Teranesia Read Free

strained his ears long enough to check that he wasn’t being libelled, then went and
     sat on the bench outside his own hut. It was mid-morning, and the beach had grown uncomfortably hot, but most of the kampung
     would remain in shade until noon. Prabir could still remember the day they’d arrived, almost three years before, with half
     a dozen labourers from Kai Besar to help them clear away vegetation and assemble the pre-fabricated huts. He still wasn’t
     sure whether the men had been joking when they’d referred to the ring of six buildings with a word that meant ‘village’, but
     the term had stuck.
    A familiar crashing sound came from the edge of the kampung; a couple of fruit pigeons had landed on the branch of a nutmeg
     tree. The blue-white birds were larger than chickens, and though they were slightly more streamlined in their own plump way
     it still seemed extraordinary to Prabir that they could fly at all. One of them stretched its comically extensible mouth around
     a nutmeg fruit the size of a small apricot; the other looked on stupidly, cooing and clacking, before sidling away to search
     for food of its own.
    Prabir had been planning to try out his idea for altitude measurement as soon as he was free of Madhusree, but on the way
     back from the beach he’d thought of some complications.For a start, he wasn’t confident that he could distinguish between the shore of a distant island and part of a cliff or an
     inland mountain, visible over the horizon because of its height. Maybe if he could persuade his father to let him borrow the
     binoculars he’d be able to tell the difference, but there was another, more serious problem. Refraction due to atmospheric
     temperature gradients – the same effect that made the sun appear swollen as it approached the horizon – would bend the light
     he was trying to use as one side of a Pythagorean triangle. Of course, someone had probably worked out a way to take this
     into account, and it wouldn’t be hard to track down the appropriate equations and program them into his notepad, but even
     if he could find all the temperature data he needed – from some regional meteorological model or weather satellite thermal
     image – he wouldn’t really understand what he was doing; he’d just be following instructions blindly.
    Prabir suddenly recognised his name amongst the murmuring coming from the butterfly hut – spoken not by Madhusree, who could
     barely pronounce it, but by his father. He tried to make out the words that followed, but the fruit pigeons wouldn’t shut
     up. He scanned the ground for something to throw at them, then decided that any attempt to drive them away would probably
     be a long, noisy process. He rose to his feet and tiptoed around to the back of the hut, to press one ear against the fibreglass.
    ‘How’s he going to cope when he has to go to a normal school back in India, in a real solid classroom six hours a day, when
     he’s barely learnt to sit still for five minutes? The sooner he gets used to it, the less of a shock it will be. If we wait
     until we’re finished here, he could be … what? Eleven, twelve years old? He’ll be uncontrollable!’ Prabir could tell that
     his father had been speaking for a while. He always began arguments dispassionately, as if he was indifferent to the subject
     under discussion. It took several minutes for this level of exasperation to creep into his voice.
    His mother laughed her who’s-talking laugh. ‘You were eleven the first time you sat in a classroom!’
    ‘Yes, and that was hard enough. And at least I’d been exposed to other human beings. You think he’s being socialised properly
     through a satellite link?’
    There was such a long silence that Prabir began to wonder if his mother was replying too softly for him to hear. Then she
     said plaintively, ‘Where, though? Calcutta’s too far away, Rajendra. We’d never see him.’
    ‘It’s a three-hour flight.’
    ‘From