• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 469 0

emergency water tanks donated by UNICEF, flies, a two-room school funded by a Saudi Arabian mosque and a single shop. We are informed on arrival that our fishermen have been stranded at sea by a broken engine. So we spend three inconceivably long days waiting in a boiling tin hut fitted out with two camp beds and an en suite tap, and reflect on the life of beetles and the sadness of small islands. In temperatures which reach 35 degrees centigrade in the shade, we often squat under a tree on the main patch of waste ground, watched over by President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom of the Maldives, the dictator, poet and Islamist whose portrait stands sentinel, by law, on every one of the country’s two hundred inhabited islands – and who bears an uncanny physical resemblance to my late father.

At mealtimes, the locals disappear into their homes to fry up a medley of fish, coconut and onions, but as we lack the requisite culinary equipment, we come to rely extensively on the stock of the local shop – whose owner also becomes our only friend, it being hard to find kindred spirits in small communities. We have chocolate biscuits for breakfast, tinned tomatoes and mayonnaise for lunch and ketchup and sweet corn for supper.

At last, the engine is fixed and we head out to sea. The fishing boat is under the command of captain Ibrahim Rasheed, a thirty-three-year-old father of five whose livelihood depends on his ability to track down and club to death at least fifteen mature tuna in the coming twenty-four hours. Tooth-brushing came late to the Maldives, but the practice has taken hold as firmly as the executives of Colgate-Palmolive could have hoped, thanks in part to a television campaign featuring a shark with vividly gleaming dentition. The tube lives on a shelf in the fishing boat’s combined kitchenette-toilet. At breakfast time, we join the crew in the main cabin for a freshly cooked meal, our first in many days: miruhulee boava (octopus tentacles) followed by an invitation to chew a bunch of areca palm leaves.

After breakfast comes a succession of card games. The tuna below us have a few more hours in which to partake of life on the planet. It should not be presumed from this image that the author is in any way lacking in empathy or bonhomie, or that he would be unable (as is sometimes suspected of intellectuals) to take his place, man to man, amongst a group of illiterate Indian Ocean sailors exchanging anecdotes in an unfathomable Indo-Sanskrit tongue. He is merely in that preoccupied state, of necessity involving a distant gaze and extreme concentration, which often accompanies attempts to control runaway intestinal inflammation.

For hours we wander the sea without hope. Then shortly after eleven in the morning – dawn in the warehouse in the middle of England – a school of yellowfin tuna approach from the east, swimming in a V-shape, the older, more confident fish on the outside, the younger ones inside. They are moving at fifty kilometres an hour, on their way to Somalia from the coasts of Indonesia. Because they lack a swim-bladder, the cursed creatures have no option but to advance relentlessly; they cannot pause and rest on the current, like the sedate grouper, or they would fall to the bottom of the ocean and die, only growing more attractive to man by their continual exertions, for it is through the life-long flexing of their tails that their flesh grows muscular and hence uniquely flavoursome. A cry goes up on deck. One of the school, by all indications a heavier, older specimen, a veteran of five years of unmolested navigation, has taken a bite at a bait of mackerel. Fifteen minutes later, he announces himself on the starboard side, panicked and enraged, his tail hammering against the boat. Fifty kilos in weight, he is attempting to prise himself free of the cable tearing apart his palate, but he does not count on two men, above him at either end, reaching into the water with steel hooks and flipping him onto the deck with a victorious cry. Pandemonium follows.

The tuna has never been this far out of