under the shelter of the quarter-deck’s companion-way, herself being one of them; some distance to the east, she had noticed a chain of islands, pierced by many deep channels; she had seen fishing boats, sheltering in the islands’ bays and coves, and other strange unfamiliar craft, scudding through the channels. Then, in the same way that a parent leads a child’s gaze towards something of interest, the storm had tipped back her chin to show her a craft that was trapped within its windy skirts – it was the Ibis’s fleeing longboat. She saw that the fugitives had made use of the stillness of the storm’s eye to race across the water to the nearest of the islands; she saw them leaping from the boat, and then, to her astonishment, she saw them turning the boat over, and pushing it out where the current could seize it and carry it away…
All this – this succession of visions and images – had been granted to her, Deeti would insist later, in a matter of a few seconds. And it was plain enough that if her testimony were true, then the visions could not have lasted any longer than that – for the arrival of the storm’s eye had provided a respite not only for the fleeing fugitives, but also for the guards and maistries. With the abating of the winds, they had begun to hammer at the jammed hatch of their cumra; it would take them only a minute or two to break through and then they would come pouring out…
It was Zikri-Malum who saved us, Deeti would add. If not for him, it would have been a gran kalamite – there was no telling what the silahdars and overseers might have done to the three of us if they had found us on deck. But the Malum, he got us on our feet and pushed us back into the dabusa, with the other migrants. Thanks to him we were out of sight when the guards and overseers burst out on deck…
As to what happened after that, they – Deeti, Paulette, and the others in the dabusa – could only guess: in the brief interval before the passing of the storm’s eye and the return of the winds, it was as if another tempest had seized hold of the Ibis, with dozens of feet pounding across the deck, running agram-bagram, this way and that. Then, abruptly, the typhoon was upon them again, and nothing could be heard but the howling of the wind and the roar of the rain.
Not till much later did the migrants learn that Malum Zikri had been blamed for everything that had happened – the escape of the convicts, the desertions of the Serang and the lascar, the freeing of Kalua, even the murder of the first mate – the responsibility for all of this had been laid foursquare on his shoulders.
Down in the dabusa, the migrants knew nothing of what was happening overhead, and when at last they were allowed out again, it was only to be told that the five fugitives were dead. The longboat had been found, overturned and with a hole in its bottom, they were told by the maistries, so there could be no doubt that they’d met the fate they’d earned. And as for Malum Zikri, he was under lock and key, for the Captain had been forced to promise the enraged overseers that he would be handed over to the authorities when they arrived in Port Louis.
Dye-kone, you can imazinn how this news affected us all and the gran kankann that was caused, with the lascars lamenting the death of Serang Ali, the girmitiyas mourning for Kalua, and Paulette weeping for Jodu, who was like a bhai to her, and for Zikri Malum too, because he was her hombo and she had set her heart on him. I was the only one there, let me tell you, whose eyes were dry, for I knew better. Listen, I whispered to your Tantinn Paulette, don’t worry, they’re safe, those five; it was they who pushed the boat back in the sea, so they’d be taken for dead and quickly forgotten. And as for Malum Zikri, don’t worry about him either, tu-vwa, he’ll have made some arrangements for you – just trust in him. And sure enough, a day or two later, one of the lascars, Mamdoo-tindal was his name, he gave your Tantinn Paulette a bundle of the Malum’s clothes and whispered in her ear: ‘When we get into port, put these on, and we’ll find a way of getting you ashore.’ I was the only one who wasn’t surprised, for it was as if everything was coming to pass as I had seen, when the storm carried me aba-laba and showed me what was happening below…
There was never a lack of sceptics to question Deeti’s account of that night. Most of her listeners had grown up on the island and could boast of a certain intimacy with cyclones: not one of them had ever imagined, or could believe, that it might be possible to look at the world through the eye of a storm. Was it possible that she had imagined all of this in retrospect? Had she perhaps succumbed to a seizure or hallucination? That she could actually have seen what she claimed seemed doubtful even to the most filial among them.
But Deeti was adamant: didn’t they believe in stars, planets and the lines on their palms? Did they not accept that any of these might reveal something of fate to people who knew how to unravel their mysteries? So then why not the wind? Stars and planets, after all, travelled on predictable orbits – but the wind, nobody knew where the wind would choose to go. The wind was the power of change, of transformation: this was what she had come to understand that day – she, Deeti, who had always believed that her destenn was ruled by the stars and planets; she had understood that it was the wind that had decided it was her karma to be carried to Mauritius, into another life; it was the wind that had sent down a storm to set her husband free…
And here she would turn to ‘The Parting’ and point to what was perhaps the most arresting aspect of its imagery: the storm itself. She had portrayed it so that it covered the upper part of the panel, stretching all the way across the frame: it was represented as a gigantic serpent, coiling inwards from the outside, going around and around in circles of diminishing size, and ending in a single enormous eye.
See for yourselves: she would say to the sceptics; isn’t this proof? If I had not seen what I saw, how would I ever have imagined that a tufaan could have an eye?
Two
As people go, the Colvers were not exceptionally credulous so if there had been no rational reason to suggest otherwise, most of them would have been content to regard ‘The Parting’ merely as an unusual family memento. It fell to Neel to show the Fami that there was at least one thing about Deeti’s depiction of the Parting that was genuinely visionary: this was the fact that she had shown the storm to be wrapped around an eye. This bespoke an understanding of the nature of storms that was, for its time, not just unusual but revolutionary: because 1838, the year of that storm, was when a scientist first suggested that hurricanes might be composed of winds rotating around a still centre – an eye, in other words.
By the time Neel set foot on the Morne the notion that storms revolved around an eye was almost a commonplace – but the concept had made such an impression on Neel that he remembered very clearly his own first encounter with it, some ten years before. He had read about it in a journal and had been astonished and captivated by the image it conjured up – of a gigantic oculus, at the far end of a great, spinning telescope, examining everything it passed over, upending some things, and leaving others unscathed; looking for new possibilities, creating fresh beginnings, rewriting destinies and throwing together people who would never have met.
Retrospectively, the idea gave shape and meaning to his own experience of the storm – and yet, at the time, Neel had had no conception of its significance. How was it possible then that Deeti, an illiterate, frightened young woman, had been granted this insight? And that too at a time when only a handful of the world’s most advanced scientists knew of it?
It was a mystery, there was no doubt of that in Neel’s mind. This was why, in listening to Deeti’s telling of the story, he began to feel that Deeti’s voice was carrying him back into the eye.
… And now the Serang and the others are shouting in my ears: Alo-alo! Ale-ale! And your granper, heaven knows how big he is, how heavy and byin-bati. He goes to the side of the ship and I fall at his feet: Let me come with you, let me come, I beg him, but he pushes me away: No, no! You must think of the baby in your stomach; you cannot come! And then they all begin to climb into the boat – and all around us, the tufaan, raging, raging; a blink of an eye and the boat pulls away. Suddenly it is gone…
Neel could almost feel the the planks of the boat, shuddering under his feet, the rain driving against his face: it was so real that he was grateful when the children began to tug at his arm, bringing him back to the shrine: What happened next, Neel-mawsa? Were you afraid?
No, not then, he said. I am afraid now when I think of it – but when it was happening there was no time. The wind was blowing with such violence that it was all we could do to cling to the boat; it seemed as if at any minute the boat would be whirled away with all of us in it. But miraculously it didn’t happen: when we were least expecting it, the storm’s eye came upon us and the winds fell away. It was in that brief interval that we rowed the boat ashore. Once our feet were on the sand, our first thought was to pick up the boat and carry it to some safe place.
