‘So, everything is just the way it was the night before,’ Nandan broke into Orko’s private universe. ‘Erstwhile strangers exchange addresses. Friendships are forged from the fleeting moments of the voyage. The band begins to wind down, each song less urgent than the one that came before. The man in the crow’s nest scans the horizon, and there’s nothing to report.’
On his way up to the crow’s nest, Orko felt colder with each rung he climbed. When he reached the top, he was greeted by an exhilarating sight. He could see everything from up here – the whole world. There was the peak of K2. He knew the snow-clad summit; he had seen it in a picture on the cover of an issue of National Geographic. He took in the sight, his eyes fixed on the mysterious mountain.
When he came to, there was a palpable tension in the air. Something untoward seemed to have happened. Dark figures hurried about with an unmistakable air of urgency. They whispered frantically among themselves, though Orko couldn’t hear what they were saying.
‘The alarm is raised,’ Nandan said, lighting another cigarette. ‘The captain of any ship would do well to panic. You must understand that there are about five minutes before the iceberg will be upon them. The wheel is cranked all the way to starboard. It’s clear they won’t be able to avoid the collision.’
Orko found himself on the boat deck. The passengers still seemed to be oblivious to their impending peril, cocooned in the engineered warmth of the dining room.
‘Below decks, the ship is alive with tension. Men scurry about in its bowels, their practised routines ripped to shreds by the unexpected turn of events. The captain is as inscrutable as ever. He has given the commands that are necessary. The ship is fighting its own momentum, straining to change course. The wheel is at the stop.’
There was a sound, like a giant, rusty screw being turned against its will, followed by a mechanical gasp that sounded like the air brakes on a thousand large, dilapidated lorries deploying all at once.
‘They’ve been hit,’ said Nandan.
Orko was ahead of the story. He found himself plunging headlong into the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. People were dying all around him. Someone clutched at his slipper, then his dress. He went under, and just as he thought he was going to take on water, his head pierced the surface of the dark ocean. The great ship was listing. Orko went under again. Then there was complete darkness.
For days afterwards, all Orko could think about was broken ships sinking into the world’s oceans as thousands of freezing, gasping, drowning people watched in horror. In those weeks, he knew what he wanted to do when he grew up. He would build ships with hulls so invincible that icebergs would just glance off them. The ships would carry thousands of balloons and tanks of helium. If the hull did spring a leak, the balloons would inflate, holding the ship aloft until help arrived.
When Orko laid out this grand design over dinner, his father laughed.
‘Modern ships are very safe,’ he said. ‘Besides, most people fly when they need to travel great distances.’
Some months later, an Air India jet was blown up by terrorists, off the coast of Ireland. The Emperor Kanishka had been the largest and grandest of flying machines – a Boeing 747 – and more than three hundred people had been on board. Each one of them was dead.
Orko’s father was not surprised. According to him, anyone with a modicum of intelligence should have seen it coming.
A year earlier, the prime minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, was shot by members of her staff. A complex chain of events unfolded around the tragedy, and Nandan reasoned that the bombing of the Emperor Kanishka was retribution for questionable decisions that had been taken at the highest levels of the Indian government. That was all he would say about the matter.
Orko had many questions about all of it, but no one would answer them. Were there members of the government on board the fallen aircraft? The newspapers didn’t say so. On the day Mrs Gandhi was assassinated, life came to a standstill in the city. All India Radio and Doordarshan pulled their regular programming. The airwaves were commandeered by a mournful sarod, and every few minutes the music would give way to the measured, deferential diction of the newscaster, who gave increasingly dire prognoses about the prime minister’s condition. Finally, in the afternoon, it was announced that Mrs Indira Gandhi was dead. The nation went into mourning. His aunt Sudeshna wept openly. It stood to reason that if important people had been on board the lost Boeing, something similar would have happened.
Orko obsessed about the Emperor Kanishka. It featured prominently in his dreams, and when he was awake he often drifted away, a passenger in a window seat, looking down at the clouds. Through tears in the infinite white beneath him, he would spot the very same ocean that had swallowed up the Titanic so many years ago. Just as he spied the green island off to his left, blood was everywhere. The flesh of three hundred passengers melded with molten steel and hurtled earthward. Orko found himself splashing down into the frigid water, eyes wide open.
He badgered his father for books about passenger planes, and Nandan brought him a few from the university library. On Saturdays they scoured the old bookshops on College Street for anything they could find on the subject. When it came to the Kanishka, though, Nandan refused to say anything at all. All Orko knew was what he read in a magazine as he waited to see the doctor.
It was a Friday evening, and Nandan’s friend Kundan was visiting them. He often came to their flat on the weekend. After some small talk about school, mathematics and Kundan’s vintage Morris Minor, Orko took his chance while his father was in the kitchen.
‘Kundan-kaku,’ he started. ‘Did you hear about the Emperor Kanishka?’
Kundan sighed. He looked pensive, and Orko waited eagerly for him to say something about the subject. Kundan gripped the armrests of his chair and dragged himself to the edge of his seat. He stretched out an arm for the ashtray that lay just beyond his reach. Orko handed it to him, and Kundan nestled it in his lap. He fished out a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He reached back into the pocket for his matchbox, but it wasn’t there. He stood up to look in the pockets of his trousers. The empty ashtray clattered to the floor.
Orko fetched a matchbox from the kitchen. Kundan settled back into his chair. He placed a cigarette between his lips and lit it with a flourish. He shook the match to extinguish the flame. He retrieved the fallen ashtray and deposited the burnt matchstick in its mouth. He put the cigarette between his lips and inhaled deeply. Then he pursed his lips and blew smoke through his nostrils. Orko grew increasingly anxious with every passing second. He knew they couldn’t have this conversation in his father’s presence.
‘Well yes. The Kanishka,’ Kundan finally said, as the last wisps of smoke faded away. ‘It was rather sad, wasn’t it?’
Orko was taken aback by Kundan’s manner, and by his choice of words. He dithered, unsure how to advance the conversation. ‘How big is a Boeing 747 anyway?’ he asked eventually.
Kundan let out a contrived cough. His manner suggested that he didn’t really know, and was embarrassed to admit it. Orko wished he hadn’t asked the question. Embarrassing a grown-up was a terrible way to continue a discussion with them. He abandoned the realm of facts and posed a question that would elicit an opinion.
‘So is there no chance that anyone survived? They fell into the ocean, didn’t they? Some of them must have known how to swim?’
That seemed to strike a chord with Kundan. ‘Can you imagine the force of the impact? They were at a height of more than ten kilometres when the aircraft exploded,’ he said. ‘Mount Everest is a little over twenty-eight thousand feet. This plane was at an altitude of over thirty thousand feet. People die every year climbing Mount Everest – and they don’t even have the full height of the mountain to fall through…’
‘So they were just presumed dead?’ Orko asked, horrified. He imagined scores of passengers struggling to stay alive in freezing waters, with no help on the way.
‘I don’t think so. Ireland mount
ed a search and rescue operation – but it was immediately clear that there had been no survivors,’ Kundan said, lighting another cigarette.
That didn’t seem possible. They did fall into the ocean, after all.
‘Did they look everywhere? Like on nearby islands?’
Kundan looked exasperated, like his aunt sometimes did when he took too long to understand a mathematical concept. ‘Did you know that most people who climb Mount Everest use oxygen, like scuba divers and astronauts?’
This wasn’t something Orko had been aware of. He wondered why Kundan was telling him this. Then it struck him.
‘So the plane exploded at a height where there’s no oxygen?’
‘Well…there is oxygen, right up to sixty thousand feet, and this plane was at thirty thousand or thereabouts. But there certainly isn’t enough oxygen up there for a human being to survive,’ said Kundan. ‘Besides, the cold would have killed them in seconds. Up there, it’s colder than it is in Antarctica, and these folks would have been in their shirtsleeves, in the warm cabin of the jumbo.’
The physics was now clear, but the psychology was still a mystery.
‘Were there any politicians on board? Someone the bombers were angry with?’ Orko asked.
It was at this point that Nandan emerged from the kitchen, with two cups of tea. ‘Stop hounding Kundan like that,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go and finish your homework?’
Usually Orko just left the room when asked to, but this was different. He was having an important discussion, about something that was so confounding that he couldn’t have imagined it, had it not actually happened. Besides, Nandan knew that Orko always finished his homework in the afternoon, with his aunt. Nandan had never been summoned to his school, and he had never been sent notes of complaint by Orko’s teachers. So the dismissal seemed patently unjust.
‘I have done my homework. You know that I have,’ Orko said, standing his ground, hoping his father would back off, just until he could have a few more questions answered. His ears felt like someone had taken a hot iron to them. He stood still, on the verge of hyperventilation, his nostrils flaring with each exhalation.
There followed a staring match that Orko lost. He might not have, if Kundan hadn’t been watching the standoff, smoking his third cigarette of the evening, its tip glowing as he squinted at Orko through the smoke. Vanquished, Orko retreated to his room. He shut the door behind him and threw himself on his bed. He buried his face in his pillow as he began to shake violently. Then the tears came.
He wouldn’t have been as angry as he was if his father’s behaviour hadn’t been so out of character. Nandan seldom talked down to Orko, and he never dismissed Orko’s questions as impertinent. When it came to the Kanishka, though, he had been devilishly evasive. What was more, he didn’t seem to be suitably shocked about it. When Orko asked him why someone would deliberately blow up an aeroplane, he told Orko the story of the Golden Temple in the state of Punjab, and about Mrs Indira Gandhi, their late prime minister, who sent her troops into the holy sanctum. He followed it up with a rant about the evils of organised religion. At the end of it, Orko’s question still remained unanswered: what did the people on board the aeroplane have to do with all of that?
Over the next few days, a devastating idea took shape in Orko’s mind. It crept in surreptitiously, perhaps in a dream. His father knew who had blown up the Boeing, and he had known all along when they were going to do it. That was why he wasn’t surprised when it happened. Seemingly unrelated facts began to come together, like the pieces of a puzzle, and suddenly everything made sense. His father had been in Japan recently, where a bag had exploded at Tokyo’s Narita airport, killing two airport employees. He had a close friend in Ludhiana, and that, Orko knew, was in Punjab. A quick look at the atlas told Orko that it wasn’t very far from Amritsar, where the Golden Temple was located. He wondered if Kundan was in on it too. Like his father, Kundan had tried to put off talking about the Kanishka, with that show of lighting his cigarette, hoping, perhaps, that Nandan would rescue him before things got out of hand.
Orko couldn’t bring himself to talk to anyone about his horrible secret, and because it was always on his mind he stopped talking to his friends at school; he spoke to his teachers only when there was no way around it. At home, he remained silent unless spoken to. Every night he tossed and turned, shuffling through the horrifying sequence of events, until he fell into a dreamless sleep. This went on for close to a month, and by the end of it he could take no more. He decided that he had to talk to someone about it all, if only to have them tell him that he was crazy.
It was a Monday. Orko remembers this because they had class tests on Mondays, and on that particular Monday Orko had been unable to answer a single question. Afterwards, when his aunt met him at the bus stop, he didn’t meet her gaze, because he was afraid that he might begin to cry.
At lunch, he sat at Amiya’s side, faint with anxiety, unable to eat a single morsel. He had to talk to someone, and the only person he could trust was his grandfather.
‘Dadu,’ he began, just as Amiya was settling in for his nap. ‘What would you do if someone you knew did something terrible?’
‘How terrible?’ Amiya asked.
‘Really bad. Something that killed hundreds of people,’ Orko said. His fists were clenched, and he felt the tips of his fingers pulse in time with the frantic beating in his breast.
‘Do you know someone like that? Someone bragging that it was he who blew up that plane, perhaps?’ Amiya asked, the slightest hint of a smile twinkling at the corners of his eyes.
Orko’s first instinct was to bolt. He hadn’t thought Amiya would decipher his foggy allusion so easily. It was almost as if he had read Orko’s mind. He fought the urge to run away, and collected his thoughts as best he could.
‘Well, he didn’t blow it up,’ he said. ‘He was here when it happened…but I think he knows who did.’
Amiya ruffled Orko’s hair and took his hand. For a while, they said nothing.
‘Who are we talking about here?’
Orko couldn’t answer the question without giving it all away. He wasn’t sure if Amiya had guessed that it was his father. For the first time he began to have doubts, and he had half a mind to tell his grandfather that he had been speaking hypothetically.
‘He won’t talk about it,’ he blurted out, unable to contain himself. ‘He won’t let me talk to anyone else. He says it was all right for the bombers to do what they did – that they had their reasons.’
‘So you’re only guessing,’ Amiya said after a moment’s pause.
Orko was indignant. ‘Of course I’m not guessing. I know.’
He couldn’t bring himself to say any more. He had struggled to fall asleep the night before, a hapless spectator as his mind shuffled through the possible consequences of divulging his terrible secret. The scenario that seemed the most likely involved the police hauling his father off to prison, with Orko placed in his aunt’s care, learning his tables and practising cursive writing all day, every day, until he was old enough to get a job.
Amiya put his arm around Orko’s shoulders. ‘Your father forgets that you’re a child,’ he said under his breath. ‘You should talk to him,’ he continued. ‘You must demand answers. Refuse to go away until you have them. You mustn’t jump to conclusions.’
‘I did ask him,’ said Orko. ‘He won’t talk about it.’
Then he thought of something that he was sure would get his grandfather’s attention.
‘He says there are no gods. There’s no one pulling on strings to control our lives, and there’s no one to punish us in an afterlife. He says it’s all superstition, invented by the ancients to explain the sun, the moon, the stars, rain and thunder. Now that we know what causes all of that, we don’t need gods anymore.’
It all came out in a breathless jumble, and when he finished, Amiya appeared to consider his statement carefully. ‘What does all of this have to do with the aeroplane?’ he asked.
>
Orko struggled to join the dots. ‘Well…I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you everything. You decide.’
‘There are three sides to every story,’ Amiya said. Orko couldn’t be sure if he was speaking to himself, like he often did. ‘Sometimes, when we’re angry, we tend to close the windows of our minds. We only see our side of the story, and we jump to conclusions that couldn’t be further from the truth.’
‘Three sides?’
‘Well…let’s take your story of this aeroplane, for instance. You are a young boy. This is possibly the most horrific thing you’ve ever known to happen – am I right?’
Orko nodded.
‘You’ve been thinking about it all the time…wondering why someone would send all those innocent people to their deaths…what could possibly make them so angry. You probably even have nightmares…’
‘Yes,’ Orko said. ‘I often dream that I’m in the plane, and then it explodes, and then I’m drowning…’
‘Why do you think that your father had something to do with it?’ Amiya’s tone was gentle.
‘He said that Mrs Gandhi sent the army into the Golden Temple, and then two of her bodyguards shot her. Then, because the bodyguards were Sikh, people burned down the houses of Sikhs who had nothing to do with the killing, and the government did nothing to stop them.’ Even as Orko reeled off all of this, he struggled to make the connection with the Kanishka. ‘And then he said that religion is the root of all evil, and that idols, temples, mosques and churches are playthings for adults…’ He was growing even more muddled as he tried to piece everything together. Then he remembered the clincher: ‘He has a friend in Ludhiana, and he was in Japan just before that other bag blew up at the airport.’
‘Well,’ said Amiya, ‘these are things that happen to be true, and they do seem to fit in nicely with your side of the story.’ From his manner, Orko could sense that his grandfather was not persuaded by his argument. ‘There’s another side of the story – the only one that’s indisputably true,’ Amiya said. ‘Someone placed a bomb in the aeroplane – we may never know why. The bomb exploded, killing everyone on board. The death of so many people was not an Act of God, and it was not carried out by demons from the underworld. It was another human like you and me, who decided to end the lives of all those poor people.’
Fern Road Page 4
