Daughter of Bad Times

by Rohan Wilson

  Every day, I went to the registration point to check the names of the dead. I would reach the end of a list pinned to the wall, maybe five thousand people, those bodies they’d lately identified from DNA or facial scans. Then I’d go back and read it again. My finger followed the list down the page. Faiza, Ibrahim, Ismail, Jaleel, Jihad, Latheef. Arriving at U, my finger would slow and my heart would quicken. I would read every name with care, looking for misspellings, Umare or Youmair or some variation, some combination I did not expect. My bappa. My mamma. Uncle. Aunt. My cousin Shadi. I had to find them. I spoke to officials from the army. I walked among the arrivals at the gates, looking into each face that passed. Empty-eyed men and women. A camp full of stunned, silent, empty people.

  They gave out disposable screens. A gift from the Chinese government. I took one, opened the packaging and powered it on.

  I sat staring at the screen for a long time. When I opened Bappa’s profile and saw that nothing had changed, I felt a sinking sort of dullness. You see, I’d had this fantasy that he was somewhere else, maybe another camp, and he’d be updating. Maybe leaving messages for me. Profile after profile, it was the same. Mamma. Uncle. Aunt. Cousin. They were fossils frozen in stone, each with a final post on 18 August 2073. I powered off the screen and lay on the floor of my tent like a dead man.

  There remained just one person I could contact. Rin Braden.

  She would come. I had not the smallest doubt. She would come and she would get me out. While for me borders were rigid walls, for her they seemed to mean nothing—she would cross them and she would come. Here I arrived at the edge of my thoughts. You see, I’d sunk a long way in the muddy Sri Lankan heat, but I’d not yet sunk far enough to forget the humiliation of my final day in the Braden house. Even the memory of it made my insides clench up. Menik Farm might have been a dusty rag of a place, it might have been profuse with flies and mosquitoes, it might have driven some to despairing deaths, but at least in Menik Farm I was a man in charge of his own fate, not a plaything for a spoilt child.

  Still, the heat and the flies and boredom slowly eroded me until, like many others, I started to despair.

  One afternoon, during the worst of it, I went to the water point to wash from my bowl and clean my hands and face. Cleaning often made me feel better. There were others gathered here, eating rice from bowls with their fingers. I poured water on my head and looked around. A man was sitting in the shade of a pile of grain sacks with a towel around his neck, staring at the red mud around with his mouth slack. He looked a little like my cousin Shadi so I filled my wash bowl and sat beside him. At some point I began to watch him, wondering how Shadi had died. Drowned, I supposed. But the longer I studied this man the more certain I became.

  His appearance had changed. He’d grown thin like someone who in the month of fasting, consumed by prayer and reading, forgets the sunset meal. Still, it was certainly my cousin. We locked eyes and it was some moments before he recognised me too, as I had also changed, and he reached out and embraced me there on the mud of Sri Lanka. He’d survived because, by the will of God, he’d been calling the adhan from the minaret of his mosque in Hulhumalé when the water spilled over the sea walls. Dr Nazeem had requested Shadi to call the adhan that day. Normally, the duty was taken by another man. Nazeem, my cousin was now convinced, had chosen him and saved his life for a purpose. He said this with such solemnity that I dared not point out how the fishermen who yanked him from the ruins had been the ones to save him.

  The following day at the boards, I was moving my finger along the lists of the dead while a woman doing the same beside me wept and dabbed her eyes with the corner of her hijab. I had renewed hope after finding Shadi alive that perhaps my parents had made it. Looking at this woman filled me with an anger or annoyance. Her crying sawed across my nerves. Hope was a fragile thing, and I did my best to preserve it. When I looked back at the board my finger was resting on the name Umair, Moosa. I read the name several times. Umair, Moosa. The number beside the name was ES-538-K. I made my way to the queue for the photo screens and stood swaying and dizzy. ES-538-K, I said to myself. ES-538-K.

  After a while I made it to the front of the queue. I sat at the table. The screen showed a warning in English and Dhivehi. Caution. These images may upset or shock. I typed ES-538-K into the touchpad and identified myself with a face scan. A photo of a naked middle-aged man appeared. The man had black hair greying at the temples like my father and a full moustache like my father. It might have been my father but it was hard to tell. The lividity and bloating had changed the shape of the face. I studied it a long time. I could not reconcile the two images. My father, the peppy, gregarious man, and the swollen, grey thing in the photo. In the end I ticked the box that said ‘Unsure’.

  In the long, useless days that followed, I lay in my tent in a delirium of grief. Mid-afternoon I’d crawl outside and urinate in the dust and then crawl back into the tent. You can imagine the kinds of thoughts in my head. The kinds of question you ask when, by some aberration, all that you hold dear is drowned in the sea. Lying there in the Sri Lankan dust with the horrid smell of my own armpits, I learned something about the universe. It was not a universe I found particularly beautiful or purposeful any longer. It was a cell and I was shut inside it.

  Shadi and I spent most of our time at the separate men’s area of the camp among the despairing mass of survivors. We had no prayer mats. No Qurans. We made use of a yard covered with blue tarpaulins to keep us clean. We all gathered. We all washed. We all knelt and put our foreheads to the ground. At these congregations, Dr Nazeem would often speak. I’d heard his name before, but it wasn’t until one Friday afternoon in Menik Farm that I met him for the first time. He cultivated a traditional appearance, wearing a taqiyah of white lace and long robes. As a veneer, I found it unconvincing. On that Friday afternoon he stood atop a crate of bottled water and spoke to us about the parable in al-Hadid.

  This parable, if you’re unaware, talks about an underlying conviction of Dr Nazeem’s style of Islam—that is, the present world is merely to be suffered through. Yes, and if you believe life is the stage preceding something greater, you likely give little thought to the here and now. The paradise to come, the Jannah, is what concerns you. The rest was pointless suffering. In fact, I couldn’t shake the feeling, having lived through the tsunami, that suffering was the entire point. This day, he used the parable to sermonise about the August disaster. In a tenuous connection, he insisted that we called the wave down upon ourselves through a lack of piety. He always smiled when delivering the worst pronouncements, as if he took pleasure in the hardness of his truths. Not that I could see any truth in what he said.

  ‘My back is killing me.’

  I looked around at Shadi. He was pressing his hands into his kidneys and twisting.

  ‘You can’t sleep on the ground?’ I said. It was a joke between us. Beasts and peasants sleep on the ground, we would joke.

  ‘It suits Sri Lankans. It doesn’t suit me.’

  ‘Our sin is this,’ Dr Nazeem called. ‘For too long, we stood idle as secularism poisoned our country. We stood idle as they abolished the moral differences between men and women and tried to make us equal. We stayed silent while they imposed democracy and destroyed our strength and our leadership. We did nothing when our country became overrun with Americans and Jews and homosexuals and non-Muslims. Abomination and shamelessness took place on our beaches. Women disgraced themselves by abandoning their family duties to work in resorts. Jewish tourists walked our streets looking for children to feed on.’

  I found these views quite tedious. Dr Nazeem was like a fast-food franchise. He sold a brand of Salafi hyper-religiosity exported by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. His religious school had used textbooks printed and paid for by the Saudis. His doctorate, which he’d claimed to have earned from al-Azhar university, was bestowed as a gift from the Ministry of Education in Qatar without any scholarly effort by Nazeem at all. Like fast food, too much
of Dr Nazeem could make you ill.

  As we took the zuhr prayer that afternoon, I found myself deep in thought. I could smell the plastic tarpaulin as I pressed my face to it. Plastic gone soft in the sun. I lay in prostration thinking upon the meaning of God. The Creator. The Subduer. The Controller. I rose and crossed my arms and called to heaven and when the time came to kneel again into prostration I found myself at a loss. My mind was empty. There was only the heat on my neck and the weight in my chest. I sat up. The sun still shone and the muezzin called and around me the prayers continued. I stood up. I felt hot. Without finishing and without knowing why, I simply walked away.

  Looking back, I understand my behaviour. It had no name at that time, no shape. It was an absence of the proper feelings. Now, though, I can give it a name—but to speak the name terrifies me. What I will say is this: God didn’t destroy our country. He drifts in his distant ether like a morphine addict, blissfully unaware of how we suffer. We’re nothing to him.

  This, I hold in my heart as a sacred truth.

  ‘We all miss someone,’ Shadi said to me later, when I tried to justify my absence from daily prayers as a stage of grief. ‘Every man here lost a family member. We mourn. We mourn for our home. You’re not the only one who grieves.’

  ‘Did they ever find Ismail?’ I said. ‘What became of Ismail?’

  ‘Who knows. Floating in the sea somewhere or eaten by crabs.’

  ‘We have to remember them.’

  ‘Mariyam,’ he said, naming his mother.

  ‘Laila and Ahmed,’ I said, naming his aunt and grandfather.

  ‘Nishan. Hussain. Ismail.’ He named his school friends.

  ‘And Raani,’ I said, naming my mother.

  ‘And Moosa,’ he said, naming my father.

  Shadi sat cross-legged like a yogi on the blankets in my tent. He’s thin, but like a palm tree, he bends with any storm.

  ‘I can’t bury my grandfather,’ he said. ‘My grandfather … who knows where he is? But I buried my mother in Sri Lanka. Praise be for that.’

  It’s true, he did bury his mother. The recovery management organisation found Mariyam in the wreckage of what had been the fish market. It was a grievous moment for Shadi, who still sheltered hope that his mother had made it. You’d think it might be a relief to find her, having waited three months without any word—it was not a relief. Shadi fainted when he was told. We had to carry him to a chair. When finally they cleared her body to be released for burial in the hasty graveyard set aside at Menik Farm, the plywood coffin was horribly light. We didn’t say a word. We carried Mariyam to the graveyard but it wasn’t really Mariyam at all. A single leg—that’s what we buried. It was the only part of her ever recovered.

  ‘Sobe,’ he says, ‘when I think about my mother, I try to imagine how I can dignify her memory. Would she approve of this thought? Am I shaming her with this action? It gives a shape to my life here in this shapeless, lifeless place. I act well to bring honour to the life she gave me.’

  ‘You do. She would be proud.’

  ‘But yet you disgrace your parents with your thoughts and actions.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘You’re losing your salat,’ he says. ‘I’ve noticed. Everyone’s noticed.’

  ‘It’s the heat,’ I say. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘By honouring God, you also honour your parents. Do you realise that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Then pray with us.’

  In our third month at Menik Farm, a pair of black Mercedes SUVs rolled into the staging area and circled and stopped. They had monstrous tyres knobbled like the hide of a crocodile. From out of these vehicles stepped a handful of men and women in suits. Bland, white, business people—the rulers of the world. A crowd gathered to watch the whites walk awkwardly through mud in thousand-dollar shoes. They were followed by hordes of children asking after food. Meanwhile, my attention was directed at the vehicles. On the side of the SUVs was a logo. Three white letters, CYC, set against a sloping dark rectangle. I’d seen that logo embossed on a coffee mug in the Braden house. The logo for Cabey-Yasuda Corrections. I thought of Rin Braden and her cherry-coloured lips and I suddenly felt more alive than I had done in months.

  Late in the afternoon, when the heat had waned, the whites called a meeting in the prayer area. They dragged a board from the registration tent, on which they’d written ‘Find A New Life!’ in heavy letters. The first to speak was a manicured, young-looking blond man. He’d rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow and unfastened his top button to create an image of getting-things-done and being-here-to-help. He strode up and down holding a bullhorn. It crackled and rang. He introduced himself as Tyler Christie.

  ‘We were disturbed,’ he said. ‘Everyone in Australia. Very disturbed to hear about the appalling tragedy that happened in August. You have our deepest sympathies for the loss of life and property. It was tragic and senseless. There are no words to convey our shock at what happened.’

  We English-speakers translated as he spoke and it spread among us as a sort of informal chatter. Tyler Christie of CYC seemed to think this an affront.

  ‘If I could have some quiet please,’ he said over the bullhorn.

  The crowd chattered.

  ‘Quiet. Quiet down.’

  Soon, we fell silent.

  ‘We’re appalled by your loss. It was cruel and shocking. And we in Australia want to help. We want to help rebuild your lives. Rebuild your homes. Help you generate an income.’

  As I translated this to the people around me, it caused excitement. They thought the Australians wanted to help rebuild Malé, Hulhumalé, and Addu City. The Dutch had always lived like that—below sea level. Many cities in America too, these days. New York. Miami. Push the sea back and the building could start.

  ‘That’s not what he means,’ I said to them. ‘No one would spend that kind of money on us. You’d better open your ears.’

  Tyler Christie cocked one hand before his eyes to shade them. ‘At Cabey-Yasuda Corrections, we believe in giving people the tools to stand on their own two feet. We want to teach you how to be independent. We want to teach you work habits that last a lifetime. We want to give you a sense of discipline, a sense of community, and a sense of productivity.’

  I could see many in the crowd nodding, many holding their loved ones. My mind, though, was filling with questions.

  ‘We only ask for one year of your lives,’ he said, his voice made huge through the bullhorn.

  There was an electric tension in the air. We all watched him wave his hand in a muscular Australian manner as he detailed how bureaucratic shepherds in the Migrating with Dignity program would lead us to the chance at an Australian visa after only a year of service at a migrant training facility.

  ‘Eight thousand of you will be given this chance,’ Tyler Christie said. ‘Eight thousand men and women who fit our selection criteria. You’ll need to be registered as a refugee with UNHCR. We can only take the registered.’

  A lot of people had started pushing towards the exit.

  ‘Work a year, you’re in the clear,’ he said.

  I was jostled by the crowd.

  ‘Work a year, you’re in the clear.’

  I looked out over the heads of everyone and beyond them to the tents, the teams of children half naked. Dust blowing over in a squall. My self-pity was a mire in which I might have sunk. I knew what Cabey-Yasuda was, where it made its profit. Rin had explained it to me. I also understood I had to save myself. I had to save myself because saving myself was the only way back to being an upright and full-hearted man. My education in Menik Farm had taught me that when you lose everything, as we had done, you also lose meaningful choices. What choice did I have? Menik Farm was a red hell and I would not stay there.

  So I walked forward to join the queue at the exit.

  A dream of flies, the dark, fat flies massing on my tent in Sri Lanka, startles me awake. This is the dormitory, this is Delta compound, this is
Eaglehawk MTC. I breathe out and relax. Five sets of bunks line each wall and every man save me is asleep. The buzzing remains and it takes me a second to realise it’s not flies but something inside my mattress. It’s coming from beneath my neck. There’s a series of wounds in my ribs that are patched with bioprinted skin; a pulmonary contusion, some muscle damage. The doctor they brought from Hobart spent about ten minutes layering in skin cells from a handheld printer and that was it. Back to work. So now when I pretend to roll over to baffle the cameras, it hurts enough to make me hold my breath and wince. I lie still for a time. Then, with blankets over my head, I slide the glasses from the hole in the mattress and put them on.

  A message from Rin.

  The first thing I notice is how sad she appears to be. Her eyes are smeared with makeup and her hair is spiky. She’s wearing a black t-shirt. She doesn’t look into the camera, but keeps her gaze low.

  ‘I’ve done something stupid,’ she says.

  Her face shifts through a series of modulations, despair, then bitterness, the outward expression of some inner turmoil. It settles on a grey blankness that fills me with pity.

  ‘Listen,’ she says. ‘I don’t know if it’s going to work but I had to try.’

  She stops to wipe her nose.

  ‘There’s a problem. The Australians have suspended MWD.’

  I pause the message. It’s 6.01 a.m. and the morning bell hasn’t yet sounded. Hassan is stirring in the bunk below. Others are stirring too. It won’t be long until they start to wake.

  I scroll the message back and replay it.