Blackmail Earth

Chapter 2





I am now Minister of Dirt.

Rafan was actually a civil engineer in the Maldivian Ministry of Home Affairs and Environment, but at the moment he couldn’t get that strange title—Minister of Dirt—out of his head.

With that absurd burden, he stepped into the throng hurrying down the narrow winding street of the Maldivian capital of Malé, where government officials huddled behind white walls and hatched crazy plans to pile dirt on an island to try to save it from the hungry sea.

That’s if Rafan could find dirt. Millions of cubic meters of it. Not easy in the middle of the Indian Ocean. And these days that wasn’t the only absurd plan afloat (though perhaps that was the wrong word for the circumstances). A real government minister—of development—had proposed building a towering skyscraper to house his country’s people. Kind of a modern-day castle with the whole ocean as a moat. Rafan whistled at the madness. Cuckoo.

A crazy country. Crazy. The president was even more ambitious, if equally deluded: He was looking for an entirely new land where he could move everyone, as if a Xanadu were waiting just for them—the cursed Maldivians. And last night Rafan had heard a rumor that some of his government colleagues were already feeling out Sri Lanka, India, and China to see if they wanted to buy the country’s fishing rights. Testing the waters, so to speak. Or, perhaps more to the point, cashing in while they could. Maybe he should, too. Buy land in Asia or Australia and move, like other Maldivians were doing. Every man for himself on a sinking ship.

But Rafan would never abandon his country, so he’d hunt for barges, and try to pile dirt on an island faster than the waves could wash it away. Sisyphus in the age of global warming. Truth be known, even the gossip about selling fishing rights was easier to bear than other rumors that he’d heard, rumors that teemed with memories of smoke and death and screams.

In his white ball cap and dark glasses, white pants and white shirt, Rafan looked too impeccable to be Minister of Dirt. He looked better suited, in the most literal sense, to working behind a desk while a Casablanca fan stirred the sweet tropical air above his salt-and-pepper pate. He was distinguished looking, in the manner of some government officials schooled abroad, and a good head taller than most of his countrymen, who jostled one another in the tight confines of the narrow street.

He maneuvered toward an alley as a muezzin’s call to prayer—adhan—quickened the crowd’s pace. Five times a day the call rose from loudspeakers to remind the faithful of their Islamic beliefs and obligations. It reminded Rafan how much his country had changed in the past decade.

People peeled away to go to mosque, leaving men like him with the uneasy eyes of those who don’t want to be seen ignoring the call. Ten years ago there had been no muezzin and no need to worry about snubbing the faith. Now, more and more Maldivians prayed with the fervor of men and women facing the loss of their homeland, a diaspora like the Jews and Palestinians and so many others had known.

The fever of faith had spread across the archipelago, along with anger hot as cook stones. Even the president and his ministers had made a show of praying underwater at their annual meeting in masks and flippers and oxygen tanks, all of them exhaling perfect bubbles of carbon dioxide and uttering “Allah akbar” before they signed hopeless proclamations with waterproof pens. But if God is so great, why do the pandanus trees bow to the sea, their roots eaten by salt, trunks by waves, until they lie facedown, limbs flattened and extended like worshippers heeding the muezzin? If God’s so great, why does He let the lesser deity Neptune swallow us alive?

When Jenna had been with him, Rafan might have shared these inflammatory thoughts with her and his other friends. Not anymore. Better to let the believers loudly implore the heavens while he quietly moved the earth, taking dirt from one island to another. Robbing Peter to pay Paul. That’s what Jenna used to say. We could make that the official slogan of the Maldives—if we weren’t Muslim. We rob Peter to pay Paul all the time. Rafan thought immediately of the country’s biggest moneymaker: the half-million vacationers lured to the Maldives every year by the Ministry of Tourism. Europeans, Asians, and North and South Americans flew thousands of miles to stay in isolated island resorts; each traveler churned out as much greenhouse gas in an average ten-hour flight as a Maldivian produced in a month. But Rafan’s country needed money, so it welcomed the wealth of the developed world, and robbed the future—and the world’s children—while wearing the smiley face of tourism.

The aroma of curried tuna drew Rafan’s eye to a food cart by the entrance to the alley. He hadn’t eaten in hours, though he hadn’t thought about food till now. It had been like that when he’d fallen in love with Jenna at the start of the new century. He’d walked hand-in-hand with her on this very street on New Year’s Eve 1999; and as the clock struck twelve he pulled her close and kissed her for the first time, hungry only for her, his other appetites as still as the concrete beneath his feet.

Now he relaxed with his meal and leaned against a building, taking a bite of tuna. He was thinking of how to arrange a rendezvous with Senada when a bomb exploded a hundred and fifty feet away. He looked up, stunned by a horrifying ball of flame as wide as the street. An oily cloud rose to the sky.

He dropped his plate and ran toward the screams, dodging survivors reeling past him and glimpsing bodies lying in the ruins of a storefront. He rushed closer, and through the pall saw men, women, and children riddled with nails, scrap metal, and razor-sharp coral chips, their limbs twisted, charred, and melted like the bicycles incinerated by the blast. His eyes raced over the dead and injured, three of them trying to crawl away; he shouted in anguish at the sight of Basheera. She lay in a crater, smoke rising around her where minutes ago the muezzin’s call had turned Rafan’s thoughts to questions of devotion and diaspora.

His sister reached a hand to him, and he ran to her knowing with his first panicky step that a second bomb might await the rescuers.

* * *

Khulood walked a sandy path that separated her thatched home from a seawall on the small island of Dhiggaru. The concrete chunks and coconut shells rose as high as her chest, but could hold back only the refuse the sea tossed to shore, not the warm salty water that spilled through the wall. A week ago the ocean touched her house for the first time, soaking the floorboards by the front door. The wood stayed damp for a full day, and a stubborn stain remained even now, as if the future had cast an inescapable spell.

Khulood had lived on Dhiggaru all her life, as her ancestors had. Her skin was as brown as the voyagers who’d migrated to the Maldives: Ethiopians, Arabs, Indians—people of color and sweat and the sea. But she had traveled only to Malé. Her son, Adnan, had sailed the world and returned with pictures of wondrous places. He worked on ships bigger than many of the islands she could see from her house. But he hadn’t left Dhiggaru for five months. The world, he’d said, was slowing down and didn’t need so much oil. Maybe next year.

She spied him at prayer, eyes filled with Mecca. So much more devout than she.

He turned when he heard her steps, smiled, and rolled up his prayer rug and tucked it under his arm. He’d begun to pray earlier this year when Parvez, his closest friend since childhood, had returned from four years of foreign study of Islam to become a cleric.

Parvez had chided her to pray like her son, but Khulood had declined. She did wear a headscarf, not as a concession but to keep the sun off her scalp.

She and Adnan spoke Dhivehi to each other, although her son’s English had surprised her. Parvez had sent him English language CDs and urged him to study them. No one but Parvez and her son spoke English on the island.

“I will cook fish and cassava,” she said to Adnan.

He walked into the house with her and put away his prayer rug. “I’m not hungry, Mother. You eat. I must see Parvez.”

He spoke his friend’s name shyly, then kissed her cheek. She watched him walk away down the path, which narrowed to a single set of footprints when it passed through a palm grove. Out there, in the gathering darkness, Parvez had made his home.

* * *

Rafan cupped the back of Basheera’s head, easing it inches from the smoking earth. Acrid fumes rose all around them, as if hell itself had exploded. Basheera’s eyes were stark with shock. Blood poured from her mouth.

“They’re coming,” he said to her. Doctors? Or the ones with more bombs? he wondered.

He looked around frantically for help, nose burning from the smoke. Waves of heat drifted over his back, and he turned to a flaming cavern that had been a tea shop. The dead and dying spilled at odd angles all around him, bodies lifted by force and dropped with fury. An old woman struggled to stand. A much younger man with sopping red pants tried to help her, agony in his eyes. They staggered away slowly, clutching each other.

Another bomb. Rafan’s constant fear. He slid his arms under Basheera’s back and legs and climbed to his feet. She was the last of his family, a young woman so slight that he couldn’t feel her weight through his waves of terror. He held her so close that her heart beat against his chest; he remembered her as a curly-haired toddler whom he carried to bed, and as a pretty young girl who splashed in the surf.

Rafan ran toward the hospital, spotting two physicians in white jackets racing to the bombing. “Help her,” he screamed, holding Basheera higher, like an offering.

The woman doctor stopped and opened Basheera’s eyes; Rafan hadn’t noticed that they’d closed. She checked his sister’s pulse. The heart that Rafan had felt seconds ago had failed.

“No,” he pleaded. He shook his head, and his refusal came loudly and without relief.

The doctor held his face in her warm hands and whispered, “Ma-aafu kurey.” I’m sorry. An instant later a second bomb tore apart everyone near the original explosion, and claimed the lives of those who’d tried to rescue the dying, including the doctor’s colleague.

Rafan turned slowly, aware now of Basheera’s enduring weight. His tears fell to her burned and sodden dress, and he cursed the earth and all it held sacred. Then he looked up, shaken by the sight of the doctor, whose life had been spared by his sister’s death, running fearlessly into a curtain of black smoke.

Tenderly, as if he could bruise her still, Rafan laid Basheera on the ground. “Ma-aafu kurey,” he cried to her before he, too, ran into the blackness.

* * *

Adnan lowered his gaze from Parvez. The cleric stared at him from across his prayer rug in the single room of his small house. Then Parvez shifted forward, speaking of an attack by Islamists in Malé. Twelve people killed. Three children.

“This is cruel,” Parvez said. “The radio said they used an IED on our own people. Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, said this is always wrong.”

“Is that what they taught you at school?” Adnan asked.

The cleric nodded without taking his eyes from Adnan, whose skin felt frighteningly alive in the presence of a man so steeped in the highest realms of Islamic thought. And to think Parvez had been his closest childhood friend. That seemed like another life, Parvez another person.

“We must not shed the blood of our own, unless it is our supreme sacrifice.” Parvez leaned closer in the dusky light. “Do you know what I mean?”

Adnan answered with a nod. Parvez rose, his robes swaying. Adnan followed him to a bamboo wardrobe. The cleric opened both doors. Adnan stared at the single item draped on a hanger. Parvez turned it so Adnan could view all of the vest.

“It can end the world as we know it.”

Adnan looked at the heavily stitched pockets—so many of them, and each so empty. Like him. Barely breath in his lungs. It stunned him to know that he had so little of Parvez’s faith, when he wanted to be as true to Islam as his friend.

Parvez placed his hand on Adnan’s shoulder and drew him closer. They stood side by side. “The man who wears this will know Allah’s love. It can end the world as we know it,” he repeated.

“How?”

Parvez whispered his answer, shivery words that spoke of flame.