Empire of Mud

by James Suriano

  Each rung I descended filled my mouth and nose with heavier and more stagnant wet air. My foot splashed into a puddle, and I followed the dimly lit path.

  A man shouted behind me; it sounded like the driver, but he spoke Mohamed’s language. And then a grab to my arm, pulling me deeper into the ship’s belly. There were at least a hundred bodies tucked away in the sagging wooden shelves. When we were at a porthole that was open, letting some of the warm air come into the space, the man pointed to an empty shelf next to it and pushed me gently toward it. It was clearly the choice seat here, and he hung around for a few seconds. They thought I had many things to give; I would have to manage those expectations. There were only two eggs left. The ship moved, and I heard groaning among the passengers. I stared out the porthole and focused on the water, letting my mind wander.

  I stood at the edge of the water in Arugam; my parents had brought my brother, Sahan, and me here for a few weeks. The wind currents picked up sand and swirled it into dunes against the hills. Dwehlli, the Buddhist nun, came with us to visit the local temple. My father encouraged our religious education, along with new experiences. Dwehlli walked beside me as I took in the unusual blue against the rolling wall of sand beside us.

  “Shula,” she said, “while Sahan is running up and down the dunes, do you think we should talk seriously?”

  Dwehlli was no taller than me, even though I had just entered my teenage years and she was an adult. She had a squinty, freckled face with a brash glow and wore the same light-orange robes every day. She said her shaved head once had bushels of golden hair piled on top of it, and she liked fashion very much but had given it up to become a nun. I envied her simplicity.

  “About what?”

  “The elements of desire.”

  Was she bringing up sex? I already knew about this. I’d seen the neighbors once and mother had explained it to me.

  “I know about sex, Dwehlli.” I was proud to say this to her, a one-up of an all-powerful Buddhist nun.

  She put her hand on her stomach and laughed. “That isn’t desire. That’s reproduction. A mechanical process you should rightly learn about from your parents. Desire is what is sprinkled down on you like a misty cloud moving through. It leaves you with a longing for all you can’t have at the moment.”

  We were moving on the boat now and the spray came through the window.

  “I know you wish for a boyfriend.”

  That wasn’t what I was interested in. I wondered if she said that to all the girls she was supposed to be schooling.

  “What you must do is restrain yourself from boys in their presence, and then the desire will grow not only in you but in them as well.”

  I shrugged. “I actually want to fish.”

  She looked at me dumbstruck. “A girl?”

  “Boys are as interesting as snails crawling. I want to learn to fish. Can you help me with that?”

  “What does a teenage girl want with fishing? You’ll forever be single.”

  This round it was my turn to laugh, and I did. “I might be single, but I won’t be hungry.”

  A splash of water brought me out of my trance.

  The fetid smell of fear and human waste threaded into the moisture of the air. I looked around. I was unassumingly clutching my bag, and there were two women at least ten years older than me sitting on my bunk.

  “Move.” I shouldn’t have been so grumpy. They could force me to the interior, and then I’d be sick for sure. The women scooted. They were working on weaving a sari.

  “You see?” one of them said. “You can do this for your daughter too. Make a sari, and then you can give it to her when you return home. It will pass the time of the journey.” She pushed the seam she was working on toward me. Her hands were swollen with arthritis, her nails broken by work. She was kind and, admittedly, the prospect of having a gift to bring home would prove to my daughter I wasn’t a total failure. To think I might bring something home for Ruka was nothing but pure desire.

  “Do you have extra fabric?” I asked.

  She lifted up her skirt. Various-colored fabric was wrapped around her waist in bands. She unwrapped a piece and gave it to me. Then she pulled two needles from her hair and handed them to me as well.

  “Follow me.” She worked the fabric in front of her slowly until the thread became something more.

  “Are you going to Kumzar too?” I asked.

  “Ha. No one is going to Kumzar. You will see.”

  I went cold at the thought I might have been duped. “But this is what I paid for.”

  The woman shrugged. It wasn’t her problem.

  The day passed. My fingers were poked full of holes, and I had little to show for my pain.

  “Keep going,” the woman closest to me urged.

  Calls from the men of the ship herded us to the top deck. A spotlight on the beach appeared to be the only industrial light in the town. The beach was rocky, and the light bounced over the water until it met us. There was a great blackness on the other side of ship from where we had we come.

  Clustered locals on small fishing boats met us. A ladder was extended into the water. They took turns rowing to the ladder, then collecting three of us at a time. One of the woman fell into the water; there was frantic splashing and scrambling, but I never saw her reemerge. I detested witnessing death. But here was a poor person, losing her life, and the first uninvited thought that entered my mind was the opportunity created by having one less person to compete with. Dwehlli would have called these unhelpful thoughts.

  The two women I’d been with during the voyage stood next to me.

  “Whatever you do,” one of them said, “don’t fall in. They only care about you if they can see you.”

  “How do you know anything about these people?” I asked.

  “This is my third try. Last time, I was swimming to the Pakistani shore, and there was a border guard. He pointed a gun at me and told me to go back. I had to hang on to a rope on the side of the boat until they stopped at their next port and I was allowed to climb back in. I was sure I would be shark food.”

  The image was ghastly, and then the man standing at the ladder pointed to me and hurried me toward him. I held the ladder like I did when I first held Ruka. Shaky, too firm, and full of anticipation. I wouldn’t drop Ruka then, and I wouldn’t fall now.

  Count, I told myself. There couldn’t have been more than twenty rungs. My foot felt around for the next one; they were thin and slippery from the seawater. I held so tightly that the chips of painted metal dug into my palms. The woman above me came down fast and stepped on my hands.

  “Move,” she bellowed.

  I scowled up at her. Not seeing me, she stepped on my fingers again. I was only a few rungs down; she was going to make me fall. The large boat was turning, and the smaller boats waiting for us were having trouble staying aligned with the ladder.

  I looked down at the man in the boat. He was young, with a bushy black hair and an unruly beard. He was dressed in a plain robe, smoking, only looking occasionally to make sure he was somewhere near the ladder.

  No one cared in this moment. I guess they didn’t care in any moment, but right now I was fighting with all my strength to make it to the next milestone. I was above the boat now, my left foot hovering in the air, toes stretching to feel the wooden edge. Contact. I kept connected to the ladder until my foot was firmly against a seat. When both feet were in, I crouched so my weight would carry me to safety. There were two other women in the boat, our fill, and our local began to row for the beach. A hand from the water appeared next to me and yanked on the boat, tilting us and letting a piece of the sea spill over the edge.

  The Ways of Kumzar

  Our local took a stick from under his knees and whacked the woman’s fingers, but they held and pulled harder. The man was yelling and pointing us to the opposite side of the boat; the two other women fearfully let out screechy moans. I reached for the hand; I was sure we could bring her on board. She had to be the w
oman I’d seen go under the water. The man swung the stick, and it connected with my shoulder.

  “No, no, no, no!” he yelled at me, shaking his finger, and then he made a motion: his flat hand flipping over.

  I stopped moving. He turned away, satisfied he had made his point. I slunk my hand over the side of the boat and fluttered my hand in case the woman might see it. I felt a brush of fingers, and then the stick hit my arm and pain shot through my entire left side. This time, when I looked at him, he snarled. I sank into myself; I couldn’t believe that I was going to let this go, that I would sacrifice helping the woman for my own well-being. I imagined my bad karma stacking up like poppadoms next to a baker.

  When we reached the shore, I couldn’t get away from the boat quickly enough. Our local pulled it in until he perched it between a set of rocks where it fit comfortably and wouldn’t wash out to sea. There were flickering lights in each of the buildings, which sat in a ramshackle fashion on the beach. The flames cast dim glows out of the gaps in the walls and doors. The buildings were low slung and created a border on the beach. We stepped into one of them, following the man’s lead. One of the women from my boat went before me. Inside, there was another man, much older, with a white beard and dressed exactly the same way, with a Polaroid camera in his lap. His hands held it loosely, and his head dipped back, mouth open, in the unnatural pose of sleep having come suddenly. Our local slapped the old man’s shoulder, and he woke up and pointed to a space on the wall where a sheet of clean blue paper hung. The local nudged one of the women toward it. The old man tried to direct her from his chair, until he got frustrated, jumped up, and used his hands to adjust her position and expression. She kept wanting to smile for the picture; I didn’t know what about. But the photographer—and I use the term loosely—tried to dissuade her from it. Finally, he was satisfied and took her picture. Then it was my turn, a flash and half-blinded snap, before I was shown into the next building. The first thing I noticed was the cacophony of languages. I heard things I understood, brief moments of sanity amid the static …

  “How long will they hold us here?”

  “They took my picture two days ago, and I haven’t heard anything since.”

  “I’m hungry. Where’s the food? I gave my whole savings for this and no food.”

  I took a seat on the floor next to a woman who spoke my language. The mention of food made the cramps in my stomach feel tighter.

  “What is your journey?” I asked, trying to settle into the space.

  “We were in Abu Dhabi.” She swung her index finger back and forth between her and the next woman. “And we’re going home to Colombo. Eight years I’ve been away. My smallest children won’t even recognize me.”

  Ruka and Mewan would know me. For that I was grateful.

  “Did anyone tell us how long until we leave for our next stop?”

  She shrugged. “Just be careful when you’re walking around this town. There are no police, but there are plenty of men looking for a young woman like you.”

  I could handle the men; it was the trip that worried me.

  …

  Light came to the village through the narrow opening of steep cliffs that formed the bay we had entered the previous night. The settlement stretched up from the rocky shore as far possible into the hills before they became so steep that not even mountain goats might traverse them. The walls surrounding us, the land we stood on, the buildings around us were awash in light sienna. It had a tranquilizing effect, the way darkness does.

  I walked through the narrow lanes; the streets weren’t wide enough for a car, and they were dug into the bedrock in a V formation so that when it rained the water would flow down them and into the bay. At all points I could see the bay, and now two ships were floating outside it. They were substantial sea vessels, not fishing boats. I saw down to the line of white houses on the water; the energy of the people moving around was increasing.

  “Shula?” I had walked past a house with an open door and a toddler drawing with charcoal on a rock.

  I spun around looking for who had called my name.

  “Shula.” This time more direct and familiar. Then it dawned on me. It sounded like Ousha. “I’m in the house.”

  I pushed my head in and saw a woman with her head covered, only her eyes showing. She lifted the veil off her face. “See? It’s me.” It was a familiar smile, as if we were sisters who had lived on opposite coasts and hadn’t seen each other in a while.

  “Your mother is looking for you,” I warned her.

  “Is she here with you?” Ousha got up quickly from her chair and looked around me. “Well?”

  “No, no. She’s still in Dubai.”

  “I don’t get it. Why are you here?” Her posture slumped.

  “To escape Mohamed. Did you think I came looking for you?”

  “I thought maybe my mother—”

  I didn’t flinch. I realized how much she wanted her parents to save her.

  “I’m looking for Inesh. You … you brought him back to me, the thought of him, all the things I loved about him. I thought I might find him here. Someone had told me he had come through Kumzar.”

  “Ousha, I don’t know how to tell you this, but—”

  I saw her eyes narrow. Her shoulders tensed and straightened.

  I reached for her; I knew she’d need some steadying when she heard.

  “Where did he go?” she insisted.

  I spoke garbled gibberish. My kind mind was telling her I didn’t know; my truthful one was telling her he’d moved on to the next life.

  “What happened to him?”

  I settled on “I don’t think you’ll find him here.”

  She must have come out of her body in that moment because her eyes became vacant. Her body stood there, a shell that housed no emotion or life. I’d said too much at once, as though I’d prepared her for a punch, then run her over with a dump truck.

  I put my hand on her arm and rubbed; it was cold and stiff. She’d eventually thaw from the inside out. I knew the feeling from when Pramith had gone missing after the wave. At first you feel the prickles of life on your skin, and as the months and years pass, they seep into you until you can feel again. In many ways, I think, were it not for Ruka and Mewan, my deepest pieces might have stayed in a deep freeze forever. Who did Ousha have?

  “Come with me,” I told her. I wanted her to know someone cared.

  There was no response. I thought of the ships and the buzzing of the people and wanted to get back to the beach. “There’s a ship leaving soon, to take us away. Come.” Ousha didn’t respond, not even with the flutter of an eyelid.

  Staying with her would have been surrendering to the spider that had nabbed you in its web. She would come or she wouldn’t, and as sorry as I felt for her, I also held her responsible. She was a woman of extraordinary means and hadn’t used them to help other people but rather wallowed in the elements of her life that had gone awry. Her suffering was smothering, so I charged out, through the streets, until I was with the other passengers who had queued up neatly. The ships had moved closer in. The fishing boats were painted in blues and yellows and ready to serve us once again. The booming whistles of the ships let us know they awaited us. It was the next step—onto a fishing boat. I saw something roughly body shaped floating farther out; it could have been a log, but there were no trees in Kumzar. I told myself it was a tree from elsewhere. I knew what I had to believe to keep myself sane—anything that got in the way of my children and me was a problem for someone else to solve.

  The fishing boat rocked, but my mind was steady and we rowed.

  We approached a commercial ship stacked tall with shipping containers. The two ladies and I climbed the ladder to middeck, then entered the door of one of the crates. It was stacked to the ceiling with toys, with only a small walking space, about a meter wide, through the center. There was another door, deep in the center with a thin reflective metal, and we were told to enter. Once we were inside, shoulder to s
houlder, the door closed and locked. There was light, but it came from two pipes that led outside. My body started to panic. I moved in every direction but was met by the push of other shoulders. I imagined that I couldn’t breathe, that the air was getting hot and thin, like when you put your head under a blanket for too long.

  “Push against the door,” a woman yelled. There was a surge forward, our collective weight trying to break through the locks on the other side. But we only ended up trampling a small woman who whimpered on the floor, crawling between our legs. Our bodies were too close to one another to even bend down to help her.

  I always thought I might die from coming upon an unsuspecting wild animal or crashing during the few times I’d ridden on a moped. Or maybe a terrible disease would beat me into submission until I gave in. There was, of course, the possibility of growing old, but that seemed unlikely. Those who made it that far were celebrated; the gods clearly favored them. But now what was slowly becoming apparent was that I would suffocate and some unlucky official would open this door and find all of us dead. It would reach the news for one minute, and then the collective watchers would be assaulted by the next tragedy.

  The crying started after about an hour. Then grunts of frustration and anger, until eventually the entire room was crying for relief. I shut my eyes and tried to block out the sounds as shoulders and hips bounced into me. I thought it would never end. Then I passed out.

  Pakistan

  I woke up hanging upside down, the bodies next to me holding me in place. We were moving, more like swinging, all of us, the entire crate. I felt the rush of the air through the pipes, bringing daylight with it. The other women began to wake up. Someone squeezed my arm. And then we hit the ground, which sent a shock through my spine that made me dizzy. A few voices cried out. Then nothing. Time passed, the daylight faded. I was positioned under one of the pipes and saw the stars come into view.