Glorious Boy, page 9
“Most kind of you, Doctor. Thank you.” Gupta shot a grudging glance at Shep’s lab across the hall. “And how are your experiments progressing?”
The note of condescension reminded Shep so viscerally of his father that he couldn’t bring himself to answer. Instead he shifted his gaze through the corridor’s gloom to the coral tree out front.
As if in reply, the tree gave a strange, fluid, quickening shudder. Shep felt himself being jerked forward, slammed into Gupta’s chest, and they fell together as the floor rippled, then rolled back into the wall beneath a deafening roar.
Chunks of ceiling plaster rained down. Clutter from the nurse’s station turned projectile. Shep made a helmet of his arms. His first thought was a bomb. But explosions were finite. This attack didn’t stop. He placed his palms on the floor and felt a succession of deep peristaltic jolts, unlike any of the tremors he’d experienced in China.
A dull throbbing started in his chest where he’d collided with Gupta’s stethoscope. Beside him, his lieutenant had curled into a fetal ball. Around them, the joints of the hospital were cracking like knuckles.
“We need to get everyone out of here,” Shep said.
“What is happening?” Gupta pled.
“Earthquake.” Shep tried to get up, but his legs had turned to chewing gum.
He steadied himself on his knees. The building was standing. He could see that the beds in the men’s ward had traveled across the room, but having taken the ride, their lone patient was sitting up unhurt, the graybeard clutching his coverlet like a guilty child. Only the nurses were screaming.
They’d been inside. Claire had offered Leyo her pencil. He held it between his thumb and forefinger the way Groucho Marx plied his cigar.
Suddenly the pencil was dropping, and she was following its descent through sunshine onto the coir rug. She bent to retrieve it. Leyo caught her arm, and her first thought was that she, too, must be falling. Her second was that his touch seemed uncharacteristic, urgent and alarmingly intimate.
A needle of reflexive fear, then suddenly he was yanking her to her feet. “Kamin!” As the small room throbbed, Claire glanced up into the split of time and noticed the ceiling fan swaying. But Leyo had known the quake was coming before it even began.
Naila would remember Ty’s hand pumping down and up, down and up. She still had the song in her throat, slowing the way Mem had taught her—double yew, ex . . . why and—
Suddenly the door banged open, and Leyo came flying out onto the porch, yanking Mem by the arm, then letting her go to pick up Ty. The dirty pink soles of his feet flashed like crabs, and then they were tearing across the grass with Mem chasing them.
The earth began to roar and shift, as if they were riding the back of an angry beast. Ty laughed, even though Mem held him to her, terror in her eyes. The trees around them bent and snapped. The roof of the bungalow buckled. The ride seemed to last forever. Then the world grew still.
Only then did Naila think of her parents, who had gone together to Aberdeen that morning. She watched Ty stand and test the ground. He looked as if he were dancing. As if, she told herself, he knew not to be afraid.
Leyo moved to the fence at the top of the bluff. He yelled down at the local boys who fished off the rocks.
“Thank God,” Mem said as Doctor Shep came running toward them from the hospital. He picked up Ty and drew Mem into his arms. Ty reached over his father’s shoulder for Naila, but the girl knew better.
She went instead to join Leyo, who was now gesturing wildly at the boys below. When Naila looked to see why, she too cried out.
In a motion at once slow and vast, the water was peeling backward. Acres of coral lay bare as the tide lifted rowboats and fishing vessels. Some of the smaller boats capsized, catching on the shoals. The local boys paid no heed to Leyo. As if enchanted, they went scampering after the receding tide, collecting stranded fish like offerings from the gods.
Leyo screamed at them in Urdu to run to the top of the steps, the water would soon return with a wave taller than the five of them. The boys looked up as if he were mad, this black man on high.
Only when Doctor Shep joined him, shouting down in English, “You will die!” did two of the five turn back. “Run!”
The tide that had pulled back lifted to form a wide black wall across the horizon. Then, in one terrible movement, the wall began to turn.
At last the other boys started to run, but they were so far out now, the mud sucked at their ankles. They fell. They pushed up. They looked over their shoulders.
Leyo and Doctor Shep had gone out of the yard to the top of the beach steps. They pulled the first two boys to safety, then stripped off their shirts and tied them together. Doctor Shep yelled, and Naila roused herself to bring her father’s ropes from the orchid garden.
When her father came, she thought, he’d know what to do.
The three boys below were now swimming. Stealthy as a serpent, the water already had surged to the base of the cliff, then to the rock that jutted like a figurehead halfway up the steps. The water churned around it, and when Naila looked back out, the swimming boys were gone.
Leyo’s gaze traveled far out across the sea. Mem came to stand beside Naila, Ty now quiet in her arms. “The ferry,” she said.
Naila looked and saw nothing, but her teeth began to chatter.
That day was the first time she heard that terrible word: evacuate. Naila refused. Her parents would be back soon. They would expect to find her where they had left her. She would wait here on Ross Island. She would stay and help Leyo pack the things that Ty Babu and his parents would need on the mainland. The mainland would be safer, they said, but she would not leave until her parents returned.
She hardly noticed when Mem and Ty had gone, though she did hear Mem promise to look for Jina and Som in Aberdeen. As soon as there was any news . . .
Naila kept her head busy tearing the word: ee-vac-you-ate. Her parents should be here by now. She wanted to be with them, not Leyo. Not with Mem or Doctor saab, either, or even with Ty Babu. Not without her own ma and pa. Evah-kyu-eht.
Leyo didn’t speak, but every now and then he took her hand and led her back outside. Then the island would tremble and jerk, and after it finished, they’d resume their silent work filling suitcases with clothing and books and objects that Naila barely noticed passing through her hands.
The hours stretched as the sun made its journey toward dusk. She thought of Doctor Shep and Mem this morning with Ty Babu sandwiched between them. Her parents should be here to hold her like that, to murmur and comfort her, too. They should have returned this morning before any of this terrible business happened. She would stay here and make time to reverse until they had never left. But no matter how many times she looked up the ridge path or down to the beach, her ma and pa did not appear.
At twilight Doctor Shep returned from hospital, which also was being evacuated. “They’ll know you’re with us,” he said. “You can’t stay here on your own, Naila. They wouldn’t want you to.”
She wanted to fight, but with darkness her fear swallowed her strength, so the doctor and Leyo escorted her like a prisoner onto the lumber barge that was being used as a ferry.
“Ross Island saved us!” Reverend Crisp shouted above her head. Floodlights swam like yellow eels down through the night to wreckage. The solid world had filled the sea with metal and wood and the screams of unseen animals. Naila leaned over the railing and willed herself into the fractured light beams.
“—split the wave, sending the brunt of the tsunami up and down the coast. Few grounded boats and downed trees. The jail’s watchtower collapsed, but the port escaped the worst, except for those poor souls on the Sapphire, God help them—”
The old priest stopped mid-sentence, but Naila’s skin already was turning in on itself. Doctor Shep’s hands pressed her shoulders and drew her back from the rail. She turned her head and saw the coral of Leyo’s sarong, the white of his singlet, two shapes floating among the deepest shadows. Like stones under water.
The crisis of the earthquake was compounded by torrential rains that began within seconds of Shep and Naila’s arrival at the Browning Club, where evacuees were being housed on the mainland. Claire hoped the girl would be too exhausted to notice, or too glad to be reunited with Ty, or both.
She’d been asking people all afternoon for news of Jina and Som, but only the shopkeeper Farzand Ali had seen them. They’d bought a necklace from him for Naila’s birthday and were rushing for the ferry, he said, just minutes before the quake struck. That ferry, the Sapphire, was the only one not accounted for. And Som could not swim. Now this downpour and darkness.
Claire was searching for a way to distract Naila when Shep signaled with his eyes for her to leave the girl be. Ty was the best medicine for her, and nothing would distract their son from the gusts now streaming sideways against the windows. As mystifyingly difficult as Ty could be, true crisis seemed to relax him. He’d been cooperative all day, too interested in the chaos and disruption around him perhaps to be upset by it.
Still clutching Naila’s hand, Ty pulled her across the room and pressed both their palms against the pane. The window overlooked Dilthamon Tank, a view dissolving in froth that made a sound like scratching fingernails. Afraid the glass might shatter, Claire tried to tempt Ty with a banana, but he ate without budging, and Naila stood with her arms around him, so stoic and silent and frozen that Claire flinched at the memory of her own mother standing just so, arms wrapped dutifully around her daughter in a pretext of comfort, their reflection captured in the hall mirror hours after Robin died.
The whole port was in shambles, trees snapped in half, electrical lines down, shanty roofs caved in, and pavement cracked in gaping zigzags, but the shoreline was the worst. Fishing boats sat on toppled palms. Shards of dead gray coral and carcasses of fish littered eroded sand. Broken timbers, bloated animal corpses, and swaths of faded cloth formed ghostly apparitions in the mist. As the rain continued and the tides came and went, some of this would wash away, but much would take months to remove or salvage. All of it was an ominous reminder of the force that had seized those unlucky enough to be out on the water.
Shep had heard stories from patients at Haddo of whirlpools that made dinghies look as if they were going down the drain, of a sailboat turning somersaults, a shark stranded in a mango tree, and an octopus clinging to the lightning rod atop a submerged bungalow. Everyone knew someone who still was missing.
“Dr. Durant.”
He turned to find Alfred Baird, the Assistant Commissioner, picking his way through the foreshore debris. Shep held out his umbrella, but the major waved it aside; he wore a military mackintosh, and the rain had lightened to drizzle.
“You’re all right, then?” Baird asked.
“Not all. Our servants—”
“Ah, yes. I heard.” The gray light made Baird look jaundiced and gaunt, too frail for his sympathetic voice.
“Any news?”
“Well, we found the Sapphire’s smokestack on the beach below my house at Rangachang.”
Shep lowered the pointless umbrella. “What else?”
“That’s all we could identify.”
Shep followed Baird’s gaze to the swollen flesh of animal limbs and organs strewn down the beach. Despite the rain the stench was rising. A few yards away, a pack of wild dogs nosed the carcass of a goat. Other remains were unrecognizable for the crabs encrusting them.
His voice caught in his throat. “They were like family, Alfred. And their daughter’s barely thirteen.”
“Has she relatives?”
“Not here. I don’t think so.” He hesitated. “I don’t actually know.”
Baird pushed back the hood of his slicker and rubbed the mist through his thinning hair. He lifted his face to the sky and moved his lips silently.
At length he said, “I’ve heard some of the Ross evacuees talking about leaving. The ladies, in particular. Now the Blitz seems to have ebbed, home’s looking a tad more inviting.”
Shep had heard this talk himself. Even if the war is closer, the homeward logic went, at least we’ll be among our own. But neither he nor Claire really had any “own” apart from each other and Ty. And there were so many reasons for them not to leave. Foremost now, Naila.
“I’m afraid we’ve the opposite problem,” he said. “It’ll take me months to replace my specimens. And Claire wants to get up to Behalla to see how the Biya have fared. But first we need to find somewhere to live. Ross, I gather, is permanently off limits.”
Baird considered him briefly. “In that case, maybe I can help. There’s a house available up Marine Hill, just below the Commissioner’s new compound.”
The girl refused to talk about her parents. Claire and Shep both had tried, though neither of them could find the right words. For now, they decided the best course was to play along with her hopes. Fortunately, Ty seemed immune to her grief, though Claire wished more than ever that he would start talking. Some days the silence threatened to swallow them all.
Moving at least kept them busy. The house that Baird had recommended was strange and beautiful, whitewashed and terraced down the hill. It reminded Claire of the Greek villages they’d sailed past during their Mediterranean crossing, and she learned it actually had been built by a Greek sea captain—before he decided not to retire to the Andamans after all.
Shep hired a van to carry Claire and the children up and over the hill on moving day. Leyo would meet them there, along with Abraham, the new cook referred by Shep’s driver Narinder.
“Sure you don’t need me?” Shep asked as he opened the passenger door for his wife. Narinder waited across the road to drive him around the point to the hospital at Haddo.
“Not a bit.” She kissed his cheek. “When you come home tonight we’ll be almost all settled.”
It confounded her how different life was already. Shep had had this gleaming red Morris and the services of Narinder here on the mainland from the beginning, but as long as they lived on Ross she’d rarely laid eyes on either car or driver. Now she was touched each morning by the sight of a fresh orchid in the vase that Narinder had wired to the dashboard. The tall stately Gujarati ex-convict might have a political past, but he showed a zest for grace.
In the van, Ty sat beside her, while Naila squeezed into the back among the cartons and suitcases. The girl still wasn’t speaking in more than monosyllables, but the motion of the vehicle and the whipping of hot air loosened Claire’s tongue. “Can we see your school from up here?”
Naila pointed without interest down through the damp sunshine toward an island of red-roofed buildings surrounded by flooding from the cricket field. There would be no school for the foreseeable future.
A dog started barking when the van passed the massive gates of Commissioner Wilkerson’s new Government House. Ty’s face brightened, and Claire could almost hear him shouting, “Wilkie!”—Ty’s canine friend from Ross. But the boy’s outburst sounded only in her imagination, and the next stretch grew quiet as the outer slope thickened with mangosteen, kapok, and banyans.
At the end of the road, they drove over a gully and through a pair of open gates to stop under a trellis of white bougainvillea. Claire took Ty by the hand, and they entered the house’s breezeway vestibule.
The red padauk wood floor led to an open-air sitting room with cushioned bamboo seats and a view of Mount Harriet beyond the fretwork railing. Naila craned her head to look east, but the property was angled so that Ross was out of sight.
“It’s not easy to get your bearings,” Claire said. “But eventually we’ll get used to it.”
Straight downhill, a red clay path switchbacked through a nearly vertical garden. Ginger and jasmine bushes screened the servant quarters, a glass greenhouse, and several sheds. At the bottom of the path a gate opened onto the wreckage of the foreshore road. What was left of Aberdeen Jetty lay around the bend. Incredibly, this house had sustained no damage in the quake. The captain had built on bedrock.
Leyo and the new cook had not yet arrived, so while the van driver unloaded their bags, Claire showed the children the rest of the house. An open-air staircase led one flight down to a dining room and kitchen, another flight to two bedrooms and a bath. The rooms were white and square and equipped with simple bamboo furnishings like those on the terrace. Dirty clouds of netting hung above the beds. A third flight led down to two more large rooms, which would serve as playroom and study.
Ty pulled Naila into his room. They pushed back the shutters, and sunshine puddled hotly on the floor among shadows of giant palm fronds. Ty crouched like a frog and, silent as ever, hopped from one dark pad to the next. After each jump he turned his head and blinked expectantly at the girl, who watched him without moving.
Hop. Turn. Blink. Hop. Turn. Hop. Blink.
Finally, Naila gave in. She cupped her chin with her palms and began to flutter her fingers. She made a buzzing noise and pretended to fly. Circling closer, closer above Ty, she veered until, at last, she lost her balance.
As the gold light lapped over them, Claire saw the girl almost starting to laugh, but in that instant the little frog leapt. Their two small bodies converged, and the room seemed to hold its breath.
July 1941
From her first day at the white house, Naila sensed she had been to this place before. Or near here. She knew the dusty sweet smell of this hill, that jungle of brush across the gully, the steep angle of the slope below the road. Or, she thought she did.
The memory was dim and distant: her father taking her by the hand. She’d been younger than Ty Babu. The yellow-walled compound where her family lived then lay at the base of this hill, on the water. Her father had led her through the jungle up up up what had seemed a mountain. Never tell anyone. Our secret place.
The chance to test her memory came several days after their arrival, while Mem and Ty both were napping and everyone else had gone out. Naila slipped out of the house and across the gully, then skirted a thicket of leafy brambles and turned to get her bearings.
