Drive-by Saviours Read Free Page A

intermittently, “Your power out too?”
    â€œYep, should someone check with maintenance?”
    Bill, our maintenance guy, fumbled around with the fuse box for a while as we stood around wondering aloud what could have caused a complete power outage.
    â€œAnyone got a battery-operated radio?”
    Mabel, our receptionist, had a battery-operated radio in her drawer, which was filled with gadgets and elastic bands, paper clips and candles, just-in-cases. The radio explained that a central generator Somewhere-in-America had gone down. The reasons were as yet unclear.
    â€œOkay Bill, you can stop pretending to problem-solve,” Mabel shouted to the broom closet.
    â€œWhat now?” I asked Mabel, Sherry, and two other social workers, Connie and Maria.
    Sherry told me, “If you didn’t think you could go home at 4 : 30 , now you can.”

EIGHT BOYS AND SEVEN GIRLS GET LONG-DISTANCE SAVED IN CHAPTER 3
    O nce he started drinking, Yusupu’s transformation from strict but loving father to dangerous and unpredictable man was quick and complete. All that sprightly energy he had once expended at sea was transferred into late nights on the mainland or long nights playing his favourite card game, gaple , back on the island. Bumi’s father always seemed to find a few men to accompany him to a mainland bar. When he came home he blamed Bumi for everything.
    â€œMy son Bumi,” he would say, “who is smarter than the gods and all the men who ever walked the surface of Rilaka. Sure he can barely run or kick a football, but he can add and he can speak the mainland language perfectly. Why would someone like that ever need to be humble?”
    Bumi’s bruisings became so frequent that he resorted to playing football just to get out of the house. On the pitch, a white strip of sand on the south side, Bumi displayed the same ingenuity that had changed the way his island fished. Under Bumi’s leadership football became ‘Monsters of the Deep,’ a complex game of dodge-ball played with the feet, in which two of ten players are monsters, and rolls of dice determine who is kicking the ball at whom and which boys are under suspicion of having eaten their fathers. The boys had been playing this game every day for a week when word got back to Yusupu. Bumi’s mother, Win, chose that very moment to seduce Yusupu, thus saving Bumi, and in the process conceiving Bumi’s sister, Alfi. She was his only sibling and it was plain to all that Yusupu had drowned the best swimmers among his sperm long before her birth.
    Alfi was born as crinkly and brown as Bumi, with wider eyes and a thin third lip. She didn’t speak until she was three, and very little after that. She didn’t speak, but she was an excellent listener. Bumi liked to tell her everything he knew about the world, which was a lot.
    His favourite topic was the mainland market. There Bumi went from failed boy genius at the centre of a father’s anger to a face in the crowd of wheeler-dealers. There the boardroom tables turned so Bumi could chair and his father follow his lead.
    Yusupu, not understanding the language of business, knew that all means of survival—clothing, fuel, medicine, food and drink—depended on his son’s mind for numbers and his instinct for measuring the weaknesses of men. And it wasn’t just Yusupu’s success at stake. If he could ride Bumi’s mind to a good market day, he could afford to be more generous with his profits and all of Rilaka’s families would benefit. In return, they would be more generous with one another, and with Yusupu when he had a poor catch.
    All the rituals and rhythms of life on Rilaka depended on fish and on the islanders’ ability to catch and market it. To a Rilakan, fish is more than food. Fish is survival. It is health. It is justice. It is ceremony and celebration. It is sustainability. It is life. Fish was Bumi’s ticket to the