by Rohan Wilson
‘The Australians have suspended MWD. It’s because of the TabaPets. We’ve signed new contracts. CYC wants to keep you there forever building goddamn TabaPets.’ Rin looks into the camera. Her face is empty and she does not blink. ‘It’s insane,’ she says. ‘They’re not keeping you, no fucking way. I’ve taken action—I’ve hit them hard. So be ready. It’s going to be in the news today. Things might get rough.’
For a second my head is numb and I find it difficult to process. It feels like those first few moments when the water hit the Braden house, a change so sudden and enormous that my mind can’t keep up. MWD has been suspended. I pull the pillow over my head. We are to be kept here.
I whisper some keywords into the search engine. Cabey-Yasuda Corrections. Maldives. Eaglehawk. I can hear the quickness of my own breathing. A list of articles returns, from which the first three have met with wide community outrage. I open the topmost result. A story in an Australian news aggregator that morning, 10 February 2074. As I read it I can feel the blood beating in my temples. Someone inside Cabey-Yasuda had leaked a cache of emails, documents, and data to a transparency outlet.
Rin. It has to be Rin.
The central fact conveyed by the data dump seems to be that the Australian government had suspended MWD at Cabey-Yasuda’s request. No claims for asylum will be heard, no visas will be granted. So, we Maldivians, the newspaper states, can’t make a claim for asylum, but neither can we request deportation. Deported to where, after all? The Maldives no longer exists.
Thus, we’re trapped in Eaglehawk.
I pass through a moment of addled wonderment. The ingenuity of it leaves me awed. Here we are—men, sons, fathers—removed from the law. Here we are, confronted with the fact of our own non-status. We’ve been dumped in a legal black hole as citizens of nowhere. I lay a while just thinking about that, breathing, as the knowledge works into my brain. Really, I should be enraged. They’ve made us into slaves for their machinery. Instead, I’m full of cold fear at the power these people have, these people who can bend reality to suit their needs.
First I conceal the glasses, then I wake Hassan.
‘Something has happened. We’re in trouble.’
Hassan is half smiling, thinking perhaps I’m quoting a movie.
‘Cabey-Yasuda lied to us,’ I say. ‘They’ve stopped the visa program.’
Before I can add anything further the lights in the dormitory snap on. This is unusual. To save money, CYC allows only a few hours of light each night and none in the mornings. Besides, the morning bell hasn’t sounded. Nothing happens without the morning bell. Then from outside the door we hear the crackle of a radio.
‘Bravo nineteen clear for entry.’
Hassan and I have time to look at each other in concern before the DEOs enter the room yelling for us to get up, get up, get up. Captain Rahmatullah leads the team. They come in full gear—armoured and helmeted and ready for war. They each hold batons which they use to hit the people in bed. Rahmatullah stands in the centre of the room with his hands on his hips like a general.
‘Outside,’ he says. ‘Move it. Out.’
Other men throw off their blankets and sit up. The officers grab them by their t-shirts and drag them to the exit.
‘Out,’ Rahmatullah is shouting. He’s in black plate armour. He sticks his thumbs through the velcro straps. ‘All of you. Out. Out.’
We assemble in the yard beneath the ascending sun. The nine hundred men of Delta compound. Maldivians, Nigerians, some Bangladeshis. I stand with Howland and Hassan under the blue gum watching the men from our dorm file out in various states of undress, clothed in hardly anything other than underwear. They file out and, seeing the three of us standing by the tree, they veer off in a different direction and gather together in a band of warm light sheering in through the buildings.
No one has precisely said it yet, but many seem disappointed that I survived Shadi’s attack. They speak in low voices. From time to time they look across at us. I hear the word laadheenee. It’s an Arabic word we Maldivians have borrowed, like so much else we’ve borrowed from the Arabs. It means something like anti-Islamic or atheistic. In the minds of many, I’m the one who should have been sent to the Behavioural Adjustment Unit as punishment, instead of Shadi Thoriq. He’s the good man, the defender of his family honour. I’m the laadheenee.
I’d be upset if it wasn’t all so patently absurd.
‘Think they’ll find them?’ Hassan says in Dhivehi.
I look at him from the side of my eye. ‘Find what?’
‘Don’t treat me like I’m stupid.’
So he’s aware of the glasses. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. His bunk is right beneath mine.
‘That woman gave them to you, didn’t she?’
‘Maybe the cameras saw something,’ I say.
‘Maybe.’
‘Or maybe someone told them.’
‘I swear on my mother’s tears I never said a word.’
We can see the dark shapes of the DEOs through the upperstorey plexiglass. We can see them ransacking everything inside. A few DEOs leave our dorm pod. They come toting armloads of junk—mostly, it’s the ancient commissary-issued media headsets that some men had bought at colossal expense. All this is dumped into a crate on a pushcart while one man stands guard.
‘We’re like a flock of sheep to them,’ Howland says. He’s propped against the blue gum with his knees drawn up. He has a can of soft drink from somewhere. ‘They can either shear us or slaughter us. Right now, we’re being shorn. But you’re a fool if you think a slaughter isn’t coming.’
He’s been speaking like this since he arrived. I’ve long since stopped listening, but Hassan seems taken with it. At least, he seems taken with trying to pick holes in Howland’s arguments. Trouble is, the longer you spend here, the easier it is to agree with Howland.
At length Captain Rahmatullah says something into the radio on his shoulder, some signal, and his men push the different carts together in a huddle before Red Gate, the exit that leads to the wide central sallyport, the manufactory, and outwards into Mike and Oscar and Kilo compounds. They have their helmet visors drawn down like they expect trouble and it’s trouble that follows. A water bottle is thrown. A shoe. Rahmatullah keeps his gaze level and does not react. The men jeer. Bottles spin in the air. Rubbish patters around the team as they exit into the sallyport.
All I can think about is Rin’s glasses.
If they’ve found them, she’s in dire trouble. I should have wiped the memory. I should have destroyed them when I had the chance. Now I’ve put her in danger.
Hassan and I enter the dorm and what we see stops us both cold. It’s a bleak sight. Rahmutallah’s men have ransacked every shelf and box and cupboard in the dormitory. I own almost nothing—two pairs of sweatpants, two t-shirts, shoes, a bar of soap, a razor and a facewasher. I see my spare t-shirt soaked in green paint where Yusif Mohamed’s paint kit has spilled. My sweatpants lay among the waste emptied from the bins. They’ve also dragged the futons off every bed and stripped the blankets. The sheets are covered with boot prints of coloured paint. We can no longer tell who owns any of it.
I step here and there among the wreckage like a gardener, lifting and poking and pulling things. Eventually I find my mattress at the far end of the dormitory, as if it was thrown there in fury. Yes, I’m certain it’s fury. This is Eaglehawk, after all. Many of the guards seem to carry a furious anger towards us. Why? They resent having to share our imprisonment. They resent having to share their country too, I suppose. Not all of them hate us—some are indifferent and some even feel compassion. Once, Van Hooj had brought a cricket bat and ball into the facility and organised a match where he bowled his medium pace to us for hours while we hit the ball about. Then Yusif Mohamed took 4/22 with his left arm spin. But good men or bad men, on a day like today they resent us.
On a day like today, we’re subhuman once again.
I’m conscious of the cameras, so I crouch and di
sguise my actions with other movements until I feel the warm arm of the glasses inside the foam stuffing. The frames are bent but I twist them into shape and tuck them into my sweatpants as quickly as I can.
Abdullah, Yusif Mohamed, Rasheed, Ibrahim and the rest have begun filing into the room. Rasheed, who is the youngest, who doesn’t yet understand human cruelty, holds his cheeks and makes odd strangled sounds. Then Dr Nazeem comes through the door. He must have come from his own dormitory because he’s holding the leather-bound and gold-embossed Quran supposedly given to him upon his graduation from al-Azhar university. In his sermons, he often tells the story of how this book kept him afloat in the floodwater. He enters, waving the book. He’s removed his taqiyah. His grey hair is awry.
‘Look,’ he says. ‘Look.’
The Quran has boot prints of mud on its cover.
‘What have they done?’ Rasheed says in shock.
Abdullah is standing before the cavity where the wall screen used to sit. ‘They took the tv.’
Everyone is looking at the empty bracket on the wall.
‘Why did they take the tv?’ Rasheed says. ‘Do they hate us that much?’
‘I know why,’ I say.
No one looks at me.
‘We’re being punished for something,’ Abdullah says. ‘Maybe Shadi Thoriq’s violence. Maybe they think we put him up to it.’
‘Then why are they punishing Yamaan as well?’ Rasheed says. He might be young, but he’s quick of mind. ‘Yamaan was the victim. It makes no sense to punish him.’
‘I know why they did it,’ I say again. They ignore me.
‘It’s perfectly obvious what’s going on,’ Dr Nazeem says. His hair sits wildly on his head. ‘It’s persecution. We’re Muslims in a Christian country. This is the reason. We’re Muslims and they’re Christians and they’re rubbing their hands in glee at the opportunity for revenge. Do you think they have forgotten the defeats we inflicted upon them in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya and Nigeria? Never. For the first time since the Crusaders, they have a Muslim country on its knees—’
‘Hey.’ Hassan snaps his fingers. ‘Save that for Friday. Right now, you should be listening to Yamaan.’
‘The laadheenee?’ Nazeem says. ‘Listen to the laadheenee?’
‘He might be a laadheenee,’ Hassan says, ‘but he’s a laadheenee who knows what’s going on.’
‘He speaks like a snake,’ Dr Nazeem says.
‘Let him say what he has to say. Stone him later if you like, but let him finish.’
Dr Nazeem jams his desecrated Quran under one arm. ‘Come on, little philosopher. Tell us what you’ve learned. Why did they take our tv? Why did they take our headsets?’
I look from one man to the next. With a weary anger in my voice, I begin to tell them everything I know. The TabaPet contracts. The suspension of MWD. The intimacy between the Department of National Integrity and Cabey-Yasuda Corrections. I explain that the DEOs have taken our electronics away to stop us communicating beyond the walls of the camp. They want to hide the truth of our situation for as long as possible, which means no more news from outside. No more messages from loved ones. No calls or videos. I explain how we are now trapped without hope of leaving this place.
‘They lied,’ Nazeem says.
‘They can’t lie,’ Rasheed says. ‘Governments can’t lie.’
Hassan snorts.
‘But it makes no sense,’ Abdullah says. ‘We can leave anytime we want. We can go back to Menik Farm. How can they keep us here?’
‘You don’t have a passport,’ I say. ‘None of us have a passport.’
‘There’s always deportation,’ Abdullah says. ‘They deport us back to Sri Lanka.’
‘You’re not Sri Lankan,’ I say.
‘So what?’
‘So they can’t deport you to a country that was never your home.’
There’s a moment of silence as everyone ponders the implications.
‘And we can’t go home,’ Rasheed says, ‘because Malé is a horror. It’s a ruin.’
‘Now you see the problem,’ I say.
Abdullah lifts two fingers like he’s asking for quiet. ‘Wait, wait. If we can’t go home, then we’re stuck here.’
‘That’s what’s he been trying to tell you,’ Hassan says.
By now the talk in the room has ceased. The men sit on empty bunks with their heads in their hands. Abdullah is pacing up and back with his fingers working the nape of his neck. He kicks the junk on the ground. Before the cataclysm, he was a rich man, the manager of a five-star resort; after, well, he was as poor and humble as the rest of us. We knew that his wife wrote emails from Menik Farm describing in detail how she wished to kill herself but could not bear the dishonour of the act. He’d told us with tears in his eyes. You could see the nature of his thoughts in the way he ground his fingers into his neck. And Rasheed. Rasheed squats in a corner holding the broken bits of his harmonica. Rasheed lost his entire family in the floods. He plays his harmonica for them because he has no words for what he feels.
These are the men being punished.
‘It’s like this,’ I say. ‘They want to keep us ignorant. If we’re ignorant, we’re easy to manipulate. But we’re not ignorant anymore. We know what they’ve done. We can stand up to them. We can—’ Before I finish what I’m saying Daniel Howland lumbers into the dormitory. He steps over the clothes and the paint and the sheets, and for the first time I notice that the tattoo on his neck reads Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes? in an ornate Latin script of faded blue. Who will guard the guards themselves? A quote from Juvenal, the old poet, the Roman. It gives me a churning feeling in my stomach. He has a plastic shopping bag that’s full of cans of Coke and he starts passing these out to us and giving each man a sympathetic pat on the shoulder.
‘It’s an obscene and upside-down world we live in,’ he says.
He hands me a can but I hesitate to take it.
‘Obscene that a company making billions can treat us this way. Obscene that we’re made slaves by a corrupt system. Obscene. Do not stand for it. Do not let it be. This obscenity should make you so sick at heart that you can’t live with it. No longer. Not one minute longer. You’ve got to show them. You’ve got to take your eyes off the heavens and stare them down. You’ve got to make them understand that you will destroy their profit unless you’re set free.’
I don’t like this Tasmanian. His ideas about the world are too destructive. He’s full of his own self-importance, like all white men. Yet he’s right about one thing. To accept the suspension of the MWD program is to accept our own imprisonment. Even the thought of it fills me with hot water. We must act. We must act or we may never be free again.
‘We have a lesson to teach these people,’ Howland says. ‘The biggest lesson of all. The final lesson of history. That nothing lasts, not even countries. These corporations might seem permanent. This facility might seem permanent. But free men, truly free men, must refuse a structure that calls itself permanent. We must tear them down, starting with Cabey-Yasuda.’
‘He’s right,’ I say.
‘You make your own hell, just like you make your own heaven,’ Hassan says, quoting Anand. Yes, Anand’s words always gave us a brief chuckle. The melodrama, the sentiment. How could you not laugh?
Right now, no one is laughing.
‘We have common interests,’ Howland says. ‘We should be acting together. Let me show you how Tasmanians fight.’
We share a short exchange of glances, we Maldivians, and my heart falls when I find everyone looking at Dr Nazeem for confirmation. Lost are those men led by the blind. Dr Nazeem straightens up. You can almost see the stiffening of his soul.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘We’ll fight.’
When the bell rings at nine that morning for the end of the night shift, we know the trouble has started. It happens three times every day, the change of shift. A great reloading, like the passing around of data. The manufactory transmits and receives. The men com
e, the men go. Today, in Delta compound, no one goes. The packet of workers finishing their shift arrives through the sallyport, dressed identically in blue smocks and face masks. Maldivians for the most part, with a smattering of Nigerians, Iranians, Tuvaluans. Not that you can really tell behind the masks. In the masks, they’re all just ones and zeroes. They spill through Red Gate where they spot a few hundred men sitting in the recreation area below the cankerous blue gum.
I see their puzzlement as they come through the gate. Puzzlement, then worry. They turn to each other. They walk and then stop. They walk further. They can see that something is wrong. They approach us and they’re pulling off their hairnets and some start running and others stand as if they’re afraid. When we tell them about MWD, about the contracts, and the visas, they cycle through a sequence of emotions, starting with confusion, then, as they understand, it’s misery, and finally as they see the obscenity of lies, their anger emerges. We tell them there’ll be no more work. This is our protest. No more work until we’ve been given visas.
Our absence from the manufactory is a source of concern. Within minutes a squad of DEOs arrives at Red Gate and forms up inside the compound. These are the overseers. They gather in the long square shade of the buildings to talk among themselves. They wear white shirts with epaulettes. Most are former nightclub bouncers, private security, martial arts fighters, gym junkies, and steroid users who have been given a day of training and a uniform. For a long while, the DEOs linger in the shade watching but not acting.
Howland comes to sit beside me.
‘I thought they would send Rahmatullah and his Emergency Response Team,’ I say.
‘First they’ll try to talk sense into us.’
‘Try to get us back to work.’
‘Exactly.’
‘We should expect a response. Don’t you expect a response?’
‘I expect a response.’
‘What will it be?’ I say.
He’s drinking cola. He smells strongly of sweat. ‘Won’t know until we see the response.’
‘They have water cannons,’ I say. ‘They have directed energy weapons. They have gas.’
