Teranesia

He’d never learnt his way around Ambon as a child, relying on his parents to shepherd him. He recognised none of the buildings he passed, and he had no real sense of where he was in relation to the shops and markets where they’d bought provisions. But the angle of the light, the scent of the air, were enough to evoke a discomforting sense of reconnection. He didn’t need to see the past re-created brick by brick to feel the tug of it inside him.

A small group of people in brightly coloured, formal-looking clothes stood at the edge of the main square, arms outstretched at their sides, eyes half closed, perspiring heavily, singing. Behind them, a sagging cardboard sign bore a few dozen words in Indonesian. Prabir was too tired to dredge his memory for an uncertain translation, and when he saw a citation at the bottom – book, chapter and verse – he decided not to bother fishing out his notepad for help.

Hordes of evangelical Christians from the US had descended on the region in the wake of the civil war, but they’d had far more success in West Papua, where even the current President had been converted to born-again psychosis. Prabir wasn’t sure why the Moluccans had proved so resistant this time round; they’d been a pushover for Spanish Catholicism, then chucked it all in for Dutch Protestantism – though that must have been at least partly a matter of trying to get along with whoever held the guns to their heads from year to year. Maybe the Americans hadn’t tried hard enough to conceal their phobia of Islam, which would not have gone down too well here. Relations between Christians and Muslims on Ambon had suffered almost irreparable damage in the early years of the post-Suharto chaos, with provocateur-led riots claiming hundreds of lives. A decade later, entire villages had been wiped out under cover of war. With independence, the government of the Republik Maluku Selatan had set about reviving a five-hundred-year-old tradition of alliances between Christian and Muslim villages; these pela alliances had once been famously successful at defusing inter-religious tensions, and still ran so deep on some outlying islands that Christians built mosques for their neighbours, Muslims built churches. The return of pela, with the opportunity it provided to write off the years of violence as an aberration, was probably the main reason the RMS hadn’t torn itself apart in an endless cycle of revenge killing.

Prabir was about to move on when he noticed the exhibit at the singers’ feet, largely obscured by the pedestrians passing in front of it. Some kind of animal had been inexpertly dissected, and the parts laid out on a stained canvas sheet. Reluctantly, he moved closer. The viscera and the separated bones meant nothing to him; the intended audience had probably had more experience with butchering animals, and would at least know what was meant to impress them. The skull looked like a small marsupial’s, a tree kangaroo or a cuscus. Some pieces of the hide were thickly furred; others were covered in shiny brown scales. But if the creature really had been some kind of astonishing chimera, why lessen the impact by cutting it up?

One of the evangelists opened her eyes and beamed at him. His clothes and backpack must have given him away as a foreigner; the woman addressed him in halting English. ‘End times, brother! End times upon us!’

Prabir replied apologetically, in Bengali, that he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

The desk clerk at the Amboina Hotel was far too polite to laugh when Prabir asked where he might hire a boat as cheaply as possible. The response – couched in the most diplomatic language – was that he could forget about the ‘cheap’ part and join the queue. Everyone who’d arrived in town for the last two months had been looking for a boat; it was a seller’s market.

This was a dispiriting start, but Prabir fought down the urge to retreat into pessimism. ‘There was a group of about twenty people who would have passed through Ambon three weeks ago. Scientists, on an expedition being mounted by some foreign universities. Have you heard anything about that?’ There were half a dozen other places they could have stayed, but he had nothing to lose by asking.

‘No. But we have many guests here from foreign universities.’

‘You mean, in general? Or in the hotel right now?’

The man glanced at his watch. ‘Mostly in the bar, right now.’

Prabir couldn’t believe his luck. They must have completed the first stage of their work and returned to base to recuperate. They could hardly have been stranded here all this time; they would have organised transport well in advance.