by Amitav Ghosh
I felt my hand being squeezed and looked down to see Cinta smiling up at me. ‘What did I tell you, Dino? Sandro di Vigonovo is a good man, a man of honour, a true Venetian. I am sure it was he who ordered the rescue.’
Beside us Rafi and Piya were spinning around and around, in an embrace, with tears of relief running down their faces. Then Piya broke away and flung her arms around me. ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, planting a kiss on my cheek. ‘Tipu’s safe at last!’
* * *
By the time the cutters reached the Blue Boat darkness had fallen so the evacuation was carried out under the glare of bright spotlights. When the refugees had all been moved, demolition experts climbed into the little blue fishing vessel. A little later a series of small explosions went off and the Blue Boat began to capsize, very slowly. On the decks of the cutters, the refugees lined up to watch their vessel go down; many of them raised their hands to wave it goodbye.
Then Gisa’s voice echoed across the Lucania’s deck: ‘Venite! Venite qui! Come, come, the admiral’s addressing a press conference. Come and watch.’
Rushing to the stern-side screen, we saw a sombre-looking man in uniform facing a roomful of journalists. A chyron was unspooling across the bottom of the screen, translating what was being said.
‘Admiral, did you order the rescue of the migrants on your own authority?’
‘Yes I did,’ said Admiral Vigonovo. ‘The responsibility is mine alone.’
An uproar broke out. A couple of minutes passed before the next question could be asked.
‘But Admiral, you were under direct orders to prevent these refugees from landing in Italy, or even from boarding an Italian vessel. Are you not aware that you have acted in contravention of your orders?’
‘I do not accept that I have contravened my orders.’
‘But you are aware surely that the Minister’s orders were to prevent the refugees from setting foot in Italy, at all costs?’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said the admiral, ‘but I would like to set the record straight. What the Minister has said, in public, was that only in the event of a miracle would these refugees be allowed into Italy.’
There was a pause.
‘And I believe that what we witnessed today was indeed a miracle.’
In the hubbub that followed I heard Piya’s voice whispering in my right ear: ‘He’s wrong you know – there’s a scientific explanation for everything that happened there. It was just a series of migratory patterns intersecting in an unusual way.’
‘Even the bioluminescence?’
‘Sure. That kind of bioluminescence is caused by dinoflagellates, and some species of dynos are known to migrate.’
‘Have you heard of anything like this happening before?’
‘No,’ whispered Piya. ‘But animal migrations are being hugely impacted by climate change so nothing is surprising now. I’m sure we’ll see more of these intersecting events in the future.’
‘But don’t you think it’s strange, Piya, all of this happening at the same moment?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Piya, shaking her head. ‘I really don’t know. All I can say is that I’m grateful that it happened the way it did.’
* * *
I noticed now that Palash had also come to sit beside me, on my left, and that he was weeping silently into his hands.
‘Ki hoyechhe Palash?’ I said. ‘What’s the matter, why are you crying?’
‘It is a miracolo,’ came the answer. ‘It is! Everything we had hoped for is coming true. There is an awakening happening around the world – this could be the moment when everything changes…’
In the meantime, a journalist was shouting on the screen. ‘The Minister has just released a statement saying that you’ve broken the law, Admiral, and you will be brought to justice. What do you have to say to that?’
‘I have nothing to fear from the law,’ said the admiral, standing ramrod straight. ‘I have acted in accordance with the law of the sea, the law of humanity and the law of God. If I am tried, those are the laws that I will answer to.’
Now all order broke down and the journalists began to hurl questions at random.
‘Admiral, what gives you the right to prioritize your religious beliefs over your orders…?’
‘Admiral, is it true that in your stateroom there hangs an icon of the Black Madonna of La Salute…?’
* * *
These last words made me think of Cinta. Looking around me now I saw that she wasn’t with us and it struck me that a couple of hours had passed since I had last seen her.
Stepping away from the stern I took a turn around the Lucania’s deck and was unable to find any sign of Cinta. A twinge of unease went through me and I hurried to her cabin. There was no answer when I knocked so I tried the handle and to my surprise the door swung open. The cabin was dark but there was a nightlight glowing in one corner. I saw that Cinta was lying on her bunk, with her eyes closed, her head encircled by a halo of white hair.
I thought she was asleep and was about to step out when she opened her eyes and smiled. ‘Come here, Dino.’
I went up to her and she reached for my hand. ‘How are you, caro?’
‘I’m fine, Cinta,’ I said. ‘But what about you? Why are you here, all by yourself? Why aren’t you celebrating with us?’
‘But I am celebrating,’ she said, smiling peacefully. ‘I am celebrating with Lucia, my daughter. She is here with me.’
‘What…?’
She gave my hand a gentle squeeze. ‘Don’t try to look for her, Dino – you will not see her. But she is here, believe me.’
‘That’s crazy, Cinta. Why should she be here?’
‘She has come to take me away. It is time at last.’
‘What the hell do you mean, Cinta?’ I could hear my voice rising to a wail. ‘You’re not going anywhere, Cinta. You need a doctor, that’s all! You’re not well.’
‘No, Dino,’ she said calmly. ‘You are wrong. I am very well. In fact I have never been better. And for that I want to thank you. You have given me a great gift – as I always knew you would.’
‘What gift? What are you talking about?’
‘Well, Dino – as you know, I sometimes have these … intuitions. And I had one the very first time we talked, outside that library, in the midst of that Midwestern snow. I knew that one day you would give me a great gift, a boon … and I just wanted to thank you.’
I had become quite frantic now and could not bear to listen to her. ‘Cinta, you need a doctor. I have to go find one.’
I stumbled out of the cabin and rushed around the deck, calling for a doctor. But with everything that was going on, people were so distracted that it took a good fifteen minutes before I found one, and then too it was only with Gisa’s help.
When we reached the cabin a sense of dread seized me and I hung back when the doctor and Gisa went in. I could not bring myself to follow them so I closed the door and stood by it, waiting, with my eyes shut, and suddenly memories, from all the years that I had spent in Cinta’s orbit, began to flash through my mind, starting with that bitterly cold Midwestern day when we had talked in the faux grotto outside the library, and ending with the words she had said to me in the cabin, a few minutes before: ‘I knew that one day you would give me a great gift’.
Now at last I had an inkling of why she had chosen to bestow her friendship on me: it was as if she had had an intuition that someday we would bring each other here, to this juncture in time and space – and that not till then would she find release from the grief of her separation from her daughter. In that instant of clarity I heard again that familiar voice in my ear, repeating those words from La Salute – Unde Origo Inde Salus – ‘From the beginning salvation comes’, and I understood what she had been trying to tell me that day: that the possibility of our deliverance lies not in the future but in the past, in a mystery beyond memory.
Then I felt something like the touch of a hand, brushing gently against my cheek. M
y eyes flew open and I began to say – ‘Cinta?’ – when I realised that it was just a draught, created by the opening of the cabin door.
It was Gisa who had opened the door and she was standing in front of me now, wiping her eyes.
‘We came too late,’ she said. ‘Cinta’s gone.’
Acknowledgements
With many thanks to Shaul Bassi, Haznahena Dalia, Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan, Roberto Beneduce, Shail Jha, Aaron Lobo, Kanishk Tharoor, Antonio Fraschilla, Sara Scarafia, Norman Gobetti and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
ALSO BY AMITAV GHOSH
The Circle of Reason
The Shadow Lines
In an Antique Land
The Calcutta Chromosome
The Glass Palace
The Hungry Tide
Incendiary Circumstances
Sea of Poppies
River of Smoke
Flood of Fire
The Great Derangement
A Note About the Author
Amitav Ghosh is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Ibis trilogy, which includes Sea of Poppies (short-listed for the 2008 Man Booker Prize), River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire, all published by FSG. His other novels include The Circle of Reason, which won the Prix Médicis étranger, and The Glass Palace. He was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government in 2007 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2009. He divides his time between Goa, India, and Brooklyn, New York. You can sign up for email updates here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Part I: The Gun Merchant
Calcutta
Cinta
Tipu
The Shrine
Visions
Rani
Brooklyn
Wildfires
Los Angeles
Gun Island
Part II: Venice
The Ghetto
Rafi
Strandings
Friends
Dreams
Warnings
High Water
Crossings
Winds
The Lucania
Sightings
The Storm
Acknowledgements
Also by Amitav Ghosh
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2019 by Amitav Ghosh
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2019 by John Murray (Publishers), Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2019
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71941-8
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.