Over the last few days of that tortuous journey our boatman developed a taste for human flesh. He hid the old man's carcass under a tarpaulin. It was to save the flesh from getting soaked in rain. Poor man! He would have died anyway if he had stayed back home. Would have been killed by the blood purifiers: the army, the angry Mogs. Worse, his own folk were eating his flesh now.
I remember things in pieces. I cannot tell you for sure if Yunus killed the old man. Or he had died of hunger. But he was starving for weeks. So was I. We were lost in a watery wilderness weeks ago. Our engine broke. Our food depleted. Our clothes rotted in the heat and rain. And one day we saw the sun rising behind us. But we told ourselves that we must sail towards it. Not away from it. We realised that death was crawling into our boat. So, one by one, all the passengers died. Starving. Except the three of us.
Yunus thought we were only two. Left now at the mercy of the sea. He could not see my baby daughter in the hold. He did not hear her cry when I gave birth to her. The sea was calm in the morning. And there was no cloud in the sky. But a storm broke out towards the evening. It came from nowhere. First, I could see only a strip of pale cloud. Soon it became thick and black. Like a woman's black hair – with yellow tints streaking across it. It looked as if it was the sky of the keyamat day. I had never seen such a strange sky in my life. It was then I felt the dull aching pain in my lower back. I felt somebody was trying to make a way out of my womb!
You see a boat riding a stormy sea was not the room a mother would want her baby to be born in. Big waves rolled under the boat. Crashed against the hull. The poor vessel began to bob nervously. It tossed and turned. As if in a nightmare. It was ready to dive into the bottom of the sea. With each wave rushing in, I feared the boat would capsize. I descended the small ladder that led to the hold, clawing at anything I found within reach. It was the last place I would have chosen for my delivery. I had been there during those hellish days, crammed in with ninety-nine people dreaming to cross the Andaman. You could barely breathe inside. You could never see the sky. It still had the stench of our urine and faeces. A foul odour always hovered between the floor and walls. But I had nowhere else to go now.