Uzma Khan: Trespassing

The boy hesitates. He grew up in the city and does not know how to swim. The best he can do is suck on a hookah like his great-grandmother did, before she died.

‘Come on,’ coaxes his uncle. ‘It’s the winter now. The sea is calm. She isn’t hungry. She’ll spit you up even if you try to slip into her bowels.’

‘Why don’t you do it?’ the boy blurts out.

His uncle laughs. ‘That’s a child’s game!’ His ringlets blow in the breeze and smoke twists out from his nostrils. His van waits on the road. He has returned to his village for the first time since he left, many years ago. He’d told the boy he did so only for fear of Sumbul. ‘Your mother is far, far more vicious than any sea,’ he’d winked.

The boy now asks, ‘Where do you go in your van?’

‘Oh,’ he slides into the dune, his thick black feet sinking into the cool sand, ‘I pick up boxes full of very heavy things and deliver them to a shop. That’s my work.’

‘Can I come with you?’

Again he laughs. ‘Listen. If you swim out to the anchor line, I’ll take you with me next time.’

The boy hangs his head in shame. He can’t do it. Not even for the honor of riding beside his mother’s magnificent brother. He stares at the pale expanse of beach stretching around him.

‘Okay, I’ll go,’ his uncle sits up. ‘You stand right here like a lighthouse. When you see me surface, blink your lights. Like this.’ He waved his arms. ‘Agreed?’

The boy nods but is still too ashamed to look up. He takes his place, watching the older man saunter to the water’s edge, take off his kameez and slink into a swell.

While he waits, something distracts him. Tiny mounds of grain erupt first beside one foot, then the other. A little boat trundles out, replete with oars and even a rudder.

‘What’s this?’ he says to the air.

No one answers.

Something tells him they are the turtles he has heard about. Baby ones. ‘Come back!’ he calls his mamu. ‘Look at this!’ He beckons the distant cluster of aunts and uncles around the teahouse. But no one hears; they are all busy. He is alone, and yet the beach is a flurry of lumbering saucers the size of his palm, bursting out from under him, all heading for the sea.

His instinct warns of danger: gulls soar overhead, dogs pad overland. He follows the migration, waving both arms, scanning the water for his uncle. But the anchor line alone cuts the glassy sea.

Then he hears his mother call. ‘Lunch is ready! And bring your mamu too!’

The child frowns. He is busy but his mother would say he is too young to be busy. Kneeling, he picks up a hatchling and turns it upside down. The creature’s feet wriggle imploringly and the boy giggles.

His mother calls once more. ‘Hurry up!’

He frowns again. When his uncle surfaced, he would expect him to be here, blinking like a lighthouse. He can’t leave. But why hadn’t Mamu appeared yet?

In his hand, the baby turtle continues to squirm. Some of its siblings have reached the surf. ‘All right,’ he says to the one in his grasp. ‘Time for you to go too.’ He puts it down. When his mother calls a third time, angry now, he casts an anxious look out at the sea then hurries to his great-grandmother’s teahouse.

Halfway there he looks back. Still no sign of Mamu. More turtles melt into the waves breaking on the shore. A few remain tentatively where he’d last seen them. Then he observes one — perhaps the one he’d lifted — making for the huts. You should be going the other way, he thinks. He decides to tell it.

Jogging over to the hatchling, he picks it up and turns it around. The little creature’s legs again wave in the air. The child squats and gently releases it. Touching ground, the turtle immediately bursts forward, this time toward the sea, as though its course had never changed.

I am grateful to the outstanding, independent-minded writers and journalists whose efforts formed the basis of my research on the Gulf War. While space does not permit them all to be named, I do want to single out one book: The Fire This Time (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1992), by former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark. This finely documented analysis, which the author presents simply, with compassion and outrage, is strongly recommended to anyone seeking a view of the war that challenges the one presented by the US Government, with the cooperation of the mainstream media.

I am also grateful to Dave, for being my most insightful critic, for giving me the time and space to complete this book, and most of all, for our love; V.K. Karthika, for opening the envelope and discovering my first novel; Laura Susijn and Philip Gwyn Jones, for launching me farther than I ever dreamed I could go; and my parents, for their continued love and support, prayers and generosity of spirit.

Uzma Aslam Khan grew up in Karachi, Pakistan. She is the author of one previous novel, The Story of Noble Rot . She has taught English language and literature in the US, Morocco and Pakistan, and now lives in Lahore with her husband, author David Maine. Trespassing has been published around the world and been translated into several languages.

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