One instant, Karun gestures towards us, to come join him at the railing, together breathe in the fresh and free coastal air. The next, he flies forward, the force of the bullets lifting him off his feet. Somewhere behind me the deck bursts into flame, with Sequeira calling all hands to battle the blaze. Jaz runs across the planks, pulling out a gun, firing uselessly at the sky.
But Karun. I turn him over, unmindful of the explosions rocking the boat, the smell of smoke and burning wood, the rasping drone of the jet as it nonchalantly flies away. He moves his lips but the sounds don’t emerge—the line I love gets smudged and thick. Jaz comes over and rips open his shirt to try to staunch the blood—joining hands and laps, together we cradle him. Karun looks at the two of us and tries to grasp our fingers, he tries to speak or smile or reassure but the effort is beyond him. A bubble of red forms between his lips, and he turns to look at the sky as if the stars are beckoning him.
I lose track of the boat—whether we drift, or head back, or prepare to sink. Perhaps I hear Sequeira shouting, perhaps I even feel the heat from the flames. Jaz and I sit there, with Karun between us, as if we have just put him to sleep with a relay of fairy tales. We hunch over a little so that our shadows combine to block out the sun, to form a protective veil over his face.
My mind is capable of a single task—trying to rewind the reel. The plane recedes into a malignant dot, one I can forever rub off the film. Karun stands once more at the railing, gesturing us to join him. His request seems audacious, but only because it’s so innocent—he’s asking for something, he doesn’t want to be greedy, it’s only if we can accommodate him. Neither Jaz nor I can resist his schoolboy earnestness, the dash of guileless charm mixed in.
He’s awkward at first, holding us stiffly on each arm as we sidle up. The pose is new, he was only half expecting to succeed, he hasn’t quite learnt this language. But then he relaxes and draws us closer—so close that we could all three kiss if we wanted. His arms around our necks, he hugs us closer yet, as if this is a group shot and he wants to make sure he squeezes us entirely into the frame.
This is the still I will carry with me, the image by which I will remember him. His eyes glistening with gratefulness, his smile joyfully lit, as if he can’t believe his luck, the fortune he’s hit. The unsureness that’s always lingered like an underlying shadow replaced by the new radiance of belonging on his face.
The sea spreads out as carefree as before, smoke from the smoldering deck tinges the spray. We rise and fall under the empty sky, borne back towards the land by the frisking waves.
JAZ
18
WHO KNEW THE JAZTER WOULD BE CONDEMNED TO COMPOSE THESE thoughts? That his story would be led so astray? This, then, is the harsh lesson he must learn. Endings need to be lived, they cannot be ordained.
Afsan manages to steer us into Arnala, a small port just north of Bombay. While Sequeira uses his mafia connections to wrangle another boat, Sarita and I search the brush above the shore for wood. Some of the pieces are too green, others too thick—many of the branches are little more than twigs. I try not to think of what they’re for, try to focus on the task at hand through my shock.
We set up the pyre on the beach itself, well above the tide line. Sarita says she will light it alone, but relents at the last minute, inviting me to assist. Together, we hold a burning branch to the stack on which Karun reposes—it seems to take forever to catch. As the flames leap up, singeing the body I’ve cradled and caressed and loved, I have to hold on to Sarita to be able to watch. She clutches me as well. Neither of us wants to leave before the embers cool, but Sequeira eases us away. He arranges for one of the fishermen to sort through the ashes in our absence and immerse the remains.
Back at sea, my grief gives way to rage. Rage against the enemy, rage against the war, rage against everything that’s conspired to snatch Karun away. How arbitrary, how wasteful and unfair, after the impossible gauntlet of hurdles we overcame. I scour the sky like King Kong, ready to reach up and pluck off Pakistani planes. Bring on your worst, I silently rail—bullets, bombs, nuclear explosions—I’m ready to confront them all.
But the horizon remains untroubled by jets or mushroom clouds. The sky doesn’t rend, no seaquake announced the arrival of the scheduled doomsday. We journey through the night, reaching Diu on the nineteenth around eleven a.m.
The town is in a panic, even though Ahmedabad, the nearest target on the list of eight, lies three hundred kilometers north. People crowd the dock waiting for long-departed boats to convey them to safe havens (where these might be located, nobody can probably pinpoint). Some hunker down in their houses, hoping their bolted doors and shuttered windows will persuade any impending malignancy to move on; others roam the streets with clubs and pellet guns and old muskets, searching, perhaps, for the leader seasoned enough to mobilize them. “Why did you leave Mumbai?” an acquaintance asks upon spotting Sequeira. “Hasn’t the Devi appeared there in person to keep away the bomb?”
Sequeira takes us to his family mansion off Fort Road, where his siblings Vincent, Paul, and Mildred live in a large joint household. He tells them about our recent bereavement, but enthralled by the approaching cataclysm, they barely register our grief. Vincent and his son take turns cranking a hand-generated emergency radio, only to get static no matter where they set the dial. Sarita and I crowd around as well—perhaps the future will distract us from our own mourning. But our attention quickly veers back—nothing can feel as real or compelling as Karun’s loss. The drama of Diu’s survival (or for that matter our own) is like a television show in comparison, one we find only moderately engaging.
The sun emerges as brightly the next morning. The heavens look clean and radiant. Relief washes through the streets and the docks, now that the nineteenth has passed, now that Diu has survived the date without any harm, any nuclear shockwaves. Sequeira’s sister Mildred complains of a smokiness in her throat, a greenish tinge to the air. But by the time the magnificent sunset lights up the seafront, with its golden rays reaching towards the old Portuguese church on the hill like the fingers of God, she agrees it has to be her imagination. The next evening, when the sun makes an even more spectacular exit, with eloquent streaks of orange and red and magenta, she’s ready to proclaim the end of the war. The local Jain community floats little earthenware oil lamps into the sea to give thanks—a ritual that soon encompasses Hindus and Muslims and Christians as well.
Sequeira drags us to the celebration by the water’s edge to cheer us up. I watch as people launch bits of candles on rafts, diyas made of wicks and tin cans. All I can think of, as the points of twinkling gratefulness carpet the bay, is Karun. Could we have remained safe in Bombay, did we lose him for naught? What if he’d survived just one more day?—would that have conducted him past the end of the war?
Mildred interrupts my rumination to tell me about Diu’s charmed existence. Except for a stray air raid on some old office buildings in the center, the town has remained unscathed. Moreover, religious rancor has not been a problem—not like nearby Veraval, with its brutal massacres of Muslims. “Yes, our electricity’s gone, and our lifeblood of trade choked off—we can no longer find flour in the market, and half our workers have wandered away. But show me one place in the world that doesn’t have these problems now. Diu’s escaped the worst of it, thanks to the lord.”
More people turn out the next evening, drawn by the sunset, which now scintillates with an extended palette from yellow to purple. Even I’m amazed by the unusual striations of green, ribbing the sky like a sprawling celestial skeleton. Revelers throng the terraces of the old houses overlooking the harbor to watch the show below, the diya lamps now replaced by triumphant bonfires blazing from victory floats. Something about this escalating drama makes me uneasy. We have yet to receive any news from the outside, even from Ahmedabad (Vincent can still only crank static from his radio). I try to recall what I’ve read about particulates in the atmosphere, about dazzling sunsets after volcano eruptions. But caught up in the town’s festive mood, I decide I’m fretting for no good reason.