The boat carried too many people and too many smells: diesel; wet socks; instant noodles gone bad inside torn plastic bags; someone’s jasmine perfume lingering stubbornly through it all.

Raza sat underneath a blue tarp near the middle of the boat. His knees ached from being folded for so long. Behind him, a child slept badly and kicked his back every few minutes. Nobody complained anymore. Once enough hours had passed, the discomfort stopped feeling temporary.

He was 17, on paper 22, and on the strip of masking tape stuck to his jacket he was 47.

The man beside him slept with his mouth hung open. Across from them, two brothers from Ghazni argued quietly over football.

“Messi walks now.”

“He always walked.”

“He’s old.”

“He still scores.”

“You sound divorced.”

The younger brother laughed through split lips. Even here, somewhere out in the black water between countries, men still argued about football as if the score could change something.

Raza liked that.

The sea looked flatter than he expected, almost boring. That frightened him more than storms would have. It stretched in every direction with the same dull, expressionless face, like a government office waiting room after lunch.

He rested his head against the wood behind him and thought of Quetta. Not the Quetta from news reports. Not funerals and smoke and photographs of men carrying coffins.

He remembered the tyre shop near Alamdar Road where boys sat on upside down paint buckets debating cricket. The wedding hall with mirrored walls and flickering green lights that made everyone look slightly ill. Winter mornings outside the naan shop, men rubbing their hands together and steam clouding the windows. He remembered the donkey that wandered through Hazara Town eating election posters off walls. During campaign season the animal became fat.

His cousin Dawood once watched it chewing a candidate’s face and said, “Even donkeys survive on promises in this country.”

Raza smiled before he realised he was smiling.

The woman beside him noticed. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“You laughed.”

“I remembered something stupid.”

“Those are the useful memories,” she said.

She looked around forty. Exhaustion made it difficult to judge age. Her son slept against her shoulder wearing a yellow jumper with one stretched sleeve. She adjusted his head carefully every few minutes when the boat rocked.

“What’s your name?” Raza asked.

“Shazia.”

“From Quetta?”

“Yes. Brewery Road.”

“Near the mechanic shops?”

She looked at him properly then.

“You know the area?”

“I used to buy DVDs there.”

“My brother sold DVDs.”

“What kind?”

“Pirated. What else?”

For the first time that night, both of them laughed without forcing it.

In places like this, people continued to discover that they had stood in the same bakery queues once, shared the same roads without knowing it.

The engine rattled beneath them.

It had sounded wrong since the sun had set, but after enough time passed, every odd sound seemed normal.

Raza looked up. No stars tonight. Only low clouds hovering low over the water. He tried to imagine Australia again.

The smugglers described it simply. Endless jobs. Big houses. Government money. Respect. As though a country could be explained by its wages.

Raza imagined smaller things: a tram window; a library; working somewhere ordinary enough that nobody studied his face before speaking to him. That was all he wanted now – to arrive at a place where he could explain himself before his appearance did it for him.

Behind him someone began humming softly. Not a prayer – an old Ahmad Zahir song. Another voice joined in, uncertain at first. Then another. The singing stayed low, as though nobody wanted to disturb the dark.

Raza thought of Sitara then. Not romantically at first; just her irritability. She hated boys who quoted poetry badly.

“Every failed philosopher in Quetta memorises two lines of Rumi and suddenly thinks he understands suffering,” she once told him outside their tuition class.

“And girls?”

“Girls have homework.”

He laughed so hard tea came out of his nose. Sitara laughed harder at that than at her own joke.

He wondered where she was now. Iran maybe. Mashhad. Tehran. Somewhere crowded with people waiting for documents. Maybe she still rolled her eyes at poetry boys.

The boat rocked harder. Somewhere near the stern a baby cried. Somebody asked quietly for water.

Fear came and went in strange ways. Sometimes, for whole stretches of time, Raza forgot to be afraid. Then, the boat would suddenly tilt and fear would return all at once, clear and sharp inside his ribs.

The man beside him stopped snoring. Raza glanced sideways. At first, he thought the man had simply shifted his position. Then he noticed his complete stillness. The tarp snapped overhead. The sea moved beneath them. People coughed and muttered and shifted their weight. The man did not move at all.

Raza stared at him for several seconds. The dead man’s beard fluttered slightly in the wind.

Across the boat, the brothers were still arguing.

“You only like Messi because short people support each other.”

“At least my favourite footballer pays taxes.”

A child vomited over the side. Shazia adjusted her son’s sleeve. Life continued in parallel to death, unnoticed by most of the boat.

Raza looked down at the masking tape on his chest, the numbers suddenly irritating him. Not because they dehumanised him, everything before this had already done that. Borders, offices, interviews, checkpoints. The tape was simply honest about it.

He peeled loose a corner. Underneath, his jacket still carried the faint smell of smoke from home. Burnt flour and charcoal. His mother’s tandoor.

Push. Fold. Turn.

She used to hum while making dough before dawn. Once, she threw a sandal at Dawood for swearing during a cricket match on television. She missed him completely and broke the kitchen clock instead. The clock told the wrong time for eight months. Nobody bothered fixing it. Visitors learned to ask for the actual time.

For months after leaving Quetta, whenever Raza thought of it, he remembered only violence – explosions, funerals. Policemen checking identity cards too carefully.

But now other things stubbornly returned to his mind. He remembered the old bookseller who, every winter, predicted that the Russians would invade again. He recalled children throwing their sandals at low-hanging power lines for sport. The barber who gave every teenage boy the same Cristiano Ronaldo haircut regardless of head shape. His father asleep in front of the television after work, one sock missing.

A city cramped, noisy, dusty, and alive.

The engine sputtered once, then died. Silence spread slowly throughout the boat. Nobody screamed. That frightened Raza. The smuggler swore under his breath and kicked the engine casing. The metal clanged uselessly.

Far away, thunder rolled across the water.

Shazia looked at him. “You think we’ll make it?”

Raza opened his mouth, then closed it again. “I don’t know,” he said after a moment.

She nodded once and looked back at the sea.

Wind moved through the tarp overhead with a sound like paper tearing. Raza peeled the masking tape fully off his chest and held it between two fingers. A number waiting to be processed somewhere. He let the tape go. The wind took it immediately.

For a moment he felt lighter. He closed his eyes. Not to pray, only to remember properly.

The donkey chewing election posters. Sitara mocking poetry boys. Dawood shouting at football matches with bread still in his mouth. His mother humming beside the tandoor as smoke darkened the kitchen ceiling. The city returned in pieces. Dust. Burnt bread. Motorbikes. Green wedding lights. Someone laughing in the next room.

The first wave struck the side of the boat.