The Officer’s Cove was a strip of beach nestled between a semi-circle of rocks. Would-be visitors had to pass through two checkpoints to reach it, which was often the case with some of the least interesting places in the City. But when the Nissan Patrol pulled up to the cliff overlooking the Cove, Hasan decided it would be well worth his while to draw up elaborate plans involving deception, diversion and disguise that would allow him to gain access to the Cove without the aid of generals.
The water was clearer here than anywhere outside of pictures. Even from this height Hasan could see the sand beneath the water, with tiny pebbles scattered across the seabed instead of sharp-edged rocks or limb-tangling seaweed. A crab scuttled out of a hole in the sand near the cliff’s base, but it was not of the purple, pincer-clawed variety that could cause so much glee when seen on the end of a crabbing reel yet was a source of terror when it zig-zagged in proximity to bare feet. No, the crab down below was almost a spider, dancing across the sand in a camouflage that suggested shyness rather than subterfuge. At the edges of the cove, where rock arms cradled the beach and prevented it from slipping into the sea, rockpools promised glimpses of strange sea-creatures.
‘Cool hut,’ Rabia said. Hasan turned away from the beach and looked at the red ‘hut’ which would not have been out of place in the most upscale neighbourhoods of the City. There was even a satellite dish on the roof, and a garden at the back. Inside, there were two bathrooms, three bedrooms, a spacious kitchen and a large lounge with a dining table at one end. The walls were covered with paintings by Ami and Auntie Poops and the most despised man in the artists’ community, known variously as ‘Oh, Him!’, ‘Not Him!’ and ‘Him Again!’ Hasan wondered if any of the officers realized that the model for Ami’s ‘Departing Man Seen Through Lattice’ was Salman Mamoo.
‘So you’re Saira’s son?’
Hasan turned to face a man who could honestly say that his hair was silver, not white. ‘Yes,’ he said.
The man smiled and extended his hand. ‘Your Nana was a great friend of mine,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he would be happy to know that the ties of friendship between our two families have extended down the generations.’ He released Hasan’s hand and looked up at Ami’s painting. ‘She’s captured the slope of Salman’s back perfectly.’ Hasan looked at the painting and remembered how it felt to rest his cheek against that back, his arms encircling Salman Mamoo’s waist. He wished he could paint out the lattice. General Jojo filled his cheeks with air, and exhaled slowly. Najam came up to Hasan, and patted his shoulder. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get changed. Everyone’s already in the water.’ This was worse than when Zehra spoke gently to Hasan.
‘I’m fine,’ Hasan said, shrugging off Najam’s hand. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’
General Jojo saluted smartly and turned to join Javed’s parents and their friends on the deck-chairs outdoors. Hasan stripped down to his swimming trunks in the bedroom and made his way down the half-broken steps which dissected the cliff-face, jumping off the second-last step so that he could feel his feet sink into the warm sand.
‘Come on,’ his classmates yelled from the sea. ‘Come on, Hussar.’ Hasan grinned, and pointed to a spot just behind them.
‘Wave!’ he yelled.
The wave was just beginning to swell, somewhere between the swimmers and the horizon, but already it was obvious that it would be a big one. Hasan started to run, his feet moving too fast to sink in the sand, gathering speed even though there was no question of sinking now that he was on the wet, packed sand, toeprints and tiny indentations of heels marking his rapid progress; the sea backed up a few inches, intimidated by the single-mindedness of his approach, but it could not withdraw fast enough and Hasan’s feet were moving through water, trying to outpace the chill, leaping rather than running now, until the water reached halfway up his calf, and then he dived in, buffeting aside the water with his arms. The wave kept growing. Just ahead of Hasan, Javed lifted his head out of the water just long enough to contemplate the size of the wave and yelled, ‘Oh, dung!’. He turned and began paddling back to shore, Rabia and Ali and Ayesha following.
Najam was a few feet ahead of Hasan, Zehra beside him. Hasan stopped swimming and trod water. This was where he would meet the wave. It was a vast wall of water now, gloriously terrifying. All the swimmers turned their backs on it, but kept their heads swivelled so they could watch its approach. Through the corner of his eye, Hasan saw Najam, and then Zehra, leap up and forward into the wave as it arced above them, and at that instant he knew Najam had chosen the perfect spot, because just after they leaped the crest of the wave dipped. Now it was bearing down on him, and Hasan leaped but he was rolling, not riding, rolling beneath the water, his body tossed around, water entering nose and mouth and everything and the noise of the world disappeared; there was only a sensation of helplessness and flailing arms and the impossibility of knowing if he was near the shore or somehow being pulled in the opposite direction and was that a leg or a turtle or a pebble that hit him and suddenly there was air again.
Hasan coughed and expelled water. Nearby, Omar was doing the same. Hasan stood up, rubbed the sting out of his eye and leaned his head to one side, pounding his left ear with the flat of his palm to eject water from his right ear. Zehra and Najam were already swimming back out to meet the next wave, flushed with the triumph of being carried all the way to shore on the crest.
‘Well, at least you did better than me,’ Javed said. ‘Come on, Hussar, we’ll ride the next one.’
Hasan shook his head. His teeth were chattering. ‘I need food first.’ He ran his tongue along his lips. ‘But nothing too salty.’ He trudged back up to the hut, waving off Ali and Ayesha’s invitation to join them in a walk to the rockpools. He procured a slice of fruit-cake from the kitchen, and hoisted himself on to the bonnet of a Nissan Patrol. The bonnet was hot beneath his legs and calmed his shivering immediately.
‘Oh, here it is!’ Hasan whispered. He leaned against the windshield, and breathed in the sea. He recognized the mood of the moment immediately; it was the same one he had found in Salman Mamoo’s garden at dawn when Azeem’s fall had been the most unfathomable thing in his life: the mood which allowed memory without pain.
A few months earlier – yes, it didn’t hurt to think this – Hasan had been at another City beach, sitting on the terrace of Aba’s firm’s beach hut, drinking a cup of tea just hot enough to cut the chill of the first winter breeze. The sky had been merely blue straight ahead of him, but when he swivelled his eyes to the right he saw clouds and, through a chink in one, the sun. At first the sun was golden, bordering on white, and Hasan could look straight at it without squinting. Rays of light slanted into the water, and a filigree of gold stretched across the horizon. Hasan wished the grown-ups inside the hut would stop arguing so that he could better hear the waves providing a soundtrack for the sunset. For a moment the clouds obscured the sun completely; then the chink reappeared and the sun was flame-red.
Ordinarily, nothing would have distracted Hasan from the final minutes of sunset, but that day his eye caught something dark move across the water. Visible one moment, then gone. ‘Seaweed,’ Hasan said to his teacup, and then he glimpsed it again.
‘Salman Mamoo!’ he yelled. ‘Quickly!’
Almost instantly Salman Mamoo was beside him. ‘What? What is it?’
‘Watch. There’s something out there. I saw it twice. Wait, it’ll reappear.’
A flash of tail, an arc through the air, and back it knifed into the water. ‘Oh wow!’ Salman Mamoo breathed. ‘Saira! Sherry! All of you! Black dolphins!’
A whole school of them, suddenly, everywhere. Their backs arching through the waves, sometimes two in tandem, one just behind the other so they looked like one dolphin, extra long; sometimes one leapt a little higher and its tail broke free of the water. Just when Hasan thought they were gone, one would rise from the waves again, and again, until sea and sky were dark and the dolphins were still darker forms rising through the phosphorescent waves. When Hasan thought of dinner and looked away, they disappeared.
A few weeks later, during mid-term, Hasan was sitting on the branches of a mango tree in Salman Mamoo’s garden, when Salman Mamoo hoisted himself up beside Hasan. ‘Good place to talk without worrying about wire-taps,’ he said. ‘This must all be very mystifying to you.’
‘A little,’ Hasan said. ‘Why exactly is everyone so worried about the military? I mean, I know the President isn’t nice, and he’s put you under house-arrest and all that, but what’s he going to do? I mean, why is everyone so scared?’
Salman Mamoo plucked a leaf off the branch, and started poking holes into it with his fingernail. ‘Remember the dolphins?’ he said. ‘Yes, of course you do.’ He looked up at the sky, and pointed out Orion’s belt, but today Hasan wasn’t interested in constellations. ‘Watching the dolphins, Hasan, I felt I could believe in magic, and I understood why I believe in God, but only later did I realize why the moment seemed so important. See, Huss, it wasn’t the dolphins. It was the way everyone reacted to them. I don’t know if you were paying attention to the conversation inside the hut just before you called me outside . . .
‘Everyone was yelling at each other.’
‘Yes. It was one of those things. There were eight people, and nine points of view in that room and dammit each one of us could yell our point of view as loudly as anyone else! But then the dolphins swam into sight and – remember this? – suddenly everyone was in agreement. Standing on the terrace, looking out of the door, the windows, all of us, all so awed and moved by those – let’s face it – fish, that for a moment arguments seemed impossible. How could we disagree about anything, or raise our voices in anger at each other, when we had stood together seeing dolphins leap against a sunset?’
‘Things did get quiet after that,’ Hasan concurred. ‘But dolphins are mammals, not fish.’
‘Well, that’s a relief,’ Salman Mamoo laughed. ‘I can maintain my low opinion of fish.’
‘Are you trying to not answer my question?’
‘No, no. All countries need dolphins, Hasan. But the General, our self-exalted leader, well, I’ve seen the way he operates. If he saw people in a hut drawing together to view a dolphin, he would shoot the dolphin dead. Then he’d plant clues to suggest to each person that someone else in the hut had pulled the trigger, and when the accusations turned to violence and everyone was intent on ducking and throwing punches, he would sneak out and sell the carcass for a handsome profit. The worst part is, before long some of the people in that hut would become dolphin-killers themselves. And Huss, I don’t think I could live in a world without dolphins.’
Hasan jerked upright on the car bonnet. That was it! Salman Mamoo’s spirit wanted dolphins. But – Hasan’s eyes swept across the still water – but if the President killed dolphins and created dolphin-killers, then for Salman Mamoo to live . . .
Zehra hopped on to the bonnet beside Hasan. ‘Hey, lonesome,’ she said.
‘Oh, God!’ Hasan moaned, slumping forward. ‘Someone’s got to depose the President. Someone’s got to depose him within thirty-six days.’