Criminal Investigation Department

The Criminal Investigation Department, referred to as the CID, enters the story in the aftermath of the Titlipur pilgrimage to the Arabian Sea. Its detectives question the people rescued from the water, formally considering whether survivors can be charged with attempted illegal emigration. Their inquiry becomes a contest over testimony: several survivors insist that they saw the sea divide and the pilgrims walk away beneath it, while the department’s interrogators press them to abandon what they say they witnessed.

The Department’s Inquiry

The CID’s investigation begins in a hospital ward, where Mirza Saeed Akhtar wakes to find a CID officer beside his bed. The authorities are considering the feasibility of charging the expedition’s survivors with attempted illegal emigration, and detectives have been instructed to obtain their accounts before they can confer. The timing is significant: the survivors are questioned separately, but their stories converge on the extraordinary event at the water’s edge.

The novel presents the CID not through a named senior official or a detailed account of its internal structure, but through this immediate investigative task. Its detectives gather testimony from people who have survived a mass disappearance and from a man still grieving his wife. The institutional concern with possible emigration charges frames the survivors first as subjects of official scrutiny; their accounts of the sea’s division then force the inquiry to confront claims that do not fit an ordinary account of what happened.

Testimony About the Sea

Titlipur village head Muhammad Din tells the detectives that, as his strength failed in the water, he saw the sea divide like hair being combed. He says he saw the others walking away from him, including his wife, Khadija. His account makes the central claim both specific and personal: the miracle is not an abstract proposition but something he says he saw while close to drowning, and it includes the wife he loved.

Osman the convert also describes searching in the water, especially for Ayesha, whom he had known before her transformation. He reports seeing the water open and the pilgrims proceeding along the ocean floor among dying fish. Sri Srinivas swears by the goddess Lakshmi that the sea parted as well. When the detectives question Mrs. Qureishi, she gives the same essential account in her own words, insisting that she repeats what her eyes have seen whether or not the listeners believe her.

These accounts unsettle the detectives because, as the narrative presents it, the witnesses could not have coordinated their stories. The CID is therefore confronted with testimony that is independently repeated, rather than with a single claim it can dismiss as an isolated recollection. Yet convergence does not settle the question for the investigators: the department’s next response is to challenge the witnesses’ credibility and insist on a material account of the dead and missing.

Pressure and Contradiction

The detectives subject Muhammad Din to what the narrative calls a third degree. They accuse him of lying and invoke the drowned bodies already floating ashore, swollen and foul-smelling, as evidence against his account. Their threats make the interview coercive rather than merely skeptical: they warn that they will force him to confront what they call the truth. Muhammad Din refuses to retract his testimony, answering that he still saw what he saw.

Mirza Saeed Akhtar’s interview offers a different kind of answer. Asked what he saw at the beach, he protests that his wife has drowned and tells the detectives not to press him with questions. He has not witnessed the parting of the waves. When he later learns that he is the only survivor of the pilgrimage not to have seen it, Sri Srinivas tells him that the waters closed on them, as if the gates of Paradise had shut in their faces. Saeed breaks down and weeps for a week and a day. The CID’s questioning thus establishes not only a division between belief and disbelief, but also a painful distinction among the survivors: some claim to have witnessed a passage through the sea, while Saeed is left with loss and the knowledge that he did not see what they describe.

Narrative Significance

The CID represents the effort to collect, compare, and test accounts after the pilgrimage has ended in catastrophe. Its procedure gives the episode a public and investigative aftermath: survivors are not simply left with private memories but are questioned by authorities who are also considering a possible charge. The interviews place official scrutiny beside testimony of a miracle without resolving the difference between them.

The department’s conduct remains sharply divided between listening and coercion. Detectives record accounts and encounter witnesses whose separate versions reinforce one another, but they also use threats to discredit Muhammad Din and demand that he submit to their definition of reality. The novel does not show the CID reaching a conclusive explanation or establishing what happened to the pilgrims. Instead, its investigation preserves the conflict between the survivors’ insistence that the sea opened and the authorities’ attempts to make their statements answerable to an ordinary, evidentiary account.