Shadows & Tall Trees 7

by Michael Kelly

  Halfway into the Straits of Johor, the boatman killed the engine. The boat rocked gently; water lapped its hull. Tankers and cargo ships buoyed the horizon like floating coffins.

  Sunil Uncle stood on the deck, hands on the boat’s side, staring out into the horizon. Sanjay, still not understanding, wondered what would happen if he pushed his uncle overboard. Sunil pointed towards the corrugated line of ships.

  “See that ship, Sanjay? That old one.” In the distance floated an ancient hulk of a barge with a long, low body. A ship just like ours. We refused to mutiny, you see, unlike the oath-breakers who traded one master for another; King for Shōwa Emperor. And so it was our brothers who kicked us, beat us, forced us aboard a ship like that one. A ship owned by our countryman, but flying the flag of the Rising Sun. Saagar Raj.

  “What about it?”

  “Must be forty, fifty years old. We used to have one just like it. The first ship your grandfather bought. The first Saagar Raj. That’s where our company name comes from. It went missing during the War. When we tracked it down in Bangladesh—”

  “I know the story, Uncle.”

  Sunil fell silent, staring off into the horizon. The little boat rocked back and forth, and Sanjay cradled Dad’s urn under his arm.

  “Well,” Sanjay said. “You loved the ocean, Dad. This is where you belong.”

  The priest chanted in Sanskrit, and Sanjay leaned over the boat’s edge. Sunil held Sanjay’s hip; the undertaker held his shoulder, and Sanjay felt a sudden stab of fear. Perhaps his uncle would be the one to drown him. But they held him tight as Sanjay emptied his father’s remains into the sun-kissed sea, where they would mingle with the currents of the world’s great oceans, the same currents that had blessed their family with so much fortune, and taken ours away. Ash and bone flowed from the urn, plopping gently into the water. There was so much of it. Sanjay shook the urn, until it was empty and his arms began to tremble.

  “Throw the urn, also,” the priest said, and Sanjay dropped it into the waves. What was left of Dad’s body mixed with the waters of his family’s crossing from India, a spreading cloud of bone, meat and burnt-out marrow. It all becomes ash in the end, down here in the blackest waters beneath the world, where not even ships can cross.

  But we desired to taste what was left of him, and so we broke the water’s surface for just a moment, and pulled what little remained of Dad down to the depths.

  “Did you see that?” Sanjay asked. He’d seen it now, something sleek and dark cutting through the cloud of ash. The urn tumbled over itself, filled up with water and began to sink. Sunil, trembling, released Sanjay as he stepped back onto the deck. The undertaker pulled Sanjay up to his feet.

  “Fish, probably,” the priest shrugged. “Not to worry. It’s good luck. The fish is the divine vehicle of Goddess Ganga, called Makara.”

  On their way back to land, the Brahmin told Sanjay about the Makara, but all he could think was that something had eaten Dad’s ashes. And Sunil Uncle’s lips were drawn tight and thin; he did not utter another word, not even when Sanjay dropped him at home.

  The priest had told him to go home and shower, but Sanjay went to the office instead. Saagar Raj Limited occupied the 32nd floor of a building that overlooked the port. Sanjay, like Dad, had always loved the view. He’d inherited Dad’s love for the maritime side of the business. Unlike Sunil Uncle, who saw ships as no more than the cold sums of their cargo manifests, assets to be reconciled in the accounts.

  But today, instead of invigorating Sanjay, the ocean had left him empty. He sat down at Dad’s desk, pushing himself back on the wheeled chair, remembered playing at being CEO when he was a boy. But boyhood was long behind him now. Adulthood, and its inheritance, weighed on him like rusty chains slipping beneath dark water. Sanjay thought about Dad who would never sit at this desk again, about Sunil Uncle and the Saagar Raj, about secret agreements made when he was still a child, their perpetrators made unquestionable by age, illness and respect.

  And there they were, right on the desk. Dad, Sunil, and Granddad, on the deck of Granddad’s yacht. Sunil was a young man in the photograph, younger than Sanjay. He wore a tight-fitting shirt and blue sunglasses, a champagne glass in his hand. Sanjay picked up the photograph, trying to understand. He glanced at the other photos on the desk; Dad and Captain Singh, head of fleet ops, together on the bridge of Royal Durga, sea jackets casually unzipped. There was Dad, Mum and ten-year-old Sanjay, happy and smiling. A hinged picture frame showed two old photos from a party in someone’s garden, Christmas lights strung from the trees. Granddad and Grandma, smiling with drinks in their hands. In the second photograph, Granddad stood in the same garden, standing next to the former Prime Minister. LKY & LKM, someone had written in the corner. Sanjay smirked at the pun, and at his family’s association with the powerful. But what about those of us who’ve been trampled and left to rot in the water? What about Risaldar Satwant Singh, Lance-Naik Mohan Nair, and the rest of the loyal lads whose soggy bodies have no urns or caskets? What about those who were devoured, cooked and eaten while the rest of us watched? We cannot blame our starving captors. They were soldiers, like us. Bound together in dharma, we forgave them their hunger as we slipped together into the sea. But you, O Water King, O soft-fleshed child of plenty? You cannot possibly imagine our hunger.

  Sanjay searched Dad’s keychain for the right key and unlocked the desk drawer. It was jammed, but he forced it open and found his father’s treasures inside. The drawer smelt of moldy paper, and of flowers: the smell of priests and temples, of garlands wet and shiny, blooming from a casket.

  Rummaging, he found a stack of manila envelopes behind the box, marked in Dad’s handwriting. One of them said S.R. Trembling, Sanjay undid its metal clasp and shook out a folded yellow paper and a rubber-banded stack of photographs. The photos depicted an ancient, beached ship, very much like the one Sunil had pointed at when they were out on the water. Whoever took them had been staring up at its colossal hulk, and had photographed it so the name was clearly visible, fading on its rotted hull. Saagar Raj. The Sea King. That first, missing ship, which bequeathed its name to the family business, along with its sin. Our ship.

  Sanjay unfolded the piece of paper: a photocopied note, written in terrible, cursive handwriting: Mr. Mirchand, I hv found ship … Chittagong Yard … see photo … hv asserted yr ownership … badly corroded … not much … value … nevertheless hv negotiate … US$100,000 … shld accept … full credit … transfer … pls advise hw to dispose remains? kindly revert … Mr. Prakash.

  Mr. Prakash. Not a scrap broker Sanjay had ever heard of. He picked up the stack of photographs. Flipping through them, he saw the Saagar Raj’s funeral. The ship beached at the breaker’s yard, decaying and turning skeletal; its hull cracked open, dismembered components littering the beach. The hold was open too, its secrets strewn across sand stained red with blood and rust, where poor boys laboured, smashing fingers and snapping bones as they prepared ships for the afterlife and lined the pockets of rich men. Photo by photo, the Saagar Raj became an empty shell, a desecrated tomb. Scrapped for profit, peeled apart; its bones completely exposed.

  And then the final photograph. A close up, inside the cargo hold. Something pale and yellow, scattered against the corroded wall.

  Pls advise hw to dispose remains?

  Sanjay put the photo down. His hands shook, his jaw clenched hard enough to shatter teeth. Panicking, he left Dad’s office, walking down the corridor to his own. He ransacked his drawers, looking for cigarettes. Finally he found a bashed pack of Marlboros—with three left inside, thank God. Trembling, he put one in his mouth, chewing frantically on the butt. He lit it and filled the room with smoke, distracting himself with fevered drags until he started coughing. Sanjay thought about cancer, spreading like Dad’s bones in the sea, like our dusty bones in the Saagar Raj’s belly. He rubbed his neck, feeling for swollen nodules, and put the cigarette out early, fingers stained and shaking with ash and horror.

 
He walked back to Dad’s office. The answering machine on the desk blinked orange, a new message waiting inside it. Had it always been there? Confused, Sanjay sat back down in Dad’s chair and played the message. Sunil Uncle’s voice filled the room, drunk and distorted.

  “Anil Bhai,” Sunil sighed. “I came to see you. I don’t know if you could hear me. But … anyway, they say … hearing’s the last thing to go. But you didn’t… look like you anymore. Like you were already gone. I’m so sorry, Bhai. There’s so much I wanted to say. But it’s too late now. I don’t know why I’m calling you. Maybe I’ve gone crazy. But I … needed to say goodbye. And to tell you something. I’m–I’m sick, too. What happened to you … it’s going to happen to me. It’s that ship. I’m trying to stop it. Trying to do what I can. I’ll take care of everyone. Radhika. Sanjay. Vidya. I miss you, Bro … I-I’ll see you soon. Goodbye.”

  A long pause, and then his voice returned, darker, insistent and full of revelation: “Anil. People were eaten on that ship, did you know that?”

  The line went dead. Sanjay stared at the answering machine, wondering what else it contained. But that was it. He thought about calling his uncle. Sunil sounded crazy. Suicidal, even. He looked at the photos spread on the desk. Whatever happened on that ship was in the past, he decided. What was important was the future. The future of his family, the future of the company. And Sunil Uncle, whatever his intentions, was a threat to that future.

  Angrily, Sanjay swept the photographs back into the drawer and shut it. He cradled his forehead in his hand. He would call the lawyer tomorrow. This was far too much for one day.

  That night, Sanjay was afraid to sleep. He watched Vidya as her eyelids fluttered and she began to snore. He felt abandoned, left alone and haunted in the waking world. When he shut his eyes he saw corpses, skeletal bodies floating face-down in murky black puddles. He wandered through the corroded, claustrophobic tunnels of an old ship, pushing his way between walls not even wide enough to hold a body hollowed by cancer. An open container yawned at him, like the mouth of a monstrous fish.

  Magar. Makara.

  Corpse-hands pulled him inside and lay him on his back. Sanjay’s eyes opened to darkness, a crushing weight on his chest. Next to him lay a body, pale and unmoving. He gasped—

  “Hm?” Vidya responded sleepily. Sanjay forced the heavy blankets off him, and propped himself up on his elbow to look down at her. There was no corpse. Only Vidya. But imagine if he had been us, forced to turn gasping and sweating in that hold, waking from a fever dream expecting to see his wife but seeing only the man next to him, again and again. We have been here since the beginning.

  “Nothing. Bad dream,” Sanjay said, and Vidya made a small, sleepy noise. He had to urinate, but was afraid of the darkness, of putting his feet on the bedroom floor. He feared the wood had turned to water by now, and if he dipped his feet overboard he would surely sink down, down into the crushing depths. But soon the urge became too much, and he stumbled shivering towards the bathroom.

  Sanjay opened the bathroom door. Through the frosted windows, the moon traced spidery shadows on the floor and wall like emaciated, grasping fingers. He wanted to turn on the light, but then he would have to venture back out into pure darkness. So he stood over the darkened toilet and urinated, feeling relief replace pressure in his over-full bladder. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shape caress his own in the bathroom mirror, and spun, panicking, spilling hot urine all over his feet.

  But there was nothing there, nothing peering out from the reflection’s dark edges.

  Sanjay cursed under his breath. Of course there was nothing there. Yet as he washed his hands in the darkness, splashing clean tap water on his feet and wiping them dry with his towel, he saw them. The shapes in the mirror; impossibly compacted limbs angling out from the reflected shelves, misshapen forms of ash and shadow. He whirled around, but there was nothing.

  Back in the bedroom, shivering in the air conditioner’s draft, he wanted to lie down next to Vidya, to clutch her to him, but he worried the body in bed would not be hers. The shape of the blankets unsettled him; bunched-up like the hump of an ocean creature breaking the waves for just a moment. He needed fresh air, needed to feel the cool, humid night on his skin. So he left the bedroom, the eyes of his grandfather and great-grandfather watching from inside their frames. He descended the stairs, careful not to wake his mother who slept downstairs in the guest room because she would no longer sleep in the room she once shared with her husband.

  Sanjay moved like a sleepwalker through a living room made hostile by shadows, a kingdom claimed by the dead in which he was no longer welcome. He pushed open the verandah door, and the moist swimming pool air bathed his skin, the chlorine smell pulling his mind firmly into the waking world. Into the present, where his past awaits him.

  Sanjay walks past the old plastic chairs that Dad never saw the point in replacing and steps onto the pale tiles that surround the thirty-metre long swimming pool, lit from within so nobody will slip and fall in at night. He is careful not to look inside as he walks the length of the pool, but then he slips, wet feet sliding out from under him, his back and hips crashing onto hard ceramic.

  Groaning, he rubs his aching back, damp through the t-shirt. The tiles are soaked, as though something huge had jumped into the pool, or a platoon of swimmers had emerged dripping just moments earlier. Then Sanjay looks into the water, and sees us.

  We have been waiting for him. Like a spreading oil slick, like the flower blooming in his lungs. We spread and coalesce, our tendrils unfurling into the dimly-lit chlorine water like Dad’s ashes in the ocean. Sanjay sees the darkness growing and uncoiling in the swimming pool, and knows it is his reckoning. We swim towards him. We come to collect the debt.

  Shocked, he scrambles backwards across the slippery tiles, onto the grass. He cannot escape us, the dark shape rearing out of the water now, taking form as we come into contact with the air. Watery talons splash onto tiles, kala paani dripping everywhere as we regurgitate ourselves out of the pool and make our landfall; a huge, reptilian shadow looming over him.

  Magar. Makara.

  “Please,” he whispers, but we are here for him.

  “You’ve become rich, bhai-sahib,” we whisper. “So rich. But every rupee is a bite of flesh from our bodies.”

  Our teeth are eyeballs. Our mouth a hundred starving mouths.

  “Mujhe maaf karo,” Sanjay pleads in his fragmented Hindi. “Forgive me. Please.”

  “Nahein,” we hiss. “We have waited so long to find you,

  Saagar Ra.”

  His skin is cold in the humid night. We tower over him, and he can see now that we are made of dead men, our bodies reconfigured, some partially chewed and digested, others torn to shreds to make teeth and tail and talons. Every claw a hand with ten emaciated fingers, nails broken on the walls of the hold. People were eaten on that ship, did you know that?

  “But my father is dead,” Sanjay pleads.

  “Yeh unka ghar hain. Yeh aapka ghar hain,” we reply. This is his house. This is your house.

  And when the ghost of the black waters opens its mouth, Sanjay smells salt water and metallic blood and the rotting stench of shit. He sees all our faces, us poor betrayed comrades, starving and hollow-eyed lads, our uniforms all in tatters. He hears the buzzing of flies, and our voices, as we scream and moan and plead with our captors, our equally starving captors who cut us, cooked us and ate our flesh, far, far across the black waters, so that we might never again return home.

  We raise our hand to his mouth and caress him like a bloodthirsty lover.

  And as he is devoured in the shadow of his father’s mansion, Sanjay finally understands why.

  IN THE TALL GRASS

  Simon Strantzas

  WHEN REITER IS AWAKE, HEIKE SITS AT his side, entwines her fingers with his, sometimes strokes his face. But when he’s asleep she steals out to the tall grass at the edge of the farm and finds a spot deep within it to kneel. She doe
sn’t know what she prays to—there’s nothing to believe in anymore—but she prays all the same. She prays because deep in the tall grass, far away from the house and from Reiter and from everything she knows, the world is softer and more malleable. She’s closer to something she has no name for—be it God or Fate or whatever. No matter how foolish it might be, she hopes if she prays there she will be heard. Reiter will be saved and the two of them will be happy forever.

  But she isn’t heard and Reiter is gone by the time she returns.

  He’s buried in the tall grass because that’s what he wanted, but she never visits him. She can’t go back to where her world ended. Without him, she is untethered. Those crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes eventually stretch farther across her broad face, and her red hair turns a grey like water tinged with blood. The woman in the mirror who returns her furrowed-brow glare looks as though she’s forgotten everything Reiter taught her about being alive.

  She doesn’t notice Baum in the grass because he takes his time arriving. At first he is no more than a shoot between the seed-heavy blades, a thin reach of green that grabs hold of whatever it can to climb its way into the sun, open a lone pink flower to the light. It’s during the subsequent autumns and winters and summers and springs that Baum grows and blossoms, getting larger, stronger, until he is finally able to uproot his twisted legs from the soil and find himself steady enough to move forward.

  Baum emerges from the grass while Heike works on her truck, shirtsleeves folded to above her elbow. She hears the snap of a thousand twigs and turns her grease-smeared face to find Baum crying, crooked arms spread wide. The smell of new green wafts from him while light diffuses through his foliage, dappling shadows over her face.