Coconut Island (short story)

Coconut Island

(click above for story)

A young girl dies while attending a school for the uber-wealthy of Bangladesh on St.Martin's Island. Did she kill herself? Zafar Shah travels down there at her mother's request and uncovers the unexpected, to say the least.

Excerpt:

"The silence lay like a blanket, and the heat emanated from the hills in waves. We forget that sound and light are substances and that they beat on our bodies like any other substance. The quiet of the place affected the body: only a few crickets could be heard, and sometimes the bark of a dog or the call of a child from the village nearby. A plume of smoke rose from between the areca and coconut palms, indicating cooking. Otherwise there was hardly any sign of human activity. The quiet of the place affected the body: there seemed a sudden oneness between mind and body. At night, the darkness affected me similarly. And the moonlight – for it was full moon – clothed the hills and forest in silver. All stress seemed to escape the body: only the heat remained to affect it strangely. The heat of the hills was different; it was an enveloping, ambient heat; it did not descend from above, or rise from below, but embraced one from all sides; it was an erotic heat, suffusing – with the darkness and the silence and the moonlight - the entire personality; it reminded me of an elephant in must."

After the Revolution

"Iranians are too sophisticated to be ruled for ever by a clutch of old men in turbans. The regime has been illiberal and authoritarian. It is often vicious in its suppression of opponents and its disregard for human rights. Iran has the highest rate of judicial executions per head in the world."

- The Economist, 20th June 2009

The Germans were too sophisticated to be ruled by a short corporal. They were illiberal (to put it mildly) and authoritarian (ahem!).
The excelled in everything: from sophisticated composers ranging from Bach, through Beethoven and Brahms, and – whoops! – Wagner, to philosophers like Kant and Nietzsche.

Yet it took a less sophisticated people – the Russians – to stop them.
After the Iranian revolution, the revolutionaries found they had no plan: no one had thought of what kind of regime would replace the Shah's. The only people who had a blueprint – and one from heaven – were the mullahs. Otherwise, the nation would have descended into chaos.

It has been estimated that 11% of Iranians took part in the revolution; the corresponding figure for the Russian revolution is 9%; and for the grand daddy of them all, the French revolution, it is 6%.

All three revolutions had one thing in common: no one knew what to replace the previous regime with, except the mullahs, the Bolsheviks and Napoleon.