The colonel asked me a number of questions, mostly about the nationality of the men on the tanker and where I thought they were taking it. Finally he picked up his hat and his swagger stick and called for his car. ‘Follow me please,’ he said and led me out into the neatly white-washed forecourt. ‘I now have to take you to the Assistant Commissioner who will find it a difficult problem since you are landed on his lap, you see, with no passport, no identification, and the most unusual story. It is the lack of identity he will find most difficult. You say you have been ship’s officer in Karachi. Do you know somebody in Karachi? Somebody to say who you are?’
I told him there were a lot of people who knew me — port officials, shipping agents, some of those who worked at the Sind Club and at the reception desk of the Metropole Hotel. Also personal friends. He nodded, beating a tattoo on his knee with his stick as he waited for his car. ‘That will help perhaps.’
The car arrived, the coastguard flag flying on the bonnet, and as we drove out of the compound, he pointed to a long verandahed bungalow of a building just beyond an area of sand laid out with mud bricks baking in the sun — ‘Afterwards, you want the hospital, it is there.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I said.
He looked at me doubtfully. ‘We get the doctor to have a look at you. I don’t like you to die with me when you have such an interesting story to tell.’
We passed one of those brilliantly colourful trucks, all tinsel and florid paintings, like an elaborately decorated chocolate box; conclusive proof to the wandering haziness of my mind that I really was in Pakistan. From fine-ground sand and a cloud of dust we moved on to tarmac. Glimpses of the sea, long black fishing boats anchored off, their raked masts dancing in the sun — this was the eastern side of the Gwadar Peninsula, the sea still a little wild, the shore white with surf. There was sand everywhere, the sun glaring down.
‘We have a desalination plant, good water from the sea, all by solar.’ The colonel’s voice was far away, the driver’s forage cap perched on his round black head becoming blurred and indistinct against the moving backcloth of open bazaar booths and mud-brick buildings. ‘We see Ahmad Ali Rizivi now.’ The car had stopped, the colonel was getting out. ‘This is what you call the town hall. It is the house of the Assistant District Commissioner.’
We were in a dusty little open space, a sort of square. A janitor in long robes sat in the doorway. I was vaguely conscious of people as I followed the colonel up the steps and into the dark interior. A clerk sat on a high stool at an old-fashioned desk, another ushered us in to an inner office where a man rose from behind a plain wooden desk that might have been a table. He waved us to chairs hastily placed. It was cooler and there were framed maps and texts on the wall — texts from the Koran I presumed. And the inevitable picture of Jinna — Quaid-i-Azam, the man who had led Pakistan out of the Empire, out of India, to independence and partition. The pictures came and went, the voices a dark murmur as a hot wave of weariness broke over me, my head nodding.
Coffee came, the inevitable coffee, the colonel’s hand shaking me, the Assistant District Commissioner gesturing to the cup, a bleak smile of hospitality. He wanted me to tell it again, the whole story. ‘From the beginning please.’ His dark eyes had no warmth. He didn’t care that I was exhausted. He was thinking of me only as a problem washed up by the sea on to his territory, the survivor of a wreck with an improbable story that was going to cause him a lot of trouble. There was a clerk there to take notes.
‘He is Lord of the Day,’ the colonel said, nodding at Rizivi and smiling. ‘He is the Master here. If he says off with his head, then off with his head it is.’ He said it jokingly, but the smile did not extend to his eyes. It was a warning. Who was the Lord of the Night, I wondered, as I drank the hot sweet coffee, trying to marshal my thoughts so there would be some sort of coherence in what I had to tell him.
I have only the vaguest memory of what I said, or of the questions he asked. Afterwards there was a long pause while he and the colonel talked it over. They didn’t seem to realize I understood Urdu, though it hardly made any difference since I was beyond caring whether they believed me or what they decided to do about me, my eyes closing, my mind drifting into sleep. But not before I had the impression that they were both agreed on one thing at least — to pass the problem to higher authority just as soon as they could. People came and went. The colonel was alone with me for a time. ‘Mr Rizivi arrange air passage for you on the next flight.’ The Assistant District Commissioner came back. He had spoken to Quetta on the R/T. ‘You go to Karachi this afternoon. Already we are consulting with Oman to see if your story is true.’
I should have made the point then that the Aurora B would probably have sailed by the time arrangements had been made for a reconnaissance flight over the kbawr, but my mind was concentrated entirely on the fact that I was being flown to Karachi. Nothing else mattered. We were in the car again and a few minutes later the colonel and his driver were thrusting me along a verandah crowded with the sick and their relatives to an office where an overworked doctor in a white coat was examining a man whose chest was covered in skin sores. He pushed him away as we entered, peering at me through thick-lensed glasses. ‘You the survivor of the wrecked dhow?’
I nodded.
‘They talk of nothing else.’ He jerked his head at the crowded verandah. ‘Everybody I see today. They all have a theory, you see, as to how it happened. How did it happen? You tell me.’ He lifted my eyelids with a dark thumb, brown eyes peering at me closely. ‘They say there is no naukbada, only a solitary English. Is you, eh?’
I nodded, feeling his hands running over my body. ‘No fractures. Some bruising, nothing else.’ He pulled open my shirt, a stethoscope to his ears, his voice running on. Finally he stood back, told me there was nothing wrong with me except lack of sleep and nervous exhaustion. He gave me some pills and made me take one of them with a glass of water right there in the stuffy confines of his little consulting room. After that I don’t remember anything at all until I was in a Land Rover being driven out to the airfield, the wind and dust blowing, the land flat, a desert scene with passengers and officials standing in the glare of the sun, baggage lying around them on the ground.
The plane came in, a Fokker Friendship bright as a dragon-fly against the hard blue of the sky, the gravel airfield spouting long streamers of dust as its wheels touched down. The adjutant himself saw me on to the plane and remained beside it until the door of the fuselage was finally closed. We took off and from my window I had a good view of Gwadar as we climbed and banked, the hammer-headed peninsula with an area of water and green trees like an oasis on one corner of its barren top, and below it, in the sand, the glass-glinting square of the desalination plant, then the town, neat acres of brown, the white of the coastguards’ buildings, and the sea on either side with the fishing boats lying off or drawn up on the sand. And against it all I suddenly saw Choffel’s face, his mouth wide open, the black hair plastered to his white forehead and his arm raised as he sank from sight in the wash of a wave. Somewhere down there his body floated in the blue sea, pale skeleton bones beginning to show as the fish picked him clean.
I remember thinking about the eyes and that I should have done something to help him. His features were so appallingly vivid as I stared through the window at the line of the coast stretching away far below.
And then the wheels touched down and I opened my eyes to find we had landed in Karachi. One of the pilots came aft from the flight deck insisting that nobody moved until I had got off the plane. There was a car waiting for me and some men, including Peter Brown, the Lloyd’s agent. No Customs, no Immigration. We drove straight out through the loose-shirted untidy mob that hung around the airport entrance, out on to the crowded Hyderabad-Karachi road, the questions beginning immediately. Sadeq — I had referred to a man called Sadeq. Who was he? What did he look like? But they knew already. They had had his description from the oil company’s Marine Superintendent in Dubai. They nodded, both of them, checking papers taken from a coloured leather briefcase with a cheap metal clasp. Peter Brown was sitting in front with the driver, neatly dressed as always in a tropical suit, his greying hair and somewhat patrician features giving him an air of distinction. He was a reserved man with an almost judicial manner. It was the other two, sitting on either side of me in the back, who asked the questions. The smaller of them was a Sindhi, his features softer, his dark eyes sparkling with intelligence. The other was a more stolid type with a squarish face heavily pock-marked and horn-rimmed glasses slightly tinted. Police, or perhaps Army — I wasn’t sure. ‘He had another name.’