The Black Tide

He knew there had been a dhow wrecked during the night because bits of it had come ashore. He asked me whose it was, where it had come from, how many others had been on board — all the questions I knew would be repeated again and again. I shook my head, pretending I didn’t understand. If I said I was alone they wouldn’t believe me. And if I told them about Choffel… I thought of how it would be, trying to explain to a village headman, or even some dumb soldier of a coastguard, about the Aurora B, how we had taken the dhow, cutting it free in a hail of bullets … How could they possibly accept a story like that? They’d think I was mad.

I must have passed out then, or else gone to sleep, for the next thing I knew the wheel of a Land Rover was close beside my head and there were voices. The sun was hot and my clothes, dry now, were stiff with salt. They lifted me up and put me in the back, a soldier sitting with his arm round me so that I didn’t fall off the seat as we jolted along the foreshore to the headquarters building, which was a square white tower overlooking the sea. I was given a cup of sweet black coffee in the adjutant’s office, surrounded by three or four officers, all staring at me curiously. It was the adjutant who did most of the questioning, and when I had explained the circumstances to the increasingly sceptical huddle of dark-skinned faces, I

was taken in to see the colonel, a big, impressive man with a neat little moustache and an explosive voice. Through the open square of the window I found myself looking out on the brown cliffs of the Gwadar Peninsula. I was given another cup of coffee and had to repeat the whole story for his benefit.

I don’t know whether he believed me or not. In spite of the coffee I was half asleep, not caring very much either way. I was telling them the truth. It would have been too much trouble to tell them anything else. But I didn’t say much about Choffel, only that he’d been shot while we were trying to get away in the dhow. Nobody seemed to be concerned about him. His body hadn’t been found and without a body they weren’t interested.

The colonel asked me a number of questions, mostly about the nationality of the men on the tanker and where I thought they were taking it. Finally he picked up his hat and his swagger stick and called for his car. ‘Follow me please,’ he said and led me out into the neatly white-washed forecourt. ‘I now have to take you to the Assistant Commissioner who will find it a difficult problem since you are landed on his lap, you see, with no passport, no identification, and the most unusual story. It is the lack of identity he will find most difficult. You say you have been ship’s officer in Karachi. Do you know somebody in Karachi? Somebody to say who you are?’

I told him there were a lot of people who knew me — port officials, shipping agents, some of those who worked at the Sind Club and at the reception desk of

the Metropole Hotel. Also personal friends. He nodded, beating a tattoo on his knee with his stick as he waited for his car. ‘That will help perhaps.’

The car arrived, the coastguard flag flying on the bonnet, and as we drove out of the compound, he pointed to a long verandahed bungalow of a building just beyond an area of sand laid out with mud bricks baking in the sun — ‘Afterwards, you want the hospital, it is there.’

‘I’ll be all right,’ I said.

He looked at me doubtfully. ‘We get the doctor to have a look at you. I don’t like you to die with me when you have such an interesting story to tell.’

We passed one of those brilliantly colourful trucks, all tinsel and florid paintings, like an elaborately decorated chocolate box; conclusive proof to the wandering haziness of my mind that I really was in Pakistan. From fine-ground sand and a cloud of dust we moved on to tarmac. Glimpses of the sea, long black fishing boats anchored off, their raked masts dancing in the sun — this was the eastern side of the Gwadar Peninsula, the sea still a little wild, the shore white with surf. There was sand everywhere, the sun glaring down.

‘We have a desalination plant, good water from the sea, all by solar.’ The colonel’s voice was far away, the driver’s forage cap perched on his round black head becoming blurred and indistinct against the moving backcloth of open bazaar booths and mud-brick buildings. ‘We see Ahmad Ali Rizivi now.’ The car had stopped, the colonel was getting out. ‘This is

what you call the town hall. It is the house of the Assistant District Commissioner.’