by Amitav Ghosh
The meeting was not yet over when a ship was seen to be approaching ours, from the rear. We hurried to the deck rails and once again Cinta insisted on joining us, despite my protests.
An angry howl rose from the other ship as it drew level with us. The people on deck were near enough that we could see their faces clearly. They were mainly young men, many with their faces painted in the colours of their football clubs. Many appeared to be drunk.
When they began to shout slogans – ‘Close borders now! L’Italia agli Italiani!’ – we joined hands and shouted back: ‘NO to xenophobia! NO to hate!’ – but these simple slogans seemed completely mismatched to the phenomenon that we were confronted with, about which there was something truly apocalyptic, not least because the anger that was on display was so clearly fuelled by fear.
I glanced at Rafi thinking that this vision of rage might have unsettled him. But instead his face was glowing and his eyes were glittering brightly.
‘Remember what happened when the Merchant was trying to escape from Venice?’ he said.
‘You mean when his ship was attacked by pirates?’
‘Yes. It could have happened right here, couldn’t it?’
* * *
Piya alone remained oblivious to the clamorous confrontation that was unfolding around us. Her gaze remained fixed on the water and her hands were as steady as ever on her binoculars.
‘Can you still see the dolphins and whales?’ I asked.
She nodded. ‘They’re a long way off – they veered away from us when we caught up with those other ships. But many of them are still in sight.’
‘Are there as many as there were yesterday?’
‘Sure! In fact I’d say there were more – this is clearly a major migration event.’
‘Really? That’s lucky for us.’
‘Not so lucky for them. I wonder what they’re going to do when they run into those warships up ahead.’
* * *
Long before the Italian warships came into view we knew that something very unusual was going on in the waters around them. A few TV journalists had already reached the area and were broadcasting live from there.
That morning a big screen had been hung up in the Lucania’s stern, so we were able to watch the footage. We found ourselves looking at a stretch of water that had come to life in an astonishing, almost unbelievable, fashion: the sea was calm, sparkling in the sunlight, and everywhere in the frame plumes of spray were rising and falling as schools of whales and dolphins surfaced to breathe; every now and again a dolphin would leap out of the water and somersault through the air. There must have been hundreds of them, concentrated within a couple of square kilometres.
‘Have you ever seen anything like this? I said to Piya.
She shook her head. ‘I’ve seen cetaceans gathering in large numbers, but never so many different species. What’s even stranger is that they seem to be circling in one place.’
‘Any theories?’
‘My guess,’ she said hesitantly, ‘is that those navy ships are blocking their migration route.’
‘But surely they could go around the ships?’
‘I guess.’
‘Then why aren’t they doing that?’
Her jaw twitched. ‘I can’t answer that,’ she said, with a touch of annoyance. ‘There’s a lot that we still don’t know about cetaceans and their behaviour.’
* * *
It was late afternoon when we sighted the warships. There were four of them, arrayed in a line, looking watchfully eastwards: it was as though they were waiting to ambush an enemy armada.
The activists on the Lucania had assumed that they would be able to intervene directly in the fate of the Blue Boat when it finally showed up. But unbeknownst to them the navy had already taken measures to thwart those hopes.
The warships were still a long way off when a flotilla of grey speedboats came swarming out to meet us. Shouting out orders through megaphones, they formed a cordon around the vessels to make sure that the charter boats maintained a safe distance from each other, and from the warships.
On the Lucania there was a general feeling of disappointment when it came to be realized that we were to be mere spectators. But we were lucky in at least one respect: the Lucania’s position was such that we had a good view of the waters ahead of the warships.
There was, as yet, still no sign of the Blue Boat – it was not expected to arrive for a couple of hours. But what was happening in the stretch of water that faced us was riveting enough: a forest had risen there – of dorsal fins and spouting fountains of spray.
Piya was beside herself with excitement: ‘Sperm whales … pilot whales … fin whales … bottlenoses – they’re all there! The only Mediterranean species I haven’t seen yet is Cuvier’s beaked whale!’
* * *
Sunset was nearing when a thin trail of smoke was spotted rising above the horizon. An eternity seemed to pass before the long-awaited vessel came sputtering into view. Following the Blue Boat, at a distance of about a kilometre, was an array of coastguard ships, all flying different flags: every one of those vessels dwarfed the forlorn little fishing boat with its clinkered hull and flaking coat of blue paint.
The refugees on the deck of the Blue Boat now began to wave at us. An answering cheer of welcome went up from the Lucania, but it was quickly drowned out by the angry roars that rose from the vessels around us.
‘Go back where you came from…! Not needed here…! Europe for Europeans!’
The fishing boat’s pace slackened as it limped towards the warships. Then its engine died and it began to drift, amidst the whales and dolphins, encircled by columns of spray.
‘Let’s hope the boat doesn’t get hit by a surfacing whale,’ said Piya. ‘A sperm, or even a fin whale could easily overturn it.’
Raising her glasses to her eyes she began to scan the deck of the Blue Boat, going over it minutely.
‘Are you able to see their faces, Piya?’
‘Yeah, sort of.’
‘Have you spotted Tipu?’
‘No. Not yet.’
But just a few minutes later Rafi cried: ‘There he is! I see him! Right there, by the smokestack.’
He began to jump up and down, yelling wildly. Piya threw her arms around him and they hugged each other, laughing and crying.
A German TV journalist happened to be nearby. Intrigued by the celebration he came up to Gisa to ask: ‘Do those two over there actually know someone on that boat?’
‘That’s right,’ said Gisa. ‘That woman there is the foster-parent of a boy who’s on that boat. And that fellow with the cast on his arm? He’s the partner of the same boy. In fact they started their journey together, in Bangladesh. It’s an amazing story.’
‘Wow! Do you think they’d be willing to do an interview?’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Gisa. ‘Why don’t you ask them?’
A few minutes later Piya came over to ask. ‘Do you think Rafi and I should do this interview?’
‘Absolutely, Piya!’ I said, and Gisa added: ‘You should tell them everything – about you and Tipu, and also about his relationship with Rafi. You must do everything you can to put a human face on those refugees. You’ll be doing them a great favour.’
Piya looked still unconvinced so I added: ‘It’ll be a great human interest story.’
‘Human interest, huh?’ said Piya. ‘I guess the sci-comm guys in my university would be happy about that.’
She smiled and handed me her field glasses. ‘Look after these for me, will you?’
* * *
I didn’t have much luck in focusing the glasses on the refugees: the faces on the deck were so blurred by fountains of spray that I could hardly tell them apart. But in the crimson light of the setting sun the softened outlines of the boat, and the roiling waters around it, took on an unreal, and strangely pictorial, appearance. I was reminded dimly of images I had seen somewhere.
Sitting beside me, Cinta too was rem
inded of an image. ‘Dino,’ she said, ‘have you ever seen the Turner painting of a slave ship, with a tempest approaching?’
‘Why yes!’ I said. ‘I was just thinking of that. And also of some pictures I once saw, of coolie boats.’
It struck me now that the resemblances were not incidental: in some ways the plight of these refugees was indeed similar to that of the indentured workers who had been transported from the Indian subcontinent to distant corners of the globe in order to work in plantations. Coolies too had been mainly young, and overwhelmingly male; then too, dalals and other middlemen (duffadars and mahajans – recruiters and contractors) had been essential cogs in the machinery of transportation; and then too debt and moneylending had been vital to the oiling of the machine. Then as now, trafficking in human beings had been an immensely lucrative form of commerce.
There were similarities also in the circumstances under which they had travelled; like refugees, coolies too had been policed and preyed upon by ‘coyotes’ and overseers; they too had been crammed into confined spaces and had had to subsist on meagre rations. Beatings and whippings; seeing their own die before their eyes – all of this would have been familiar to the passengers of a coolie ship.
Yet there was a vital difference – the system of indentured labour, like chattel slavery before it, had always been managed and controlled by European imperial powers. The coolies often had no idea of where they were going or of the conditions that awaited them there; nor did they know much about the laws and regulations that governed their destiny.
The coolies’ colonial masters, on the other hand, knew everything about them. They recorded in obsessive detail where the coolies had come from and which castes and tribes they belonged to. Even their bodies were studied with close attention, special notice being taken of scars and other marks of identification. It was the colonial state that decided where they would go and when; on their arrival it was the state, again, that allotted them to owners of plantations.
But all of that was now completely reversed.
Rafi, Tipu and their fellow migrants had launched their own journeys, just as I had, long before them; as with me, their travels had been enabled by their own networks, and they, like me, were completely conversant with the laws and regulations of the countries they were heading to. Instead, it was the countries of the West that now knew very little about the people who were flocking towards them.
Nor had I, or any of the young migrants I had met, been transported across continents in order to become cogs in some giant plantation-like machine that existed in order to serve the desires of others. Slaves and coolies had worked to produce goods like sugar cane, tobacco, coffee, cotton, tea, rubber, all of which were intended for the colonizers’ home countries. It was the desires and appetites of the metropolis that moved people between continents in order to churn out ever-growing floods of saleable merchandise. In this dispensation slaves and coolies were producers, not consumers; they could never aspire to the desires of their masters.
But now, just as much as anyone else, young men like Rafi, Tipu and Bilal wanted those very things – smartphones, computers, cars. And how could they not? Since childhood the most attractive images that they had beheld were not of the rivers and fields that surrounded them but of things like these, flashing across the screens of their phones.
I saw now why the angry young men on the boats around us were so afraid of that derelict refugee boat: that tiny vessel represented the upending of a centuries-old project that had been essential to the shaping of Europe. Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe.
This entire project had now been upended. The systems and technologies that had made those massive demographic interventions possible – ranging from armaments to the control of information – had now achieved escape velocity: they were no longer under anyone’s control.
This was why those angry young men were so afraid of that little blue fishing boat: through the prism of this vessel they could glimpse the unravelling of a centuries-old project that had conferred vast privilege on them in relation to the rest of the world. In their hearts they knew that their privileges could no longer be assured by the people and institutions they had once trusted to provide for them.
The world had changed too much, too fast; the systems that were in control now did not obey any human master; they followed their own imperatives, inscrutable as demons.
* * *
Suddenly Lubna came rushing over, her face flushed, her eyes shining in exhilaration.
‘Apni janten?’ she asked me. ‘Did you know all this? About Rafi and his friend and everything?
‘I suppose so. Why?’
‘Their story seems to have struck a chord around the world!’ cried Lubna. ‘The interview isn’t even over yet and we’ve been getting calls non-stop. Donations and offers of help have been pouring in! Groups that have never shown any interest in our issues have been sending us messages. It’s incredible – we’ve never seen anything like this…’
Something in the distance distracted her now and her gaze drifted over my shoulder, to the horizon. The expression on her face changed suddenly and she stepped up to the deck rails, shading her eyes.
‘What’s that over there?’
I spun around to see a darkening smudge spreading across the southern horizon.
‘Maybe it’s a cloud,’ I said.
‘No, that can’t be it,’ said Cinta. ‘There’s something different about the way it’s moving – it seems to be coming towards us.’
The smudge was growing quickly, spilling over the horizon like a stain, expanding rapidly in our direction. I could only gape uncomprehendingly.
‘What on earth could it be?’
Then suddenly Piya was beside me. Snatching her field glasses out of my hands she focused them on the horizon.
‘Birds,’ she said. ‘They’re birds – hundreds of thousands of them. No. Millions. They must be migrating northwards – they’re going to pass right over us.’
Rafi too had appeared beside us now. Gazing at the sky he said: ‘It’s just as it says in the story – the creatures of the sky and sea rising up…’
An awestruck silence descended on us as the dark mass came arrowing through the sky: it was as if some limb of the earth had risen into the heavens and were reaching out to touch us. Everything seemed to stand still, even the air; I felt that I had somehow ceased to breathe.
‘Time itself is in ecstasy,’ said Cinta softly. ‘I had never thought I would witness this joy with my own eyes, pouring over the horizon.’
And then there they were, millions of birds, circling above us, while below, in the waters around the Blue Boat, schools of dolphins somersaulted and whales slapped their tails on the waves.
‘Uno stormo,’ said Cinta, gazing upwards, using the Italian word for a flock of birds in flight – and it seemed to me that this was indeed the right word, the only word, for the phenomenon that we were witnessing: a storm of living beings, bhutas.
Now, turning his glasses on the Blue Boat, Rafi cried, ‘Look! Look over there!’
His finger was pointing to the prow of the fishing boat, where a robed figure could be seen standing erect between the bows.
‘It’s a woman!’ cried Piya.
‘She must be the Ethiopian,’ said Rafi, ‘the one who called Tipu to Egypt.’
The woman lifted her arms now, raising them until they were level with her shoulders, palms facing upwards. And almost instantly a funnel-like extrusion appeared in the storm that was spinning above us. It began to extend downwards, forming a whirling hal
o above her head.
She stood absolutely still for what was perhaps only a moment, with a halo of birds spinning above her, while down in the water a chakra of dolphins and whales whirled around the boat. And then an even stranger thing happened: the colour of the water around the refugee boat began to change. In a few moments it was filled with a glow, of an unearthly green colour, bright enough that we could see the outlines of the dolphins and whales that were undulating through the water.
‘Bioluminescence!’ cried Piya. ‘I don’t believe it!’
For a few moments more we were transfixed by this miraculous spectacle: the storm of birds circling above, like a whirling funnel, and the graceful shadows of the leviathans in the glowing green water below. Then all of a sudden a siren went off on the admiral’s flagship and a few seconds later a helicopter took off from its foredeck.
And now it was as if a storm had passed: the birds flew on, the water ceased to glow and the spouts died down. By the time the helicopter reached the Blue Boat the water was calm and the sky was clear.
Hovering above the boat the helicopter made an announcement, in English, over a powerful megaphone: ‘We are from the Italian Navy and we are here to organize your rescue. You will shortly be taken to a navy vessel. Our first concern is for your security. Please do not panic and please follow our orders. You have nothing to fear; you are safe now.’
Even as the words were ringing across the water, two naval cutters were seen in the distance, approaching the refugees.
On the Lucania there was an amazed, disbelieving silence. Then a great cheer of relief rose from our throats – but barely had it been heard before it was drowned out by angry roars from some of the other charter boats: ‘Treason…! Send them home…! The admiral is a traitor…! Try him…!’
