Uzma Khan: Trespassing

The fishing boats dock before the dawn, while the turtle digs her nest. She watches with one eye seaward, the other on the many huts dotting the shore. The nearest is just thirty feet away. She burrows fiercely, kicking up telltale showers of sand, recalling how much safer it had been when the coastline belonged to the fishermen. Now the boats sail in like giant moths, and though she wonders at their catch, it is for the visitors from the city, hidden in their huts, that her brow has creased beyond her age.

She is ready. The first egg plops softly in the hollow beneath her womb, and the rest follow, unstoppable now. The fishing nets glisten in the moonlight with small fry. How long before she dips into the waters again?

A boy, not yet fifteen, lights a K2 and leans back into the ridge of a dune. Long locks tumble over his shoulders and flare in the wind. Between puffs, he kisses the end of the cigarette, so content is he. The turtle watches him watch her when most defenseless. But she knows him; all the turtles do.

Her eggs are smooth and oval, like a naked woman’s shoulders. The boy caresses his cheek, wanting really to caress the eggs, wanting really to caress the shoulders.

His locks billow and his mood is suddenly ruffled by thoughts of his father and uncles, who did not go out tonight. They say the foreign trawlers have stolen their sea. They trespass. Fish once abundant close to shore are now disappearing even in the deep. And the fishermen’s boats cannot go out that far, even for the fish still left to catch. An uncle tried. It was he who was eaten. His family mourns the brave man’s drowning, and his father’s decision to break with tradition. They will move to the city. The boy will go first. But he is afraid, as afraid as the turtle is, of the men in the huts.

He pulls on his cigarette and wonders at the turtle. She meets his gaze with the soothing, crackly wisdom of his grandmother. He shuts his eyes and drifts into soft sleep.

Then he jolts awake: voices. Glancing quickly at the reptile, he sees her still giving birth. But dawn is tinged with foreboding. The shadow of a man stretches upon the dune beside him and creeps forward. The boy ducks. Squinting toward the huts, he sees a woman, naked below the knees, waiting. The intruder walks into view, stumbles and farts. He will not even rob the turtle gently. The boy bristles with anger, wondering what to do. He decides quickly. If the man takes a single egg, he will take the woman.

A shaggy arm crooks toward the nest, and waits, ripe fingers nearly scraping the reptile’s orifice for a gift. The boy dashes. The woman screams. Others emerge from the hut’s interior. The intruder hurtles back. The egg drops safely into the sand a fraction of a second after he is gone.

Their first kick dislodges a knee. Long hair is a hindrance, he thinks, as they use it to drag him over the line of rocks circling the hut’s porch. If I live I’ll never wear it below the chin again. There is salt in his mouth. Salt and gravel. His blood and his teeth. He swoons, but instead of their blows, he hears shells split. Thud! Crack! The men are pelting him with the eggs.

A moan rises from the pit of his groin, up to an empty cavity below his chest, shrugging its way higher, out of his nose, his ears, and mouth. He vomits oyster-white albumen and curdled vitellus, bloodied placenta, and something green. Liver?

Though blind with pain, it is he alone who sees the mound of the mother meandering silently back home.

MAY 1992

Dia sat in the mulberry tree her father had sheltered in the night before his death. A large man, he’d been limber too. Squatting had come easy. The crowd below had included journalists, neighbors and police. They’d asked if it were true: was he getting death threats?

Her father weighed ninety kilos and hunkered like a gentle ape, shuffling about in the foliage, appraising his audience with two small brown eyes that flashed like rockets. Every few minutes, he mustered up enough nerve to shake some berries. When they struck a particularly distasteful newsman or auntie, he slapped a knee with glee. Then he wept unabashedly.

The tree had been planted the day Dia was born. Her father had said the sweet, dainty, purplish-red fruit was like his precious daughter when she slid howling into the world. So when he tossed the berries at the throng, Dia, watching from inside the house, knew he was calling her. But her mother insisted she stay inside.

‘He’s gone mad,’ she whispered, clutching Dia. ‘I shouldn’t have told him.’

Told him what? Dia wondered.

Today, up in the tree, a book of fables pressed heavily in her lap. The weight was partly psychological. She should have been studying. She’d failed an exam and ought to be preparing for the retake. Instead she flipped through the book’s pages, where lay miscellaneous clippings about history and bugs. She found a page ripped from a Gymkhana library book and read it aloud:

‘Silk was discovered in China more than four thousand years ago, purely by accident. For many months Emperor Huang-ti had noticed the mulberry bushes in his luscious garden steadily losing their leaves. His bride, Hsi-Ling-Shih, was asked to investigate. She noticed little insects crawling about the bushes, and found several small, white pellets. Taking a pellet with her to the palace, with nothing but instinct she ventured on the best place to put it: in a tub of boiling water. Almost at once, a mesh of curious fine thread separated itself from the soft ball. The Empress gently pulled the thread. It was half a mile long. She wove it into a royal robe for her husband, the first silk item in history. Since then, sericulture has remained a woman’s job, in particular, an empress’.’

Dia tucked the stolen page back into her book. The best episodes from history were of discovery. She liked to slow the clock at the moment before the Empress thought to drop the cocoon into the water — just before she metamorphosed into a pioneer. What had moved her not to simply crush the little menaces, as most people disposed of pests today? How relaxed and curious her intellect had been, and how liberally she’d been rewarded!

The setting fired Dia’s imagination too. It would be an arbor at the top of a hillock, with plenty of sunlight, a long stone table, basins, and attendants ready with towels and disinfectants. When they’d made a circle around the Empress, Dia commanded the minute hand to shift. The Empress dropped a cocoon into the water.

It shriveled and expelled its last breath: a tangle of filament the Empress hastened to twist around her arm like candy-floss on a stick. The attendants gawked. Their mistress was sweating. The wind was soft. The sun snagged in the strand, a blinding prism growing on the arm of the Empress, as if she spun sunlight. When the sun went down she’d cooked all the cocoons from the imperial garden. Miles of thread hung in coils around both her arms. The attendants dabbed at her brow and helped her down the hill, back to the palace. The Emperor called for her all night. But she couldn’t sleep beside him with arms encased so. The maids burned oil lamps, dias, and she sat up alone, occasionally looking out at the moon and down at the mulberry trees, making a robe for her husband that by morning would reflect the rays of the sun, and by next evening, the moon.