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By Root 467 0

the water, has never seen light this bright, but he knows instinctively that he will drown in so much air. The fishermen need him to stop flooding his arteries with blood in panic, or he will darken, and therefore ruin, the appearance of his flesh against a dinner plate. So the captain’s brother swiftly wrestles him between his rubber boots and raises aloft a large, blunt mallet, resembling the archetypal club of a prehistoric man, carved from the trunk of a coconut tree. He brings it down heavily. The tuna’s eyes jerk out of their sockets. His tail convulses. His jaw opens and closes, as ours might do, but no scream emerges. The mallet strikes again. There is a dull sound, that of densely packed brain and experience, shattering inside a tight bony cage, triggering the thought that we too are never more than one hard slam away from a definitive end to our carefully arranged ideas and copious involvement with ourselves. The fisherman is himself enraged now, striking the beast vengefully, cursing the dying creature in Dhivehi: ‘Nagoobalha, nagoobalha, hey aruvaalaanan’ (‘Bitch, bitch, you’ve had it now’). This is the first tuna he has caught in eight days, and there are six children waiting at home.

Rich red blood explodes from the creature’s brain and sprays across the boat. Two of the younger crewmen rush forward and slit open his mouth, pulling out his gills and ventilation system. Next they turn their knives to his stomach, releasing the undigested bodies of smaller fish – fusiliers, cardinal fish, sprats – on which he breakfasted at the start of this infernal day. The deck becomes slippery with organs. As the killing spree goes on, I find myself thinking obsessively of my elder son, four years old and about the same length as some of the larger fish. It is no longer implausible that, as many religions maintain, we are all, in the end, from moth to president, members of the same large, irrevocably fratricidal family. Unburdened of his guts and his reproductive tract, the tuna is hoisted into the air and plunged into the first of four refrigerated compartments, which will, by nightfall, be filled by the bodies of a further twenty of his companions. One wonders what the atmosphere will be like in the school, 60 metres below, as the survivors pursue their way to Somalia; whether there will be a memory of the absent members and, in the pitch-black waters, a terrible fear.

We arrive at the fish processing plant – which keeps in close touch with British importers and supermarkets. The true nature of bureaucracy may be nowhere more obvious to the observer than in a developing country, for only there will it still be made manifest by the full complement of documents, files, veneered desks and cabinets – which convey the strict and inverse relationship between productivity and paperwork. Despite cautionary tales from a range of antecedents from Gauguin to Edward Said, I am unable wholly to suppress fleeting images of a joint future with Salma Mahir, the secretary of the owner of the plant, who harbours as many misconceptions about my country as I do about hers. My Maldivian father looks on.

The boss of the tuna plant, when he finally arrives, is an unexpected phenomenon. In temperament, Yasir Waheed combines the phlegmatic romanticism of a late-nineteenth-century French poet with the carnivorous aggression of a contemporary Anglo-American capitalist. His favourite book, by Bill Zanker and Donald Trump, is Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life. He is just back from an electronics conference in Dubai, where he picked up a Bluetooth wireless mouse for his Apple Cinema.

The plant’s fish handlers know how to fillet a tuna with machetes in three minutes. All were once fishermen. The sound of one of their knives cutting flesh away from a spine recalls that of a fingernail strumming the teeth of a comb. All are now widowers. Yasir took pity on them after seeing them weeping on the news after the tsunami rolled round the eastern shores of Sri Lanka and swept away their families when they were out at sea. While