She stopped and looked intently at Kulfi. Kulfi stopped beside her.
Tell me, Mrs Bose, she said, can you act?
Perhaps, Zindi said hesitantly, she could do something about your hands, too. After all, she’s a doctor.
Alu jerked his head quickly from side to side and his hands slid behind his chair. Much later she saw him sitting with his hands in his lap, staring at his fingers. The thumbs had stiffened and the skin had sagged over the bones, like a shroud on a skeleton. He tried to move them and he couldn’t. The bones were as rigid as a corpse’s; she half-expected them to clatter, dice-like. Then Alu caught her looking at him, and at once his hands disappeared under him and he went back to staring vacantly ahead of him.
That was the only time she had referred to his thumbs. She first saw them long after they had slipped past the frowning heights of Perim, through the Bab al-Mandab, into the Red Sea. They had already been at sea for — it seemed like months, with months left to go.
Somewhere on the journey, soon after Zeynab had swung through the Red Sea in a great arc and tacked close to the coast between Dhofar and Makalla, a very old man appeared in the ship. Nobody saw him arrive; he was just there one day. Nobody wondered, either, for there were boats enough drawing alongside Zeynab on that stretch of the coast, though always under the cover of darkness. He was a small man, with a gritty, hollowed-out face. He wore a string vest, a hat like in American movies, and khaki trousers many sizes too large for him (there were plenty of British soldiers in those parts, some dead). Nobody knew his name, for he couldn’t talk. His tongue had been torn out from the roots; he would wag the stump for anyone who cared to look. Nobody needed to ask how it had happened: there were more wars than villages along those shores.
Fikry, the dark, towering nakhuda of Zeynab, was said to know all about him. But despite Zindi’s efforts he never gave anything away, not even his name.
In the end the old man was named by the half-dozen boys of various ages who manned Zeynab. His one possession happened to be a Japanese umbrella, a thing of great mechanical beauty, which grew at the press of a button from a foot-long stump into a vast canopy, as shady as a banyan tree. It was dubbed, naturally, the Japanese Miracle, and it gave him his name: Abu Karamat il-Yabani.
He of the Japanese Miracle never lost his smile, all through the days after Makalla when they swung out again towards the open sea and their barrels of fresh water were found to be empty; nor even afterwards when they ran out of food somewhere in the Red Sea, along the Eritrean coast, and not one of the boats Fikry waited for in three different places turned up. Even then he kept smiling, though for everyone else it was nothing less than torture to have to watch the fires of the fishing villages on the coast and smell the delicious warmth of cow-dung smoke on empty stomachs.
Provisions reached them soon after, but then they had to suffer a torture of another kind. Fikry decided one evening that a coastguard or some other busybody had sniffed their trail. So with a few powerful bursts of her engines (rescued from a Centurion tank somewhere in Iraq) Zeynab lost herself in the basaltic maze of the Dahlak Archipelago. For the next few days they had to pick their way through hell. While two boys hung over the prow examining the colour of the water and shouting instructions to Fikry, at the wheel, they had to sit motionless as those tortured, jagged anvils of rock flung themselves at the boat’s side; watch while the magnificent, muted colours of the coral reefs leapt up without warning to scrape Zeynab’s prow.
It was somewhere there that a tail of sharks attached itself to Zeynab. No one knew what drew them: perhaps it was the sight of those two boys hanging so close to the water. It couldn’t have been the meagre remains of their rice-and-lentils meals.
No, said Fikry, they hang close because they like the smell of human shit. And, certainly, it was under the holes in the stern that they usually hung, jaws snapping, waiting for fresh turds.
All through those days the old man never once stopped smiling. He and Alu were drawn to each other by their silences, and soon they were spending the days sitting together on a little ledge near the stern, silently meditating under the banyan shade of the Japanese Miracle.
Things grew a little better after the Dahlak Archipelago. But their progress was still slow; for Fikry, in his keenness to stay safely away from the main shipping lanes, kept them close to the mangrove-encrusted shores where they had to pick their way through unpredictable sand-shoals. In the stretch between Trinkitat and Suakin they swung out towards the main shipping lanes again, to avoid Port Sudan, and somewhere there Fikry sniffed the air one morning and said: Big ships ahead — I can smell them. He laughed at the alarm his announcement caused: Nothing to worry about — these fish are too big to stop for shrimps like us.
Soon they saw it: like a city in the sea; so vast that it took a full half-hour to climb over the horizon, emerging gradually, in layers, until even at that distance it was like a marine skyscraper, dwarfing the little flotilla of destroyers in its wake. It grew vaster and vaster as it ploughed towards them. They could see planes on its flat deck now, and tiny men in uniform, and towers and turrets.
Those are guns, said Fikry, not these water-pistols we’re selling.
They were all crowded along the sides of Zeynab now, watching in silent awe. As it drew closer its flat deck became part of the sky above them and they could only see the curving black steel of its side. Even its bow wave was higher than the tallest mast in Zeynab. When it was almost level with them Abu Fahl let out a great yell and Zaghloul tore off his scarf and waved it in the air. Next moment the tiny Zeynab erupted into shouts and whistles and cheers.
He of the Japanese Miracle was watching, too, but he had ducked down and was squinting over the railing, his face screwed small like an angry boy’s. Then suddenly he leapt to his feet, gabbling incoherently in bellowing grunts and snorts, and waved the Japanese Miracle in the air. As the aircraft-carrier drew level with Zeynab his gabblings rose to a frenzy. Before anyone could stop him he threw one leg over the railing, swung his arms back and hurled the Japanese Miracle at the vast ship.
And just then, while his hands were still in the air and his leg was hanging precariously over the side, the aircraft-carrier’s bow wave hit Zeynab and tossed her up. The old man tottered and clutched wildly at the rail. But the timber was wet, his hands slipped, and with a last terrified grunt he fell.
Even before he struck the water it had erupted with the thrashing of sharks’ tails.
Alu was closest to him and he shouted: He’s gone over. He whipped round and reached for a rope. But no sooner had he picked it up than it slid out of his hands. He tried again; and again, like water, the rope poured out of his hands. So he stood there frozen, staring at his hands in helpless horror.
Do something, Kulfi shrieked. Throw him the rope.
He looked up then, and said: I can’t.
Instead it was Abu Fahl who ran there and flung a rope over the side. They could still see the old man, though the water around him was already frothing with blood. A shark rammed into him and dived but an instant later it was snapped in half by its own kin and its severed head floated grotesquely to the surface with a khaki-clad leg still clamped between its jaws.
The old man’s head was still above water, his fear-crazed eyes crying for help. Abu Fahl flung the rope out and the old man lunged with the last reserves of his strength, but the rope danced past his hands on a wave. Abu Fahl threw it out again and this time it went straight to him. They saw his fingers clawing, closing on the rope. Abu Fahl heaved and Zaghloul caught hold of the rope, too, and they hauled it in together, as quickly as they could. They saw his hands, his shoulders, his head, rising safely from the water. Then two sharp fins scythed through the water and afterwards, when the foam cleared, the head, the torso and the shoulders were all gone but the hands and arms and bloody, ragged stumps were still clinging to the rope as though the old man had willed them all his dying strength.