Teranesia

He rested on the beach for a few minutes, then carried Madhusree back to the kampung and started out with the motor. A third of the way to the beach she sat down on the path and refused to walk any further. Prabir knelt down and coaxed her into putting her arms around his neck and clinging to his back with her legs. He usually hooked his arms under her legs when he carried her this way, reinforcing her grip and taking some of her weight, but the motor made that impossible. As her legs grew tired, she ended up virtually hanging on to him by her arms alone, and though Prabir leaned forward to try to shift some of her weight on to his back, by the time they reached the beach she was crying from exhaustion.

For a moment he was tempted to leave her on the beach – what harm could come to her, sleeping beneath a palm tree? – but then he wrapped her in his arms and trudged back to the kampung. He managed to hang the three bags of clothes and food from his neck and shoulders, leaving his arms free.

Down to the beach, back to the kampung. Two cans of fuel and two cans of water remained – each weighing about ten kilograms. He’d been fooling himself: even without Madhusree, he’d never have been able to move them all in one trip. Cradling her in his right arm, holding her against his side the way his mother did, he carried the cans to the beach one by one.

By the time he dropped the last can of fuel on to the sand beside the boat, it was almost three o’clock. Prabir dug his notepad out of one of the bags: it was fully charged, which meant eight hours’ normal operation, but the battery drained three times faster when the screen had to be electronically illuminated. Still, even if they were at sea in darkness he wouldn’t need the map constantly visible.

Madhusree had grown resentful; she’d never been dragged back and forth like this for the sake of a boat trip before. She sat in the shade at the edge of the beach, calling for Ma every minute or two. Prabir replied soothingly, but equally mechanically, ‘We’re going to Ma.’

The notepad’s GPS software included a respectable world map, but Teranesia wasn’t on it; as far as the software was concerned they were already in the middle of the Banda Sea. The Tanimbar Islands were shown, but the smaller islands in the group were just blobs of two or three pixels, and the coastlines of the larger ones appeared crudely rendered, as if they’d been extracted automatically from a satellite image or a cheap printed map. With access to the net Prabir could have substituted the official navigation chart for the region, complete with water depths and information on currents; he’d viewed it a dozen times, but never thought to keep a copy in his notepad. But there was no use dwelling on that. At least Jakarta hadn’t been able to block the GPS signals; if he’d been left with dead reckoning, the sun and the stars, he would have been afraid to leave the island at all.

He fitted the motor to the hull, filled the fuel tank, then dragged the empty boat into the shallows. An image came to him suddenly, from a video his parents had watched back in Calcutta; he’d been asleep in his mother’s arms for most of it, but he’d woken near the end. A man on a deserted beach had tried to drag a wooden boat into the ocean, to make his escape from some war or revolution. But the boat had been too large, too heavy, and no matter how he strove it had remained firmly beached. Prabir shuddered at the memory, but at least he knew they wouldn’t share that fate. Whatever else happened, they wouldn’t be stranded.

He loaded everything into the boat. It sank dismayingly low in the water, but his parents’ combined weight must have been more than the weight of these provisions, and the boat had carried the whole family safely out to the ferry dozens of times. He fetched Madhusree; she didn’t struggle or complain as he fitted her life jacket, merely glaring at him suspiciously.

Prabir put her in the boat, then climbed in himself and stood looking back across the beach. He wouldn’t be gone long; if he completed the test his parents would have no reason to send him away, and everything would be back to normal within a couple of days. The poisoned chrysalis would be forgiven; it was only one butterfly out of all the thousands on the island. Anything could be forgiven if he proved he was capable of getting Madhusree to safety.