3 Her Job, His Fight JUNE 1968
5 What Sumbul Says AUGUST 1992
The fishing boats dock before the dawn, while the turtle digs her nest. She watches with one eye seaward, the other on the many huts dotting the shore. The nearest is just thirty feet away. She burrows fiercely, kicking up telltale showers of sand, recalling how much safer it had been when the coastline belonged to the fishermen. Now the boats sail in like giant moths, and though she wonders at their catch, it is for the visitors from the city, hidden in their huts, that her brow has creased beyond her age.
She is ready. The first egg plops softly in the hollow beneath her womb, and the rest follow, unstoppable now. The fishing nets glisten in the moonlight with small fry. How long before she dips into the waters again?
A boy, not yet fifteen, lights a K2 and leans back into the ridge of a dune. Long locks tumble over his shoulders and flare in the wind. Between puffs, he kisses the end of the cigarette, so content is he. The turtle watches him watch her when most defenseless. But she knows him; all the turtles do.
Her eggs are smooth and oval, like a naked woman’s shoulders. The boy caresses his cheek, wanting really to caress the eggs, wanting really to caress the shoulders.
His locks billow and his mood is suddenly ruffled by thoughts of his father and uncles, who did not go out tonight. They say the foreign trawlers have stolen their sea. They trespass. Fish once abundant close to shore are now disappearing even in the deep. And the fishermen’s boats cannot go out that far, even for the fish still left to catch. An uncle tried. It was he who was eaten. His family mourns the brave man’s drowning, and his father’s decision to break with tradition. They will move to the city. The boy will go first. But he is afraid, as afraid as the turtle is, of the men in the huts.
He pulls on his cigarette and wonders at the turtle. She meets his gaze with the soothing, crackly wisdom of his grandmother. He shuts his eyes and drifts into soft sleep.
Then he jolts awake: voices. Glancing quickly at the reptile, he sees her still giving birth. But dawn is tinged with foreboding. The shadow of a man stretches upon the dune beside him and creeps forward. The boy ducks. Squinting toward the huts, he sees a woman, naked below the knees, waiting. The intruder walks into view, stumbles and farts. He will not even rob the turtle gently. The boy bristles with anger, wondering what to do. He decides quickly. If the man takes a single egg, he will take the woman.
A shaggy arm crooks toward the nest, and waits, ripe fingers nearly scraping the reptile’s orifice for a gift. The boy dashes. The woman screams. Others emerge from the hut’s interior. The intruder hurtles back. The egg drops safely into the sand a fraction of a second after he is gone.
Their first kick dislodges a knee. Long hair is a hindrance, he thinks, as they use it to drag him over the line of rocks circling the hut’s porch. If I live I’ll never wear it below the chin again. There is salt in his mouth. Salt and gravel. His blood and his teeth. He swoons, but instead of their blows, he hears shells split. Thud! Crack! The men are pelting him with the eggs.
A moan rises from the pit of his groin, up to an empty cavity below his chest, shrugging its way higher, out of his nose, his ears, and mouth. He vomits oyster-white albumen and curdled vitellus, bloodied placenta, and something green. Liver?
Though blind with pain, it is he alone who sees the mound of the mother meandering silently back home.
Dia sat in the mulberry tree her father had sheltered in the night before his death. A large man, he’d been limber too. Squatting had come easy. The crowd below had included journalists, neighbors and police. They’d asked if it were true: was he getting death threats?
Her father weighed ninety kilos and hunkered like a gentle ape, shuffling about in the foliage, appraising his audience with two small brown eyes that flashed like rockets. Every few minutes, he mustered up enough nerve to shake some berries. When they struck a particularly distasteful newsman or auntie, he slapped a knee with