The Salt Between Their Teeth

The deck reeked of sweat and bilgewater, but Hari was accustomed to that. What he couldn't acclimatize to was the noise… the ship's groan with every blow of the waves against its side, as if a beast was being punched. There were nights it sounded just too much like his father's cough on the final days before he consented to sign the girmit.

The recruiters had termed it an agreement, but Hari recalled no signature on the page… only a thumb hard-pressed into black dye, his mother turning away. She had not spoken to him since.

Tonight, the moon cut sharp as a sickle over the Bay of Bengal, and down below the air was bitter with vomit, with prayers muttered into damp shawls. He sat with his back to the planks, legs drawn in, observing Meena… the youngest on board… pursue a loose lentil around her tin plate. She laughed when she corralled it. The laugh was out of place here, amidst so many unclean bodies, and yet it kindled something brutal in him: an urgency to keep her alive.

When cholera arrived, it killed twelve in two days. The corpses were tossed into the ocean, bound in rough sailcloth. Someone reported that a man had leaped after his wife's bundle, and the sailors pounded him until he went down silently. Hari felt sick as he saw each splat. The black, bottomless sea appeared to consume not just bodies but also the Bhojpuri songs that his grandmother sang, the red earth of the fields, the scent of damp wheat.

Weeks turned into one another. He started dreaming of sugarcane… not green reeds from home but white rows stretching on and on, to be harvested. In the dream, the cane oozed when hit.

On one dawn, land appeared on the horizon: Mauritius. The others let out a whoop of excitement, but Hari remained quiet. His mouth was filled with brine. The island had the smell of salt and something sweet, but not sweet enough to be called home.

Later, out on the plantation, hacking at cane beneath a merciless sun, he found himself humming one of his grandmother's songs. The beat was the same as the motion of cutlass, the snap of stalks. Meena listened and joined in, out of tune. For an instant, the noise was larger than the fields, larger than the overseer's lash. It reminded him that they had not been completely consumed. Not yet.

That evening, when he reclined on his mat, his palms sticky with juice of the cane, he licked them dry and tasted sugar and sea. In that bittersweetness, a vow was taking shape… not merely to survive, but to remember.