led riots claiming hundreds of lives. A decade later, entire villages had been wiped out under cover of war. With independence, the government of the Republik Maluku Selatan had set about reviving a five-hundred-year-old tradition of alliances between Christian and Muslim villages; these pela alliances had once been famously successful at defusing inter-religious tensions, and still ran so deep on some outlying islands that Christians built mosques for their neighbours, Muslims built churches. The return of pela, with the opportunity it provided to write off the years of violence as an aberration, was probably the main reason the RMS hadn’t torn itself apart in an endless cycle of revenge killing.
Prabir was about to move on when he noticed the exhibit at the singers’ feet, largely obscured by the pedestrians passing in front of it. Some kind of animal had been inexpertly dissected, and the parts laid out on a stained canvas sheet. Reluctantly, he moved closer. The viscera and the separated bones meant nothing to him; the intended audience had probably had more experience with butchering animals, and would at least know what was meant to impress them. The skull looked like a small marsupial’s, a tree kangaroo or a cuscus. Some pieces of the hide were thickly furred; others were covered in shiny brown scales. But if the creature really had been some kind of astonishing chimera, why lessen the impact by cutting it up?
One of the evangelists opened her eyes and beamed at him. His clothes and backpack must have given him away as a foreigner; the woman addressed him in halting English. ‘End times, brother! End times upon us!’
Prabir replied apologetically, in Bengali, that he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.
The desk clerk at the Amboina Hotel was far too polite to laugh when Prabir asked where he might hire a boat as cheaply as possible. The response—couched in the most diplomatic language—was that he could forget about the ‘cheap’ part and join the queue. Everyone who’d arrived in town for the last two months had been looking for a boat; it was a seller’s market.
This was a dispiriting start, but Prabir fought down the urge to retreat into pessimism. ‘There was a group of about twenty people who would have passed through Ambon three weeks ago. Scientists, on an expedition being mounted by some foreign universities. Have you heard anything about that?’ There were half a dozen other places they could have stayed, but he had nothing to lose by asking.