A cry goes up on deck. One of the school, by all indications a heavier, older specimen, a veteran of five years of unmolested navigation, has taken a bite at a bait of mackerel. Fifteen minutes later he announces himself on the starboard side, panicked and enraged, his tail hammering against the boat. Fifty kilos in weight, he is attempting to prise himself free of the cable tearing apart his palette, but he does not count on two men, above him at either end, reaching into the water with steel hooks and flipping him onto the deck with a victorious cry. Pandemonium follows. The tuna has never been this far out of the water, has never seen light this bright, but he knows instinctively that he will drown in so much air. The fishermen need him to stop flooding his arteries with blood in panic, or he will darken and therefore ruin the appearance of his flesh against a dinner plate. So the captain’s brother swiftly wrestles him between his rubber boots and raises aloft a large blunt mallet, resembling the archetypal club of prehistoric man, carved from the trunk of a coconut tree. He brings it down heavily. The tuna’s eyes jerk out of their sockets. His tail convulses. His jaw opens and closes, as ours might do, but no scream emerges. The mallet strikes again. There is a dull sound, that of densely packed brain and experience, shattering inside a tight bony cage, triggering the thought that we too are never more than one hard slam away from a definitive end to our carefully arranged ideas and copious involvement with ourselves. The fisherman himself is enraged now, striking the beast vengefully, cursing the dying creature in Dhivehi “Nagooballa, nagooballa, hey aruvaalaani” (“Bitch, bitch, you’ve had it now”). This is the first tuna he’s caught in eight days and there are six children waiting at home.
Rich red blood explodes from the creature’s brain and sprays across the boat. Two of the younger crewman rush forward and slit open his mouth, pulling out his gills and ventilation system. Next they turn their knives to his stomach releasing the undigested bodies of smaller fish – fusiliers, cardinal fish, sprats – on which he has breakfasted at the start of this infernal day. The deck becomes slippery with organs. As the killing spree goes on I find myself thinking obsessively of my elder son, four years old and about the same length as some of the larger fish. It is no longer implausible that, as many religions maintain, we are all in the end, from moth to president, members of the same, large, irrevocably fratricidal family. Unburdened of his guts and reproductive tract, the tuna is hoisted in the air and plunged into the first of four refrigerated compartments, which will, by nightfall, be filled by the bodies of a further twenty of his companions. One wonders what the atmosphere will be like in the school, 60 metres below, as the survivors pursue their way to Somalia; whether there will be a memory of the absent members and, in the pitch-black waters, a terrible fear.