Gun Island

Cinta’s apartment is 10 minutes from the “Ghetto,” in a palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal. It stands on the soft mud of the Venetian lagoon, which shifts and changes the alignment of the building above, leaving tiles and door frames perpetually crooked. In the apartment, Deen spots a copy of I Misteri della Giungla Nera—“The Mystery of the Black Jungle” (181), the children’s book by Salgari set in the Sunderbans. As he reshelves it, Cinta calls. He tells her about Rafi, and a laughing Cinta suggests that the Merchant is keeping an eye on Deen. Next, Deen meets with Rafi. However, Rafi refuses to participate in an interview, claiming he is sick of answering questions. Mid-conversation, he cries out in alarm and brushes a spider off Deen’s shoulder, warning Deen to be careful of the many dangerous spiders in Venice. In exchange for some money, he then tells Deen a part of the Gun Merchant’s story that he left out earlier.

After Manasa Devi magically appeared to the Merchant in a book on Gun Island, the Merchant decides to spend the night in the most secure place on the island, and is locked away in a room where guns are made. However, he is bitten by a venomous spider. Rafi explains that one of the symbols at the now-destroyed shrine represented the spider.

Rafi is suddenly distracted and asks Deen to leave. As Deen walks away, he notices a man walk up to Rafi and speak to him threateningly. Back at the apartment, he learns that Gisa has delayed her trip to Venice in order to learn more about Italian officials’ discovery of a boatload of refugees heading from Egypt heading toward Sicily; she must stay in Rome for the time being, as the developing situation of this “Blue Boat,” as it is called in the media, could be an important addition to her documentary.

Unable to sleep, Deen returns a call from Piya, who tells him about an email she received a couple of weeks ago, predicting a mass beaching of Irrawaddy dolphins at Garjontola around daybreak. Believing it to be from a whistleblower in the refinery, Piya arranged to be at Garjontola with a journalist and photographer. At around 8:30 am, the dolphins beached themselves as predicted. Piya and her companions managed to save many, but 20 of the dolphins died. The journalist and photographer ran an article that prompted an environmental lawyer to file a case with the Supreme Court that may help shut down the refinery.

Deen asks Piya how a whistleblower gained access to her personal email ID. She believes that Tipu is involved. He is not in Bangalore, as he claimed—he has been sending Moyna photoshopped pictures, and his phone calls are from international numbers. He has not been heard from in a while, but he sent a message to Moyna on the same day that Piya received the email. Finding research about Venice and passport applications for Tipu and Rafi amongst Tipu’s belongings, Piya and Moyna believe that both men are now in Venice. Piya asks Deen to find Rafi and gain information about Tipu. Deen reveals that he has already met Rafi and promises to ask about Tipu again.

Deen is seized by a sense of dread at all that has happened so far and tries to convince himself that the pattern in his encounters with Tipu and Rafi are all coincidental. He tries to call Rafi again but gets no response. He heads down to Lubna’s and finds her watching a news clip about the Blue Boat. The minister has ordered the navy and coast guard to stop the boat at any costs; he has declared that only a miracle will allow the refugees to set foot in Italy. When Deen asks about Rafi, Lubna reveals that he is in the hospital because he was mugged and beaten in a gang attack. She directs Deen to Bilal, Rafi’s housemate, who tells him that Rafi had been carrying a lot of money. Rafi had missed some payments on a loan he had taken from a scafista (trafficker), for a traveling companion from whom he got separated in Turkey. The friend got hurt and went back to Iran, but then called Rafi a few weeks ago to ask for money to make a connection with a dalal.

Bilal describes how he, too, had similarly gotten separated from a friend, Kabir, during his migration from Bangladesh to Sharjah, Sudan, Libya, and eventually Europe by sea. He still holds out hope that he will meet Kabir again one day, and would have unhesitatingly done the same for Kabir as Rafi did for his friend. As Deen walks back to the apartment, he spots the same man whom he saw talking to Rafi, and is sure that this is the scafista. In the apartment, he sees a spider perched on his laptop; he takes a picture of it and posts it to social media. He then sends Piya an email with an update on Rafi, which seems to confirm that Tipu did indeed leave with him, but potentially got separated in Turkey.

Lubna is not at her office the next day when Deen arrives. He meets a man named Palash instead, who explains that Lubna has gone to meet with human rights activist groups that are raising money to send out their own boats and to confront those trying to stop the refugees. Palash believes that the civilians turning up will “speak to the world’s conscience” (218), and suggests that Deen join, too, for the sake of the documentary. Palash also reveals that Rafi is still in the hospital and is being questioned by the police. The unknown muggers stole a large amount of money from him; he was planning to use it to pay back the scafista. The scafistas are all connected to the Mob and have close ties with crime syndicates in other countries like Libya and Egypt. They try to trick migrants like Rafi into bonded labor through debt, shipping them off to work on farms in a modern-day illicit form of indentured servitude. Rafi was probably mugged on the scafista’s orders as part of a ploy to keep him in debt. Palash reveals that Lubna’s husband, Munir, was also possibly killed by the Mob. He had been an activist working for migrants and their cause, and had set out to enquire about a group of migrants held captive on a farm in Sicily. He died in a car crash a few days later.

Deen gets a call from Piya, who has reason to believe that Tipu made it to Egypt. However, Piya still thinks that a whistleblower at the refinery managed to contact Tipu and brushes off the idea that he had a dream or vision about the dolphins. As Deen and her are talking, a friend of Piya’s on social media identifies the spider in Deen’s picture as a brown recluse: an extremely venomous spider. It is the first time Piya has heard of one in Venice, but she is not surprised, as temperatures have been rising across Europe, sending the spider further north.

A shaken Deen heads back to the apartment but sees a flyer advertising an exhibition of a rare book and heads to the library where it is displayed. While there, he loses himself in a daydream and imagines the book to be the same one in which the Merchant saw Manasa Devi. In a daze, he attempts to open the vitrine in which the book is encased and is immediately dragged off by security. He is set free after invoking Cinta’s name, and the librarian places a call to her. On the phone call, Deen also tells Cinta about a possible infestation of spiders in her apartment, and she promises to take care of it. Back at the apartment, the janitor insists that no spiders are to be found. As Deen enters the apartment and closes the door, the Salgari book falls off the shelf. Unnerved, he reshelves it. He drifts off the sleep but awakens in the middle of the night with an unexplained sense of urgency. He hears the thud of something falling, which he ignores and heads to bed.