by Dilman Dila
“Are those demons?” she said, in a frightened whisper, speaking for the first time that morning.
He did not respond at once. It would take her a long time to unlearn the poison they had fed her since she was a little child. First in the temples of Jok, then at school, little drippings of deadly data that made her hate herself, that made her doubt if he was her father.
“For all the years I’ve been coming here, those birds have never hurt me.”
“For years,” she said, as though trying to understand the phrase. “You did not report it to the abasura.” The disappointment in her voice turned the morning into ice.
“They know about them.”
She was silent for a while, maybe finding the information unbelievable, and then she spoke, “They should be exterminated.”
Songo steered the craft toward the shore. He wanted to give her a close feel of the birds. Maybe if she heard their sweet cooing, and touched the little ones, and felt their fluffy feathers, she would not think of them as demons. Before the bruka could touch the ground, anger flared in her eyes.
“Are you going to land here?”
Beaten, he took the bruka back up. She slunk into silence again, maybe thinking about the colorful birds in her books. They represented angels. White birds did not fly to the cities anymore. People had killed the last one of them two hundred years back. The phrase ‘white bird’ was now associated more with fable than with reality. They only appeared at a certain time of the year. It made Songo wonder where they stayed the rest of the time. It could not be inland, for they would be killed. He thought they lived somewhere beyond the four lights, which he could now see in the horizon.
Kimi had not yet noticed them. It was hard to see them at once. They were merely four dots in the distance, each the size of a fist, in a straight line. Only a few knew of their existence. No one ever talked about them. No painting of the ocean ever depicted them, yet they were a permanent feature just like the waves. No one knew what they were, or what lay beyond. The Ministry of Geography claimed there was nothing offshore, just water. The Ministry of Spiritual Affairs claimed that the sea was Hell. Myths and legends talked of worlds on the other side.
The most famous was in the Book of Life, in the tale of Mojech who led the people of Jok out of slavery from a land called Hamerikah. The Book never talked of who enslaved them, but people interpreted it to be white creatures that were half human and half bird. Their king, Wasiton, raided Jokland and took slaves in great ships. They worked for him for a thousand years until Jok sent Mojech to free them. King Wasiton refused to release them, so Jok struck Hamerikah with a hundred plaques until he succumbed. Unable to sail the ships, Mojech parted the waters of the sea with his magic staff and the slaves walked back home. It took them forty years.
Songo did not believe the Book. He thought Hamerikah was a fiction, like Heden, Kaanaan, Heziya, and Zayon. But the Mojech story intrigued him. If it took them forty years to trek across the sea, how long would a bruka take? A couple of weeks? A day? A year?
He used to think the four lights were pieces of metal gleaming under the sun. One day, his bruka broke down, and he waited for rescue until night. Then he saw that they were lights. He thought they were Pyramids with ten thousand families living in each, the collective glare from the windows making each shine like a single pearl. A week after this discovery, he tried to fly to them. He sneaked off the coast and flew low over the water to avoid the scanners. After twenty minutes, the lights were still four tiny dots in the horizon. He begun to think they were a mirage. Before he could fly further, a bruka gunship came after him. They would have vaporised him if he had not quickly sent them his royal pass. During his trial he claimed that he had wanted to paint land from the point of view of a demon. He could have been executed, but the propaganda machinery needed his talents. He instead served a year in jail.
“Here is a nice spot,” he said, as they flew over a stretch without seaweed.
“It’s too white,” Kimi said.
“It won’t hurt you,” he said. “It’s just sand.”
“What is sand?”
“It’s – it’s like the soil on which our food grows... but of a different texture.”
She did not say anything. He thought she was struggling to understand it all, for she had never touched the natural ground. She did not know the texture of soil. All her life she had lived thousands of feet up in the air.
The bruka landed with a jolt. He jumped out. He gulped in fresh air, a relief after her odour. The jungle was alive with bird music, which played in perfect sync with the waves. Kimi put a frightened foot down. She pulled her leg back, maybe surprised by the ticklish feel of sand, maybe thinking it was bad luck that the first time she steps on the ground is on a place painted with the devil’s color.
On his first day at the beach, he had imagined that sand was a type of water and that he would drown. He had clung to the ornithopter as his mentor laughed. He barely knew the old man at that time. They had met only a few months before. He had come to the beach legally, as an apprentice. It had felt strange walking on sand, the squelchy touch, the sound of it crunching under his feet, the thought of it being ominous to walk on something so white. The artist should be fluid like the wind, the old man had said. Go anywhere you like, even to Hell, or else your imagination will never fly. He took the advice and became more than just an apprentice. Songo never found out why the old man had no family, but something of a father-son love flourished between them.
He did not laugh at Kimi. He pretended not to notice her fear.
He set up the easel on the shoreline. The water lapped at his ankles. He looked at pictures in his camera. The Emperor wanted a monster to leap out of the river and snatch an angel on a mango tree. Songo thought a human prey would be more frightening. He looked away from the camera, at the coastline. He had been banned from the seaside ever since he tried to reach the lights. Whenever he got a commission to paint the beach, they asked him to do it from memory. He longed for that time when he would spend days on the beach, the wind on his face, the sun on his skin, as his brush flew over the vidicanvas. Now, he wondered if he should make the river flow into the sea. He could make the demon creep out of the ocean, go up the river, to a tree where an angel sat eating a mango. Or maybe he could have her sitting on the white sands of the beach, not an angel but a girl.
“You will be vaporised if you ever depict people at sea, or if you ever draw those four lights,” his mentor had told him.
“Why?” he had asked.
“Who knows?” the old man had replied. “Just never do it.”
He heard Kimi. She was walking towards him, her eyes on the sand, maybe puzzled that she was making perfect footprints. She had a smile, the first time he had seen her smile in two years. Dimples blossomed on her cheek. The sun licked her face, uncovering memories of the happiness they had before her mother died.
“It feels,” she searched for the words to describe it and then, laughing, said, “Squishy?”
“Take a swim,” he said.
The smile vanished from her face. A frown appeared, shocked at his suggestion. She could not swim in public. Water washed off the kalo and exposed her true color. All her life she had lived in fear of being found out. One day, shortly after her mother’s death, fed up with the fear, she stepped out of the diiro without the kalo mask. The neighbors shrieked in terror, as though she were a monster. Their faces twisted in disgust, they spat, they puked. “What have you smeared on yourself?” they yelled at her. “You look like a demonic red worm!” Rage deformed their faces. “We shall vaporise you for blasphemy!” The next week, Songo had quietly moved to a new Pyramid, to a new set of ten thousand neighbors.
She never left the diiro without her kalo mask again, even though it gave her a bad scent whenever she had her periods and had to use it with oya. The odour made her repellent. No child wanted to play with her. She got angry with him. “Who is my real dad,” she kept asking. The Book said that chil
dren inherited their skin color from their fathers. Since all humans were descendants of Habram, everyone had the same sooty shade. Why then was she a tawny-brown?
He wished her mother was still alive to help him handle her. She had died two years before, during her second pregnancy. He never knew what killed her. He suspected that they had terminated her for refusing to swallow kalona, which pregnant women were required to ingest monthly. They claimed it immunised the unborn against a plethora of disease, but his mentor had told him the truth. It gave the baby a dark hue. It ensured everyone was the same shade of charcoal. While pregnant with Kimi, Kama had secretly refused to swallow the tablet. She delivered from her diiro, later explaining to the abasura that it had happened too suddenly for her to go to the otyat. At birth, unlike other newborns with sooty looks, Kimi had a pale skin. Over the years, her skin had darkened into a tawny-brown. Songo feared the ointment had done it.
“Is it safe?” Kimi asked, her eyes searching the beach, scanning the forest with its incessant music, prying the clouds for a spybruka, which the abasura used to watch over the city.
“No one is here,” he said. “No one will see you.”
The frown did not leave her face. She peered into the water, fear shimmered in her eyes.
“What about demons?”
He laughed. He stripped off his robe and remained in his loin cloth. He ran into the water, and swam far out. He found a colorful shell. The official dogma said all sea creatures were pure white, the color of evil, because salt water bleached everything.
“See?” he said, giving her the shell. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Afraid, she refused to touch the shell. “It’s all a myth. Demons don’t exist.”
“Then why do you draw them?”
He shrugged. “They want people to think that the ocean is evil.”
“Why?”
So that people don’t get the idea of leaving Jokland, his mentor had said. But he could not explain it to Kimi. She had not yet discovered the lights.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll ask the Emperor the next time I see him.”
“But, they do exist!”
“Have you ever seen a demon in a camera picture?”
She looked at him wide-eyed. She shook her head almost imperceptibly.
“Isn’t it suspicious that you see them only in paintings? Three days ago, the Emperor told me that there is a new monster. He described what it looks like. I have to bring it to life. I’ve never seen it. He has never seen it. Even the priests have never seen it. They will see it after I draw it.” He shrugged again. “The pay is good.”
She stood still on the sand, watching the waves, as though waiting for a demon to dive out and gobble her. He thought how much she looked like her mother, his beautiful Kama, his first model. Her portrait had earned him the Emperor’s respect. In it, she blinks, and then her lips part slowly into a smile, to reveal the gap between her front teeth, her dimples glowing, deepening, her eyes twinkling, mirroring the face of whoever looks at the picture.
Songo turned away from the little girl, forcing the image of Kama out of his head. He threw the shell back into the sea, picked up a pencil and started to sketch.
Fifteen minutes passed. Kimi crept towards the edge of the water. He stopped drawing to watch her. She tested the ocean with her toes, and then let the waves wash over her ankles. The kalo drained from her skin, turning the water black like monster blood. She waded in until it reached her knees, a black trail behind her. The kalo dissolved into the sea. Soon there was no trace of it, just a tawny-brown girl swimming in bliss. A wave struck her. She fell, and vanished. He held his breath, but then she jumped out screaming in delight. Her laughter, the high-pitched squeak of pure happiness, filled the morning with the promise of a sunny day.
Songo painted fast as she played in the water. He sketched with a pencil, drawing a still picture at first, tracing out the forest, the river, the shoreline, the waves, the clouds, and then using the motion brush to animate the images in an endless loop, the trees fluttering, the river flowing into the sea, the clouds sailing, the waves licking the shore. Within an hour, he had the background ready. Kimi had not left the water since she got in. Next, he began to sketch the demon rising out of the sea, but then his pencil found a life of its own, and he ended up with an angel, a tawny-brown angel.
Before he could give it wings, the voice of reason whispered. Erase it.
Instead he brought the angel to life. It exploded out of the water with a mighty splash, its mouth opening in a silent scream of delight as it shoots into the air, and then splashed back in, vanishing for a few seconds of calm, before leaping out again, in an endless loop.
The Emperor’s propaganda machinery would never use the painting. It would only lead to Songo’s vaporisation, but Songo did not destroy the angel. He looked out into the sea, at the lights shimmering just above the waves, and he knew how to finish the picture. Using the zoom function of the motionbrush, he could make the lights grow larger until they became Pyramids, with a myriad of tawny-brown angels dancing in a celebration never seen inside the dystopian cities.
After two hours of splashing about, Kimi came out of the water, her arms full of colorful shells. They sat under a shade for breakfast. Gonja spread with odi, warm milk in gourds, slices of pineapple. They ate in silence. Kimi watched the ocean all the time. Songo recalled how the waves had captivated him, that day a lifetime ago with his mentor.
“What are those?” she asked.
“The waves?”
“No. Those four things, over there,” she pointed.
“Oh. You’ve finally seen them,” he smiled.
“Are they metal?”
“No. Lights.”
“Lights?”
“Yes.”
“What’s making them?”
“I don’t know.”
A brief silence cropped up. She did not know about his term in jail, which happened a year before her birth.
“Maybe that’s where demons live.”
“If demons were in the ocean, you’d be dead by now.”
A cloud swept over her eyes. He thought she was frowning. She ate in silence for a while, her eyes fixed on the lights.
“Do they ever go off?”
He shook his head. “I think it’s the border of another place, maybe not of hell and demons, maybe a place very much like our own.” He paused, and then added, “Maybe a better place.”
“Heziya or Hamerikah?”
“Who knows.”
“Maybe I could swim to it.”
The first time he saw the lights, he too had thought of swimming to it, but the old man had given him a piece of wisdom. It’s better to imagine what place that might be, than to go over and find it is actually hell. He wanted to tell Kimi the same thing, but he had not listened to his mentor. While serving his year in jail, he wondered what the old man had been trying to tell him. Was it a warning? Was it the wisdom that knowing the truth does not bring happiness and so it is better to fantasise rather than investigate? By then the old man was long dead. He could not get clarification. The quest for the truth had nearly cost him his life. Knowing about kalona had destroyed his family. The truth was dangerous. Still, every time he came to the beach, he wondered how he could beat the bruka gunship and reach the lights. Every time he saw a pregnant woman, he wondered how to tell her about kalona.
“It’s too far out,” he finally said. “You can’t swim to it. Maybe if there was a way to travel underwater, you could reach it. If you try to fly, they will vaporise you. And if you tell anybody what you have learnt today, they will vaporise you.”
After they had eaten, she pulled out an umbrella and lay on the beach, to shield herself from the strong rays of the sun. She dozed off. Songo continued to work. He intended to leave the beach before noon, the abasura would check on him in the forest about that time. He could complete the painting from memory. He only wanted to stay long enough to bring the idea to life.
A blast of sire
ns told him it was too late.
He turned to see a dozen fat men in black zooming above the treetops, their ornithopters fitted onto their bodies like dresses. They steered with their shoulders, while their hands held flash guns, the long kind that looked like bananas.
Kimi shot to her feet, frozen, unable to run into the bruka to smear kalo on her skin. The abasura would be on them any moment. Songo caught her eyes, and he could see the glint of anger, the accusation that he had tricked her, brought her out here into the sea, lured her into the water, and let the abasura find her without her mask on.
One officer landed. The others stayed in the air, flying in circles like a swarm of bees, their guns aimed at father and daughter. Songo did not recognize Moti until he took off his helmet. The wings folded behind his back. The wheel between his thighs crumpled into a ball, which moved into a pouch under his protuberant belly.
“Have you eaten yet?” Moti said in greeting, smiling.
“She’s my model,” Songo said, loud enough for Kimi to hear. He hated the tremble in his voice. “I wanted a demon that looks like a girl, that’s why I painted her.”
The officer glanced at Kimi, who stood rooted like a baobab tree. Disgust distorted his face. He spat, and it was as if the spittle hit Kimi’s face. He did not break his pace as he waddled to Songo.
“We should have checked her after we discovered her mother’s non-compliance,” he said. “Someone will pay for that oversight.”
It confirmed what Songo had feared all along. They had killed Kama. They had discovered she was not swallowing kalona. Her second pregnancy had been a mistake. After they got away with Kimi, they had decided not to have another child, but one night she forgot to drink the matindi soup, and four weeks later she missed her periods. They thought of an abortion, but they had gotten away with it the first time. Maybe they could beat the system again. Unfortunately, when she went to the otyat to treat a bruka accident wound, she did not come out alive. They said she suffered from internal bleeding. Now, he knew for sure. They had killed her for refusing to swallow kalona tables.
