appeared, and she’d already drifted around to face sideways. Now she simply leant towards the shore and started swimming, all difficulties forgotten.
It was hard work feigning panic without overtaking her, when her arms were about a quarter as long as his own. Prabir glanced over his shoulder and shouted, ‘Faster, Maddy! I can see his ribs now!’ The water man was leering angrily, already assuming a kind of eager parody of a sprinter’s crouch. Rocking back and forth on the tips of his splayed fingers, he dragged more of his torso out of the waves. Prabir watched as the creature inhaled deeply, driving water from his lungs through his glassy skin, preparing himself for the world of air.
Madhusree was beginning to slap the water open-handed, the way she did when she was tired. Prabir suspected that he’d be able to stand soon, but it didn’t seem right to intervene before he had to. ‘I’m going to make it, aren’t I? I just have to breathe slowly, and keep my fingers together.’ Madhusree shot him an irritable don’t- patronise-me look, and clawed the water in an exaggerated fashion before accepting his advice and powering ahead.
Prabir stopped dead and turned to examine their would-be pursuer. The last stage was always difficult; it was awkward trying to brace yourself as you dragged your legs up beneath you. Prabir closed his eyes and imagined that he was the water man. Crouching lower, forearms to the waves, he strained with his whole body until his muscles expelled a visible surge of brine. Finally, he was rewarded: he felt the warm air on the back of his knees, on his calves. His right foot broke free; the sole rested lightly on the surface, tickled by the choppy water as if each tiny crest was a blade of grass.
He opened his eyes. The water man was rising up, ready to spring forward, with just one foot trapped below the waves to hold him back.
Prabir cried out and started swimming after Madhusree. Within seconds, he knew the chase had begun. But he didn’t dare look back: once you saw a water man running, you were lost.
The violence of his strokes made Madhusree turn; she lost her rhythm and began to flounder. Prabir caught up with her as her head dropped beneath the surface; he scooped her into his arms and reached for the bottom with his feet. His toes hit the sand with Madhusree cradled safely against his chest.
Running through the water was nightmare-slow, but he pushed his leaden body forward. He tramped right over a bed of brown sea-grass, shuddering with each step; it wasn’t that the blades were sharp, or slimy, but it always felt as if something was hiding among them. Madhusree clung to him, uncomplaining, staring back, transfixed. Skin crawled on Prabir’s scalp. He could always declare that the game was over, there was nothing following them, it was all made up. In his arms Madhusree was a passenger, immune to the rules, but if he turned and looked for himself now, the simple fact of his survival would prove beyond doubt that the water man had never been real.
But he didn’t want to spoil the game for Madhusree.
His legs almost folded as he hit the beach, but he caught himself and took a dozen more steps; just walking on dry land made him feel stronger. Then he crouched down and stood Madhusree on her feet before turning to sit facing the sea, his head lowered to help him catch his breath.
He was dizzy from the sudden end to his exertion, and his vision was marred with dark after-images. But Prabir was almost certain that he could make out a damp patch glistening on the sun-baked sand, one step beyond the water’s edge, evaporating before his eyes.
Madhusree declared calmly, ‘Want Ma.’
Prabir wasn’t allowed inside the butterfly hut. Because the malaria vaccine didn’t work for him, he’d had a pellet inserted beneath the skin of one arm that made him sweat mosquito repellent. The mere smell of the stuff probably wouldn’t harm the butterflies, but it could affect their behaviour, and any risk of serious contamination would be enough to invalidate all of his parents’ observations.
He put Madhusree down a few metres from the doorway, and she waddled towards the sound of her mother’s voice. Prabir listened as the voice rose in pitch. ‘Where have you been, my darling? Where have you been?’ Madhusree began to deliver an incoherent monologue about the water man. Prabir strained his ears long enough to check that he wasn’t being libelled, then went and sat on the bench outside his own hut. It was mid-morning, and the beach had grown uncomfortably hot, but most of the kampung would remain in shade until noon. Prabir could still remember the day they’d arrived, almost three years before, with half a dozen labourers from Kai Besar to help them clear away vegetation and assemble the pre-fabricated huts. He still wasn’t sure whether the men had been joking when they’d referred to the ring of six buildings with a word that meant ‘village’, but the term had stuck.
A familiar crashing sound came from the edge of the kampung; a couple of fruit pigeons had landed on the branch of a nutmeg tree. The blue-white birds were larger than chickens, and though they were slightly more streamlined in their own plump way it still seemed extraordinary to Prabir that they could fly at all. One of them stretched its comically extensible mouth around a nutmeg fruit the size of a small apricot; the other looked on stupidly, cooing and clacking, before sidling away to search for food of its own.
Prabir had been planning to try out his idea for altitude measurement as soon as he was free of Madhusree, but on the way back from the beach he’d thought of some complications. For a start, he wasn’t confident that he could distinguish between the shore of a distant island and part of a cliff or an inland mountain, visible over the horizon because of its height. Maybe if he could persuade his father to let him borrow the binoculars he’d be able to tell the difference, but there was another, more serious problem. Refraction due to atmospheric temperature gradients—the same effect that made the sun appear swollen as it approached the horizon—would bend the light he was trying to use as one side of a Pythagorean triangle. Of course, someone had probably worked out a way to take this into account, and it wouldn’t be hard to track down the appropriate equations and program them into his notepad, but even if he could find all the temperature data he needed—from some regional meteorological model or weather satellite thermal image—he wouldn’t really understand what he was doing; he’d just be following instructions blindly.
Prabir suddenly recognised his name amongst the murmuring coming from the butterfly hut—spoken not by Madhusree, who could barely pronounce it, but by his father. He tried to make out the words that followed, but the fruit pigeons wouldn’t shut up. He scanned the ground for something to throw at them, then decided that any attempt to drive them away would probably be a long, noisy process. He rose to his feet and tiptoed around to the back of the hut, to press one ear against the fibreglass.
‘How’s he going to cope when he has to go to a normal school back in India, in a real solid classroom six hours a day, when he’s barely learnt to sit still for five minutes? The sooner he gets used to it, the less of a shock it will be. If we wait until we’re finished here, he could be… what? Eleven, twelve years old? He’ll be uncontrollable!’ Prabir could tell that his father had been speaking for a while. He always began arguments dispassionately, as if he was indifferent to the subject under discussion. It took several minutes for this level of exasperation to creep into his voice.
His mother laughed her who’s-talking laugh. ‘You were eleven the first time you sat in a classroom!’
‘Yes, and that was hard enough. And at least I’d been exposed to other human beings. You think he’s being socialised properly through a satellite link?’
There was such a long silence that Prabir began to wonder if his mother was replying too softly for him to hear. Then she said plaintively, ‘Where, though? Calcutta’s too far away, Rajendra. We’d never see him.’
‘It’s a three-hour flight.’
‘From Jakarta!’
His father responded, quite reasonably, ‘How else should I measure it? If you add in the time it takes to travel from here, anywhere on Earth will sound too far away!’
Prabir felt a disorientating mixture of homesickness and fear.
‘Well, Jakarta’s out of the question.’ There was no reply; maybe his father was nodding agreement. They’d discussed this before: throughout Indonesia, violence kept flaring up against the ethnic Chinese ‘merchant class’— and though the Indian minority was tiny and invisible in comparison, his parents seemed to think he’d be at risk of being beaten up every time there was a price rise. Prabir had trouble believing in such bizarre behaviour, but the
