“Does the defendant admit posting this message after the sinking of the ship Deep Power?” The prosecution lawyer looked up from his papers, directly at Kaveri. “I quote: ‘A hundred oilers nowhere near make up for even a single whale fall, but I guess it’s a start, el-oh-el’.”
My cousin, blank-faced in the dock, said, “Yes.”
The tight bun she’d made of her plaited hair was coming undone. I wanted to go to her and re-tie it. I gripped my thighs with aching fingers and waited.
It wasn’t truly an oil ship—I don’t know if any ultra-deepwater drilling ships still operate—but trawling for rare earth elements was hardly different, in her mind.
I was scared they’d ask if she believed what she wrote.
Instead, the lawyer said, “Can you elaborate on your meaning?” He must have been hired locally by the company. I can’t distinguish subtle regional variations, but knew his accent was a New Zealand one.
“Entire deep sea ecosystems were created and thrived on the nutrition from dead whales that sank to the seafloor, but in the absence of whales, I guess humans will do.”
The judge frowned.
No one I care about was particularly sad when the Deep Power sank. So much we loved was already lost beneath the sea—we had no sympathy to spare. But all of us, except Kaveri, had kept those thoughts to ourselves.
She looked thinner, as worn as her patched-up secondhand clothes, standing there alone. Her friends hadn’t come to support her. I didn’t blame them. We knew as soon as she was questioned that this would, at the very least, jeopardise her—our—climate residency. Then, the previous month, her charges were read out in this same courtroom—a rearranged hall in the International Seabed Authority’s local premises. The list started with something like ‘anti-green energy propaganda’ and ended with blowing a hole in a ship carrying ninety-seven crew members. No one wanted to risk being associated with that.
A little money did quietly appear in our bank account, enough to talk to a lawyer. They told me it was Kaveri’s bad luck that the ship hadn’t sunk in Aotearoa waters; the International Seabed Authority had its own way of handling trials, and national courts wouldn’t want to touch this case. I’d be permitted to attest to Kaveri’s good character if called as a witness, but unless they found new fragmented evidence six thousand metres underwater to prove she was involved, the outcome would largely depend on a judge’s assessment of her social media statements.
The company representative, when his turn came, spent a long minute staring at his papers. He addressed the entire courtroom, eyes darting often towards the lone reporter and their camera. “We have a chance to break free from petroleum—from a world dependent on burning the carcasses of millions-of-years-dead organisms to pollute the air—and to avert future wars centred on the resources of vulnerable nations already devastated by the effects of climate change.” He held his hands out, palms up, and lowered his voice. “The seafloor is common property; we could all be richer for sharing its wealth. Deep Power, and its crew, stood for that promise. We all believed the time of conflict minerals was past. And now, these . . . eco-terrorists have devastated that—”
He was cut off by the judge, who reminded him that no eco-terrorism had yet been proven.
I wondered if others in the courtroom saw through his evangelism, or if I was the only one on Kaveri’s side.
An old neighbour rows me back to the house, anchoring upriver at the rusted post that used to be a front gate. He says he’ll be back in a few hours and leaves me to pick through the remnants of our long-lost lives.
The blue-inked label on the cassette is an illegible smudge. Even if it hadn’t been water damaged, we must have re-recorded over it dozens of times. Nevertheless, it takes me back twenty years to that morning when I stood beneath screeching gulls, nose wrinkled as I pressed buttons at random on the video camera inherited from our great-grandmother.
That memory is so clear. It cools my heart to find something that cuts through the blur of the trial last month—the thin grey carpet, pens tapping against polished-wood tables, and stuffy summer air.
We’d collected the camera the day before, from the antique shop that repaired it and found us an old tape. My little cousin was determined to film her own documentary for school and apparently my new cellphone was an environmental travesty.
“Can we do this quickly? It stinks like rotting sewage!”
“It’s RICH NUTRIENTS that go into the OCEAN,” Kaveri replied. “Anyway, I’m ready. It’s you that should hurry up.”
“If only Chinnamma and Chiththappa had named you for a deity instead of this damned river, we might be singing at the temple right now!”
She danced barefoot, between lumpy tree-roots that bent upwards seeking air through mud. Waggled thin fingers overhead, as if to mimic their reach. “There’s a red light when you start recording.”
I finally found it.
She put on her best television voice. She’d been watching old clips of some famous British naturalist. “These ancient mangroves may not seem much at first glance, but—”
Her next words were about carbon fixing and nutrients flushed into the coastal ocean. The beauty of the mangroves. I noticed that her leggings were covered in mud, and somehow she’d managed to smear it on her hair. I contemplated how to prevent her dirtying the car: whether we should just leave it there and trek home through the muck, or find clean water to rinse off. I thought of how we could have gone to a zoo to film lions from a pristine concrete walkway, or visited beautiful plants in the botanical gardens full of fragrances that aimed to please the human nose. By the time we’d found crabs and oysters, or whatever she was looking for, and she’d told the camera how mangroves slowed climate change and protected us from storm surges, gloopy sediment clung to my legs too, and we had run out of tape.
“Ah well, the marks are just for the essay,” she said, trailing a toe through silt sodden with the rising tide. I wondered why she’d needed me at all, but only briefly. The smell had faded into the background as we searched for animal tracks and flicked through her plant book, and I overflowed with love for her, and the joys she always introduced me to.
“Ivvalavumthana?” says the neighbour, studying the plastic cassette in my hand. He scuffs bare feet through what used to be our garden. “Isn’t there anything else?”
We both look downhill at the boat. I always hoped we would return, once I’d saved enough for the voyage, thinking we’d benefit from closure after the way we fled during the worst of the storms. I should be grateful to find anything left here to say a proper farewell to. But seeing the house only reminds me I’ve lost two homes now.
I shake my head. “Found everything salvageable. Some knick-knacks upstairs.” I tap the suitcase beside me. “Old books.”
Not the photo albums, the letters, the remnants of my family. Not her.
I keep clutching the tape.
The smell from that day down in the mangroves seems to have suffused the air here too, although nowadays it could well be from rotting sewage. Still, when I inhale, it brings with it the recollection of something else Kaveri said: “Mangroves are the lungs of the ocean.” She breathes so much life into this world.
I think of those roots straining for oxygen above the incoming tide. When the waters recede, what’s left are memories, coated in sediment and bad smells. The richness is always washed into the sea.
At Kaveri’s questioning, she said whatever came to mind, as she always had.
She talked about her work. Yes, they had seen the Deep Power and yes, she had gone for a dive nearby because she’d never seen a deep-sea miner before and yes, she was an environmentalist or she wouldn’t be volunteering to reseed coral reefs while her cousin paid the bills, would she? The prosecution lawyer asked what she knew about deep-sea mining. She talked about creatures that grew on metallic nodules that grew in the depths of the ocean. About noises and echolocation and plumes of sediment that clouded the water for kilometres. About how everything that happened on this planet was connected.
“I didn’t know the ship that sank was the same one I saw until I was ordered to come in for questioning.”
The lawyer pursed his lips before asking what I’d dreaded. Did she believe what she had written?
She folded her arms. For the first time, her voice quivered. “If things had been different, we could have still had whales.”
When I was sworn in, the judge kept telling me to talk louder. The sound sank into the humidity. It reminded me of early days here, when people kept telling me to speak up or repeat myself, correcting the way I pronounced words I’d known my whole life.
I told the court how our family had raised my cousin to care about everyone around her.
“So you agree she has a single-minded focus on wildlife preservation?”
“No, not wildlife—humans too. We’re not separate. There’s no ‘them’ and ‘us’,” I said, hands clasped tight. This couldn’t be helping her case. “Kaveri said it already. We’re part of the same ecosystem. It’s better for everyone when it’s in balance.”
She looked up at me then, eyes bright.
I told them about the river she was named for and its delta in which we grew up; the city lost to the sea centuries ago; the family we lost in the storms. “Kaveri knows loss. She wouldn’t inflict it on anyone. Even when she was a little kid, she just wanted to show the world the beauty of what was left. She used to have me film her own documentaries . . . . I wish I could show you. I had them on my phone but everything’s gone. When we came here, we had nothing except my job offer.” My shoulders ached. I seemed to have swallowed a whole lot of air, making my stomach churn. “And Kaveri wouldn’t have knowingly put our residency application at risk either. She made a thoughtless comment, and maybe she doesn’t understand how it looks, but she didn’t mean to hurt anyone, and she definitely had nothing to do with the ship sinking.”
She gazed fixedly past me at the white-painted walls.
Now everyone knew who I was, I sat at the back of the public gallery, as far as possible from relatives and friends of the crew. The reporter, adjusting their camera, was the only person with a smile for me; Kaveri didn’t turn back in my direction. And, in the end, my attempt to emphasise her naivete made little difference.
“I didn’t do it,” she said. “And I don’t celebrate death; I only celebrate that it happened where it did. The oceans we came from are our mother. We have taken life from her and left her starving, we’ve made it impossible for our siblings to live. I hope eventually we will crawl into the oceans, and re-evolve to replace what we stole. But since this cannot happen for millennia, and since this is all we can do now, why not celebrate any chance to give back? When I die, I want my body to feed the abyssal depths. Bury me in the sea, too.”
She was sent back to her cell and they wouldn’t let me talk to her. They said judgement was reserved. It could be months before a verdict. I had to take the train back up north to wait for news.
Our residency application was declined a week later.
That night, the wind blew strong and the bay glimmered in blue light. A crowd stretched along the sand flats, well after midnight, taking photos. I left off packing to join them. It seemed a good omen: microscopic life, thriving. A respite from my despair.
Several hundred long-finned pilot whales—Kaveri would remind me they’re dolphins, really—stranded in the morning, the deep red tide of the water that brought them mirroring the brightness of pōhutukawa blossom against dark leaves and blue sky.
We cooled them with towels soaked in toxic seawater, into which we’d refloat survivors when the tide returned.
Sea-salt and sweat-salt stuck to our t-shirts. Others took breaks to lather on sunscreen. The waves lapped higher.
As our dolphin gave a weak tail-flick, the person working beside me said, “I wish we could have helped. If nothing else, maybe they’ll fall to the seafloor?”
“I was thinking the same. My cousin said . . . .”
“We’ve got it from here,” said a rescue officer, approaching. “Thanks.”
The two of us turned to wade back.
“You’re Kaveri’s cousin, eh?”
“Were you at the trial?” I stopped, a low wave sloshing at my shins.
“My friend sent me the last video.” They splashed up next to me, pushing cracked sunglasses onto their forehead. “He’s been on her side from the start. I’m sorry, must be rough waiting. Though . . . she’s right, isn’t she? About giving back?”
Unwilling to dump the ruined tape, I take it back to where I’m staying, in the spare room of a stranger’s house near the Kaveri River delta. Here, I eke out what remains of our savings, seeking work that might offer me a visa back to Aotearoa. This is a new kind of loneliness—albeit an incomplete one, because every day, I receive more messages:
“I saw her testimony. I’m writing it in my will.”
“My sister runs a charter boat company and found a funeral director to team up with. They’re booked solid.”
“I’d like to interview you about Kaveri’s trial.”
“I’ve been sending that court video to everyone I know, it’s incredible.”
“Would you be able to put us in touch with your cousin?”
I can’t, because Kaveri is languishing in custody still waiting for the verdict. In the meantime, the company has launched a new forensic investigation.
But now, out here—all over the planet—we bury our dead at sea.