His father was educating him, you see, as they strode in that sand, and hard work it was. He was a feeble boy and he whined, a mother’s boy, he had been until then. But Papa kept on, determined that the boy should know, and follow him in his way of life. James ate some roasted meat–goat, judging from the upset displayed by the goat’s relatives who were tied up outside. He thought he might be sick. Sweet-smelling smoke came from certain tents along the side of the crowd; this was where the men were smoking ‘bang’, his father said.
The air was alive with hailing and haggling, and Papa was joyous. He pointed out a weird solitary figure at the fringe of the water, facing out in the direction of the pearl banks. They called him the shark binder. Pullul Karras. His job was to keep the sharks from eating the divers. He did this by casting spells. Papa said that the man was a charlatan, but the divers would not go near the sea if he were not there.
‘His is the best job in pearling,’ Papa grinned.
‘Why?’
‘Why don’t you see? He has fantastic opportunities for snitching.’
Apparently everyone snitched.
The conjuror kept up a tranced dancing, his voice rising into a wail, and dropping to a polite appeasing manner, and his body curling and snapping up, arms flung high, repeatedly, like a whip. His eyes were glassy and his lips were black. Papa said that he was supposed to abstain from both food and drink. But, as they watched, he regularly hailed a young boy in a filmy fabric skirt, who had a brass tray with drinks on it. This was ‘toddy’ from the palm wine tree. The shark binder drank one and ordered another. Then another. Now his song came and went without its former conviction, and his arms lost their former height.
‘Papa,’ James said, ‘I don’t think he’s saying the chant right.’
‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I’m sure the sharks will get the point.’
There were fortune tellers and charm setters and religious fanatics. He watched an Indian with matted hair put hooks into the flesh of his breast. Then he was hoisted on ropes and swung around a post, his skin tearing.
‘Don’t look,’ his father said when James screamed. ‘He’s doing penance.’
The hour stretched on and the sun inched its way over to the west, where India lay. The boy wanted to see the divers.
‘The best are called Malawas and are from the Tutacoreen shore,’ said his father, speaking of them as if they were dumb animals, although James was certain they understood. ‘They’re Roman Catholics. A long time ago St Francis Xavier went to the coast of India and baptised the people. Because they’re Christian, they don’t work on Sundays but they also observe any festival, Hindu or Mohammedan. They want protection of all the gods, and you would too if you had to earn your living under a ton of water.’
James wanted to see them go down, so his father contrived for them to go out in one of the diving boats. They set sail for the banks at ten that same evening with the landward breeze. James lay on a wooden seat under a robe with his head on Papa’s lap. The sky overhead was a whirl of southern stars, brighter than any he had ever seen. The divers sat on the bottom of the boat, silent, dark, strangely passive shapes. There were ten of them, and several sailors on each boat. His mind went to where theirs was–he saw a shimmering heat, foul smells, salt, and wonderment. Then darkness. Tomorrow might bring their death.
He must have slept. The dawn was a miracle of gold and pink, with clouds shaped like a funnel through which the daylight poured. He watched the divers oil their bodies, and talk amongst themselves. Each had his set of equipment, ropes, and a large red stone shaped like a pyramid with a hole through the top. Each man picked up the rope and the stone with the toes of his right foot, and the net bag with the toes of his left. He held another rope with his right hand, and, keeping his nostrils shut with the left, jumped into the water and, riding on the stone, sank, rapidly toward the bottom.
James rushed to the edge of the boat. The water was so clear that, by hanging over the thwart, he could see to the bottom. Plunging, the divers became blurred black figures with wavy appendages. When the stones hit bottom they threw themselves flat on the sand and began to swim like insects. They were picking up oysters which lay on the sandy slope and thrusting them into the bags. After a minute, they pulled on the rope and the rowers, who now held the other ends, pulled hand over hand to raise them back to the surface.
And so it went, for hours. When they came to the surface, the divers spewed water from their mouths and nostrils. Sometimes their ears were bleeding. They unloaded, took deep breaths, and picked up their stones with their toes, then they threw them overboard again. They went down fifty times, and each time returned with a bag holding easily a hundred oysters. The boat was filling up with the thorny, grey shells; as they lay in the sun the two halves began to gape. James saw one man slip a wooden wedge in the gap. He watched without letting on as the man ran his finger inside the half opened shell, feeling for pearls. And once at least, James thought the man found what he was looking for.
He had few places to hide a pearl, this diver. He put his hand up and casually wiped his eye. James realised that the pearl was gone–into his eye. He did not tell Papa for fear the man would be punished. If sharks were near they were not biting. James sat in dread and fascination, watching the shining black men who shot in a stream of bubbles straight down into the crystal blue that extended to murk. They were down for what seemed like for ever, then they began to reappear, raised majestically like statues that had been buried.
This was his indoctrination to the pearl hunt. ‘I would like to be a diver for pearls,’ he said solemnly then. But his father said no. ‘No white man could ever go to those depths.’
At noon, the wind changed to blow them back to Ceylon. They sailed in, slowly, and when they neared the beach the oars came out. The gun fired and all the trading and singing stopped. The tied elephants brayed. The tambourines rattled to a climax; the crowd began to run toward the shore. Everyone stared out to sea. Owners and investors, fakirs, traders all, in their eyes a look James was to see more than he ever imagined–a look that was avid and fearful. These men had gambled everything on the find of pearls.
He had listened to his papa well, and understood that no one knew how good the oyster fishery would be. Perhaps the starfish had wormed their way in and eaten the flesh, or the seaweed growing on the shells had killed the animal. The anticipation became a murmur. The murmur became a roar. The sea wind with its sting of salt and sand blew in the waiting faces. Finally the boats were within calling distance. Then everyone–jewellers and boat-owners and officials with sticks in their hands, entertainers with monkeys on their shoulders, with skirts flying and veils lifting, robes flapping against legs–began to move toward the shore.
First James and his father’s boat landed, and then another and another. Amidst the shouting and embracing, the boy understood that there was a huge haul. A great cheer and a roaring began. The soldiers stamped about, excited for their chance to bid and make a fortune. The horses whinnied.
The divers sat, bent over at the chest as if all the air had been pushed out of them. They were shivering, even though it was very hot in the sun, cold inside their dark, oiled skin. Their thin extended ribs made their chests look like birdcages. They alone were silent. James could not take his eyes off them. These men consumed him; those who descend. He remembered a poem from school, Keats’s ‘Endymion’: ‘a moon-beam to the deep, deep water-world’. If they spoke and we listened, what would we learn, the boy wondered
But the divers were herded off to be searched.
James made his way in the pearling business, though not as his father would have had it. He was known neither for acuity nor gambler’s instinct, or skill at selling. He’d be remembered as the one with the gift of the