and taken to Christmas Island, which he expected to be just a respite, but they were there for many months. Always there were rumours that they would be sent to Nauru, or New Guinea, or even a camp on the Australian mainland. They spoke occasionally with officials and lawyers – always the same questions, as though being tested for consistency to reveal a lie. Asif, despite the warnings of the captain had told the truth about himself. Noor had told the truth about everything, including the captain. This was a serious mistake. Noor may have hoped that his revelation of the captain’s behaviour might stay secret, but the captain found out almost immediately and stared at Noor with black-eyed vengeance. Two days later, Noor was found in his cot with his throat cut, but the captain had been in the discipline wing and was clearly innocent. Of course, everyone knew he had ordered the killing, and when he was released from discipline a few days later he was immediately established as king of the camp.
It was in the camp that Asif discovered Habal Tong. HT wasn’t really a religion – it welcomed members of any religion. It was more a set of precepts and values that, on one level, encouraged tolerance and unity. But on another level, effectively radicalised and galvanised anyone who felt slighted, insulted or in any way disadvantaged by the Australian mainstream.
The HT group were aloof from the rest of the camp, including the captain’s thugs. In fact, they were the only ones the captain’s thugs left alone and despite the fact that Asif wanted, desperately, to embrace all things Australian to improve his chances of staying permanently, he found himself inexorably drawn to them. ‘All is nothing and nothing is all,’ was the most profound and fundamental maxim of Habal Tong and Asif reflected on it constantly – reconciling it with all his previous beliefs and feeling its empowerment.
Somehow the maxim was also interpreted to mean that Australia, as a wealthy first world nation, owed all refugees a living. ‘It is the so-called first world,’ sneered Tee Tee, the head of the Tong in the camp, ‘that caused the sea levels to rise with their industrial exhalations. If they take away your land then by all that is just and right they must provide an alternative. And if they will not do so willingly then we will take what is rightfully ours.’
It was a powerful argument but unpopular with the Australian officials who had made life so difficult for Asif – never believing him but always lying to him about his status and his prospects for staying in Australia.
‘I call on you, brothers,’ Tee Tee would say. ‘I call on Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Tamils, Muslims, Buddhists, Shinto, Confucianists, Falun Gong and Bahai … even Christians … to embrace the Tong with all your heart. This is no apostasy to replace your birth religion. No. It is a prism to focus the elements of all religions and fuse them into something more … to strengthen your own faith and bring you into a wider brotherhood!’
The turning point came in 2023 when the law changed. After so much international and domestic criticism, the Australian government simply gave up on their various policies to scare refugees away. All in the camps were given seven year temporary visas with a major restriction. They were not allowed to leave the Temporary Citizenship Zone (the TCZ) for the whole of the seven years. If they did, they would immediately be deported. And if they returned the seven year clock would start from scratch.
By the time Asif received his visa, he had been in the camps nearly two years and had been radicalised into hating Australians with their wealth and their privilege and their different rules for different people. He was a hardened member of the Tong and one year later had been easily recruited into a deep cell – biding its time to take revenge on the country that had treated them with such contempt.
‘That was a while ago now,’ admitted Asif, as he climbed the stairs to the apartment he shared with Tanya – the best part of his good fortune and the source of his growing regret.
‘Did they win?’ she called as he opened the door.
‘Pardon?’
Tanya was tall and blonde – the light to his dark – and, as ever, he found himself dazzled and took a few moments to adjust.
‘Oh … yes. Two, one … but they left it very late.’
‘That must have been exciting.’
She kissed him on the nose and walked back into the room from which she had emerged when he opened the door. Asif poured two cups of chai from the pot she had prepared in anticipation of his return and followed her into the best room of the apartment.
Tanya’s studio was supposed to be the living room, but the walls were covered with her strange paintings. The large table was invisible under paints and brushes, but also the clays, wires and bric-a-brac of her various sculptures. And empty water bottles. Like most Australians, Tanya didn’t trust the water in Ord City. Even the chai was made with bottled water.
Around the room were easels set up with paintings at various phases of completion. Asif found a place for her cup and sat back in the battered old armchair holding his chai in both hands. Tanya herself was a work of art – beautiful and complex, and utterly beyond his previous experience of women.
‘What are you working on?’
Tanya picked up her cup and eyed him over the rim.
‘You.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes … what do you think?’
She indicated one of the larger canvases which was split in half by an oblique line, dividing two different scenes. One was a flat red desert, and the other was a chaotic ocean of colour and shapes only partly perceived.
‘I don’t understand it.’
‘I think you could if you tried.’
‘I am trying. How can such a strange painting be me? It looks nothing like me.’
‘It’s how I see you.’
Asif looked again at the painting, trying to see what she saw.
‘It’s half desert and half chaos,’ he said.
‘Exactly … just like you.’
Asif was shocked, but also intrigued.
‘How am I a desert?’
‘There are several ways,’ she replied, taking a sip of her chai and contemplating her work with fresh eyes. ‘For a start you are hot and dangerous.’
‘So is lava.’
‘But lava is flowing … you are solid, hard, unmoving.’
‘Unmoving?’
‘And there is mystery about you … an infinite mystery.’
Asif glanced at her, conscious of the data stick in his pocket, but she was still gazing at the painting, as though discovering new insights.
‘What about the other part,’ he asked, ‘… the strange shapes and colours like a breaking wave?’
‘That is also you,’ she said. ‘Wild, explosive, overfilled with energy … ’
‘It looks like the wave will swamp the desert and wash the sand away.’
‘The wave can never swamp the desert,’ she replied. ‘The desert is
