The Black Tide

We were in a dusty little open space, a sort of square. A janitor in long robes sat in the doorway. I was vaguely conscious of people as I followed the colonel up the steps and into the dark interior. A clerk sat on a high stool at an old-fashioned desk, another ushered us in to an inner office where a man rose from behind a plain wooden desk that might have been a table. He waved us to chairs hastily placed. It was cooler and there were framed maps and texts on the wall — texts from the Koran I presumed. And the inevitable picture of Jinna — Quaid-i-Azam, the man who had led Pakistan out of the Empire, out of India, to independence and partition. The pictures came and went, the voices a dark murmur as a hot wave of weariness broke over me, my head nodding.

Coffee came, the inevitable coffee, the colonel’s hand shaking me, the Assistant District Commissioner gesturing to the cup, a bleak smile of hospitality. He wanted me to tell it again, the whole story. ‘From the beginning please.’ His dark eyes had no warmth. He didn’t care that I was exhausted. He was thinking of me only as a problem washed up by the sea on to his territory, the survivor of a wreck with an improbable story that was going to cause him a lot of trouble. There was a clerk there to take notes.

‘He is Lord of the Day,’ the colonel said, nodding at Rizivi and smiling. ‘He is the Master here. If he says off with his head, then off with his head it is.’ He said it jokingly, but the smile did not extend to his eyes. It

was a warning. Who was the Lord of the Night, I wondered, as I drank the hot sweet coffee, trying to marshal my thoughts so there would be some sort of coherence in what I had to tell him.

I have only the vaguest memory of what I said, or of the questions he asked. Afterwards there was a long pause while he and the colonel talked it over. They didn’t seem to realize I understood Urdu, though it hardly made any difference since I was beyond caring whether they believed me or what they decided to do about me, my eyes closing, my mind drifting into sleep. But not before I had the impression that they were both agreed on one thing at least — to pass the problem to higher authority just as soon as they could. People came and went. The colonel was alone with me for a time. ‘Mr Rizivi arrange air passage for you on the next flight.’ The Assistant District Commissioner came back. He had spoken to Quetta on the R/T. ‘You go to Karachi this afternoon. Already we are consulting with Oman to see if your story is true.’

I should have made the point then that the Aurora B would probably have sailed by the time arrangements had been made for a reconnaissance flight over the kbawr, but my mind was concentrated entirely on the fact that I was being flown to Karachi. Nothing else mattered. We were in the car again and a few minutes later the colonel and his driver were thrusting me along a verandah crowded with the sick and their relatives to an office where an overworked doctor in a white coat was examining a man whose chest was covered in skin sores. He pushed him away as we

entered, peering at me through thick-lensed glasses. ‘You the survivor of the wrecked dhow?’

I nodded.

‘They talk of nothing else.’ He jerked his head at the crowded verandah. ‘Everybody I see today. They all have a theory, you see, as to how it happened. How did it happen? You tell me.’ He lifted my eyelids with a dark thumb, brown eyes peering at me closely. ‘They say there is no naukbada, only a solitary English. Is you, eh?’

I nodded, feeling his hands running over my body. ‘No fractures. Some bruising, nothing else.’ He pulled open my shirt, a stethoscope to his ears, his voice running on. Finally he stood back, told me there was nothing wrong with me except lack of sleep and nervous exhaustion. He gave me some pills and made me take one of them with a glass of water right there in the stuffy confines of his little consulting room. After that I don’t remember anything at all until I was in a Land Rover being driven out to the airfield, the wind and dust blowing, the land flat, a desert scene with passengers and officials standing in the glare of the sun, baggage lying around them on the ground.

The plane came in, a Fokker Friendship bright as a dragon-fly against the hard blue of the sky, the gravel airfield spouting long streamers of dust as its wheels touched down. The adjutant himself saw me on to the plane and remained beside it until the door of the fuselage was finally closed. We took off and from my window I had a good view of Gwadar as we climbed and banked, the hammer-headed peninsula with an