Teranesia

The only trouble was, this was bullshit. Even writing off as aberrations the vast number of parents who never came close to that ideal, no one’s love was unconditional. Children could gain or lose favour through their actions, just like any stranger. Had the possibility of rejection itself been fine-tuned by natural selection, to improve the child’s prospects of survival by instilling a suitably pragmatic moral code? Or was it all a thousand times subtler than that? Human parents weren’t bundles of twitching reflexes; they agonised over every decision. And yet, you could reflect and reason all you liked, mapping out an elaborate web of consequences that might not have occurred to you if you’d acted in haste, but in the end you still had to decide what was right, and the touchstone for that was as primal as it was for any gut feeling.

Felix would have told him that none of this mattered – however fascinating it was, scientifically. In the end we were what we were, and it made no difference how we’d got there. But that wasn’t such an easy mantra to recite when you’d travelled halfway around the planet, with no clear idea why. Prabir had resigned himself to his inability to reason away the dread he felt at the thought of Madhusree setting foot on the island; whether or not it was out of all proportion to any real risk she faced, he couldn’t expect to shake off the past so lightly. But he wasn’t even sure what fear, or what drive, the fulcrum of Teranesia had rendered so powerful. Was he still trying to impress his dead parents with his dedication? He’d always relied on his memory of them for guidance – and their imagined approval had always been the one sure sign that he’d done something right – but he didn’t believe that he’d reduced Madhusree to a pawn in some game with the ghosts in his head. Still less could he accept that everything between them revolved around the obscure Mendelian fact that she was the only living person who could carry half his genes into the future. Madhusree wasn’t only his sister; she was his oldest friend and staunchest ally. Why wouldn’t he take a few weeks’ vacation from a job he hated to look out for her in a dangerous corner of the world?

Prabir turned away from the hospital and started back towards the city. However much he might have loved, admired and respected her if they’d met for the first time under Amita’s roof – if she’d been adopted from some other family entirely, but still chosen to flee that madhouse with him at the first opportunity – he was almost certain that he would never have been willing to follow her all the way to Teranesia.

Prabir had flown into Ambon once before, but he had no clear memory of the descent. This time, at least, it was startlingly apparent – as it had never been from sea level, approaching in the ferry – that the mist-shrouded island was actually a pair of distinct volcanic bodies, connected in geologically recent times by a narrow isthmus of silt. Ambon Harbour was the largest part of what had once been the strait between these two separate islands; if it had penetrated any deeper it would have come out the other side.

Pattimura Airport lay on the north-west shore of the harbour; Ambon City was ten kilometres due east. Prabir watched one speedboat crossing the water, overloaded with people and luggage, and decided to take the long way round.

Waiting on the highway for the bus, he felt self-conscious in a very different way than he had in Darwin; he was almost afraid that someone might recognise him and ask him to account for his long absence. That wasn’t very likely; the people they’d met here had been friendly enough, but with his broken Indonesian and the family’s infrequent visits, he’d never really had the chance to get to know anyone.

The trip around the harbour took almost an hour. The water looked much cleaner than he remembered; there’d usually been a plume of oil and floating garbage stretching out to surround the ferry before it had even entered the harbour.

He alighted in the city and set out for the hotel. The streets were cobblestone, recently refurbished, lined with tall palm trees at regular intervals; the whining scooters he remembered being everywhere had apparently been banished from the city centre. There were no billboards, and no intrusively modern signs on the shops; an almost uniform row of white stone façades shone in the sun. The whole thing was probably a calculated attempt to re-create the style of the Dutch colonial period for the tourists, most traces of the real thing having been comprehensively bombed into dust during World War II.