He sank to his knees. The newly settled dirt received him softly, and he tried to pray, as he’d tried at the burial with seven men beside him, all of them staring into her open grave. None of them had known Basheera well. For her sake he’d cast prayers to heaven, trying to reel in grace, forgiveness, hope. But his eyes had returned unsoothed to this fresh wound in the earth.
Basheera’s three dearest friends, fellow teachers at the English Language School in Malé, were not permitted at her gravesite, for “Allah has cursed women who frequent graves for visitation,” a quote attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. It gave rise in many locales to the rule barring women, made and enforced by men, to spare them the emotions of wives, sisters, daughters.
Basheera would have hated the ceremony, so male and mannerly, though she might have laughed, as she had many times, at the irony of her life as a Muslim woman: torn by her faith, troubled yet true—and scorned by extremists whose anger stifled debate and silenced dissent.
Do you know you killed one of your enemies? Rafan had wanted to scream yesterday as dirt darkened the shroud that covered Basheera. She hated what you do. What you say. But to shout would have granted them a greater victory, and he never would have done that.
Instead, he would defy them—and honor his sister—under the quiet cover of darkness. He would usher Fatima, Musnah, and Senada—the dark-eyed, dark-haired married woman whom he loved dearly—to Basheera’s grave. The three women, all friends of his sister’s, planned to scatter petals of the pink rose, her favorite flower.
No one guarded the cemetery. No one would stop them when night came. Even prying stubborn eyes had to sleep.
* * *
Hours away, on the small island of Dhiggaru, Adnan took his first clumsy steps in a pair of black flippers. Like a seal on a beach, he thought. He turned to look at his impressions in the sand, so big he could have been a giant. Or a monster?
Just nine steps to the water. That’s all. The strip of sand had narrowed and trees had fallen. They’d washed away, or languished in the gentle surf, shifting side to side with the thrust and parry of the sea.
Parvez had loaned him the mask, snorkel, and fins. “You must see for yourself,” he’d said.
“But I know about it.”
“See it,” the religious leader had insisted. “Touch it. It is not only sand that disappears. The reef is dying.”
The warm water swirled around Adnan’s legs; but in the distance the ocean appeared flat and still, reflecting the sun’s blinding rays like a mirror.
He rinsed the mask before he put it on, and swam with his eyes on the ocean bottom, watching the scalloped sand slowly recede as the water deepened. He’d swum with sea turtles as a boy, when his fears of sharks had lessened and he’d chanced the dark blue waters far from shore, once shadowing a turtle as large as himself. The creature had glided fathoms below him, fins lifting and falling in unison, effortless as palm fronds in a breeze. For many minutes he’d trailed the turtle, mesmerized by a hard shell so alive in the soft embrace of sea. He’d felt buoyant and free, unfettered by land or air or need.
The turtle swam away, and the spell was broken. Adnan had treaded water and looked to shore, so distant that it had been almost impossible to see. Yet he’d been filled not with the immensity of the ocean—his speck of life on the blank face of water—but with the vastness of the universe itself, for that’s what he’d known in his absolute isolation: the endless unraveling hand of God.
Only the memory remained—not the overriding sense of the divine—as he swam the last few meters to the coral reef, white and lifeless as sand, killed by an invisible gas that spilled from the sky and formed a deadly ocean acid.
“They have played God with our world,” Parvez had said when he’d handed Adnan the snorkeling gear. “They took all of creation in their hands and squeezed it like a lime until no more juice ran into their bowls.”
Adnan had listened. Now he placed his hand on the coral. Dead. He’d never known that a reef could feel so devoid of life, but this one did. The silent heartbeat of the ocean’s hardest growth had vanished. He remembered an admonition of his youth—“Don’t touch the reef”—because human