Photo Assignment, edited.

Pinkerton At Sea

Pinkerton stood silhouetted against the horizon his guitar held aloft as he waited for the sun to set. The sun set. A few miles along the beach couples sighed and hugged and walked back home. Pinkerton, he threw his guitar into the sea, far out as far as he could go and swam in after it. The water was cool and there was a rope between the two. Pinkerton and Lilley. Pinkerton swam through the breakers to the relatively calm sea beyond. Lilley towed along behind him. He waited for Lilley to catch up. Lilley was important, more important than it had ever been. Inside Lilley's hollow interior were a pair of waterproof shorts, a set of guitar strings wrapped in oilcloth, many packets of crackers and two cubes of cheese. Also, a periscope, a telescope, a stethescope and spectacles. Not to mention, a flute. With this happy cargo Pinkerton set off across the sea to go as far as he could or die trying. He was aiming for Burma but his geography was rather unsound. For all he knew he would land up in New Zealand or back in the Sunderbans.

Pinkerton swam on, breaking away into a float when his arms tired. Once in a while he saw lights out on the sea. He looked back and could'nt see the shore. Something hard nudged his shoulder and moved away. In the dark he saw a big bullet shaped head with a bullet shaped snout swimming along next to him. "Awrk?", said the thing. "You a dolphin? Orca?", said our man Pinkerton. "Awrk." said the orcaella brevirostris. "Awrk." replied Pinkerton. The dolphin re submerged and emerged some way off. Pinkerton decided to follow it. The dolphin wove through the water joined at intervals by another dolphin or two until the numbers swelled to a dozen or so all singing the high haunting song that pulled Pinkerton on and on until with the hot noonday sun he found himself waking on an alien beach being stared at by little brown children. He got up, pulled Lilley out of the water where it had been bobbing gently on the waves put on the waterproof shorts inaugurated a pack of crackers and gave the rest to the children. A song played in his ears, a high haunting song disjointed. A song that grew so loud that it drowned the chattering monkeys that crowded around him, the waves that broke at his feet. So Pinkerton pulled out his flute and played for the sea.

Pinkerton In The Desert

Pinkerton flopped down on the sand. Lilley wanted to rest. The damned chap was'nt cutting it anymore. He feared Lilley would have to fend for himself soon. Pinkerton had a new friend now. Her name was Cocoxatpetl and she was a multicoloured beach umbrella. Pinkerton sat and admired the sunlight as it filtered through her multicoloured panels. Lilley was jealous, Pinkerton was certain of that. He decided to give Lilley away to the next person who went by. Nobody came by but Pinkerton had to go his own way so he played a last song for Lilley and left with Coco and the flute. Lilley lay abandoned. Many centuries later a little boy will find Lilley and wonder what sort of a beast this was but that comes many centuries later. The vultures circled overhead, dizzied by the sudden splash of colour that wound around the sand dunes. Well, if it moved it had to be edible. A vulture came and rested on Coco's blue panel, it bobbed along with Coco and Pinkerton. He cawed to his mates up in the sky, this was fun. Another vulture came. Then another. Soon there were about fifteen vultures perched on Coco. Pinkerton felt the weight, the light also dimmed around him. There were patches on Coco, he missed Lilley. He threw Coco away and flung himself down on the sand. He lay there until the heat got too intense to bear then he decided to dig his way to China. He said goodbye to Coco and the flute and dove into the sand. He dug and dug and dug until he came to the moist earth beneath the sand, whereupon he sucked a handfull of earth dry of moisture and resumed digging. On his way he met many subterranean creatures. A minotaur called Larry, who he met as he tunnelled through part of a maze in Corfu, a large colony of fighter ants somewhere else, all friends he would remember fondly on winter evenings by the fireside. I dont know if he reached China or if in the time honoured tradition of Pinkerton he wandered off elsewhere but the last time I saw him was through the bottom of my glass bottomed boat as he dug his way out of the seabed in Malaysia. So long Pinkerton, I yelled out to him as he surfaced. He waved and he kept waving until we were just specks in the vast open sea.

Srinanda Ganguly.