His mother paused. Prabir watched her feet as she took one more step forward on her left, turning her body partly sideways so she could face his father. She dropped slowly to a crouch, then reached down towards him. The ladder was about half a metre from the ground; she could just touch his face with her fingertips.
‘Rajendra?’
He moved his head slightly in acknowledgement.
‘I’m too high to lift you from here. You’re going to have to sit up.’
There was no response. Prabir pictured his father rising from the sand into her arms, like a water man rising from the waves. But nothing happened.
‘Rajendra?’
Suddenly his father emitted a sobbing noise, and reached up with one hand and touched her forearm. She clasped his hand. ‘It’s all right, love. It’s all right.’
She turned to Prabir. ‘I’m going to try sitting down, so I can get Baba on to the ladder. But then I might not be able to stand up with him, to carry him. If I leave him on the ladder and walk back to my end, do you think the two of us could carry the ladder to the side of the garden with Baba on it—like a stretcher?’
Prabir replied instantly, ‘Yes. We can do it.’
His mother looked away, angry for a moment. She said, ‘I want you to think about it. Don’t just tell me what you’d like to be true.’
Chastened, Prabir obeyed her. Half his father’s weight. More than twice as much as Madhusree’s. He believed he was strong enough. But if he was fooling himself, and he dropped the ladder…
He said, ‘I’m not sure how far I could carry him without resting. But I could slide the crate along the ground with me—kick it along with one foot. Then if I had to stop, I could rest the ladder on it.’
His mother considered this. ‘All right. That’s what we’ll do.’ She shot him a half-smile, shorthand for all the reassuring words that would have taken too long to speak.
She gripped the ladder with her hands on either side, raised herself slightly with her arms, then brought her legs forward and lowered herself until she was sitting. She was still facing at an angle to the ladder; she curled her right leg up behind her and hooked her foot over one of the steps. Prabir pushed down nervously on the opposite rail. He had no way of sensing any change in the balance of forces as his mother shifted her weight, but he had a sickening feeling that the ladder might suddenly flip over sideways if he wasn’t ready to prevent it.
She reached down and took hold of his father by the chest, one hand beneath each armpit, her own arms fully extended. Prabir had imagined her wrapping his father in a bear-hug and hefting him up in one smooth motion—he’d seen her handle ninety-kilogram gas cylinders that way, in her lab in Calcutta—but it was clear now that she could stretch no closer. She took a few deep breaths, then attempted to lift him.
The geometry could not have been more awkward; that she could hold him at all was miracle enough, but everything she’d had to do with her body in order to reach him worked to undermine her strength. As Prabir watched, the top of the foot that she’d hooked over the ladder turned pale, then darkened with violet bruises. A resonant sound started up in her throat, an almost musical droning, as if she’d caught herself on the verge of an involuntary cry of pain and decided to make this sound instead, full of conscious anger and determination. Prabir had only heard her do this once before: in the hospital in Darwin, during labour.
His father lifted his head slightly, then managed to raise his shoulders a few centimetres off the ground by curving his spine. His mother took advantage of this immediately, bending her arms, moving her shoulders back, bracing herself more efficiently. With her arms stretched as far as they’d go, her whole upper body had been dead weight, but now the muscles in her back and arms could come into play. Prabir watched in joy and amazement as she pulled his father up, her arms closing around his back, until he was sitting.
She rested for a moment, catching her breath, repositioning her damaged foot. Prabir realised that his hands were shaking; he fought to steady them, to prepare himself for the task of stretcher-bearer.
Rajendra’s eyes were still closed, but he was smiling, his arms around Radha’s waist. She tightened her embrace, clasped her hands together behind him, and lifted him off the ground.
A wall of air knocked Prabir backwards on to the grass, then a soft rain of sand descended on him. He opened his mouth and tried to speak through the grit, but his ears were ringing and he couldn’t tell if any sound was emerging.
As he brushed his face clean with his arm, something beneath the sand scratched his forearm, then his face began to throb with pain. When he tried to open his eyes, it felt as if the point of a knife was being held against the lids.
He cried out, ‘Baba! Baba! Baba!’
He could feel the air resonating in his throat; he knew he was shouting at the top of his lungs. His father would hear him; that was all that mattered. His father would hear him, and come.
4
‘We’re going on a trip, Maddy! South, south, south! To the Tanimbar Islands!’ Prabir undressed her as he spoke, dropping her soiled clothes on the mattress of the cot. He didn’t think his mother would mind if he left them there unwashed; the whole point of the exercise was deciding what was important and what wasn’t. That was why he hadn’t wasted time burying the ‘bodies’ his parents had left in the garden; if something ever really did happen to them, they’d want him to think of Madhusree, rather than fussing over their meaningless remains.
He hoped his appearance wasn’t too alarming. He’d washed away all the dirt, but he’d given up trying to dig the metal from his skin, and simply drenched his face and chest with Betadine in the hope of warding off infection. Naturally, his parents had made sure that none of the shrapnel would penetrate too deeply; they would have calculated the size and placement of the charge so that no fragment would carry enough energy to harm him.
Madhusree had apparently cried herself dry in his absence. When she fingered a wound on Prabir’s face and he smacked her hand sharply, all she could manage was a whimpering sound, and even that soon faded. She remained sulky and irritable, but the idea of a trip seemed to intrigue her.
He carried her to the lavatory hut, wiped her backside, then cleaned her a bit more with moistened toilet paper.
‘Where’s Ma?’ she demanded.
‘I told you. South. On the Tanimbar Islands. She’s waiting for us there with Baba.’
Madhusree regarded him sceptically. ‘She didn’t.’
‘Didn’t what? Didn’t leave the island? Where is she then, smart-arse?’
Madhusree opened her mouth to reply, but she couldn’t hear her mother’s voice, so she had no ready answer.
Prabir said soothingly, ‘I know it was rough of them to sneak off without saying goodbye to you, but they had to do it that way. They wanted to see if I could look after you. If I do a good job, they’ll let me stay. If I don’t, I’ll have to go to boarding school. Sounds fair, doesn’t it?’
Madhusree shook her head unhappily, but Prabir suspected that this had more to do with the absence of Ma than the threat of him being sent away. He said, ‘Don’t worry, it won’t be for long. I worked out what they wanted, straight away. They want us to leave Teranesia.’
He took her back to his parents’ hut, put clean pants on her, then started packing the bag they used to carry her things when they went on the ferry. It was hard to decide what was essential. Warm clothes, obviously, in case they were still at sea when night fell, but what about nappies, lotions and powder? She’d been using the toilet for months now, climbing up on the steps his father had made for her, but how would she cope on the boat? He decided to bring her old potty along; nappies were too bulky, but he couldn’t expect her to piss over the side.