The Village by the Sea (6 page)

When Lila next went in to sweep, she had to clear away heaps of torn, coloured paper lying on the floor. As she carefully folded up the torn sheets and put them away in a neat heap, the mother came up and said, ‘Oh, just throw them away – Christmas is over.' Puzzled, Lila carried away the paper to their hut for Bela and Kamal to see and use. ‘Christmas is over,' she said and, to her surprise, the girls knew what that meant and nodded. ‘Yes, Christmas. Our teacher told us about it at school. It is the birthday feast of a baby who was born long, long ago in a stable,' said Bela. ‘Like Krishna, who was born in a
prison,' explained Kamal when Lila looked puzzled. ‘But why did they cover the tree with coloured paper and stars?' she asked, and they could not answer: their teacher had said nothing about a tree. Just then the children from the house arrived to bring them a packet of boiled sweets each, which they accepted in shy silence and later ate with noisy abandon.

‘Give one to Pinto. Poor Pinto,' said Lila, feeling sorry for Pinto who had been having a very bad time for the family had brought their dog with them – a great golden creature with a plume for a tail, as beautiful as a princess in a story – and they were so afraid noisy, excited Pinto would bite their beauty whom they called Misha that they made Hari keep Pinto tied to a tree or a veranda post all day while Misha ran about in the garden, golden and gleaming and silky. At first Pinto barked and barked in fury, but when he saw it was no good, he simply lay down on the sand and sulked. He was so hurt that when Bela offered him a sweet, he turned his head away.

But soon the cloud lifted for Pinto, and one morning the car was being loaded and readied for the drive back to Bombay. Mr de Silva made Hari fetch a bucket of water and wash the car and
wipe it first. As he stood watching and smoking a pipe, he said, ‘Yes, that's the way. Look here, this house is falling to pieces. We need a watchman, someone to take care of it while we're away. We may not be able to come again for months and it can't be left to rot all that time. We'll pay a small salary – not much since there won't be much work, just keeping an eye on it, opening it up and airing it now and again, and letting us know if it needs repair. D'you think your father could do the job? He used to be around but I haven't seen him on this visit. Where is he?'

Hari was excited. He hurried home, knowing his father was in, lying on his mat in a dark corner. ‘Father,' he said, the word rusty in his throat, he used it so seldom. ‘Father, the man is calling you. He wants to give you a job.'

‘Hunh? A job?' said his father, getting off the floor and coming to the door. Hari managed to guide him down the path to the house where Mr de Silva stood waiting by the car, watching it being loaded. But his expression changed when he turned towards Hari and his father. He asked a few short questions but frowned at the long, mumbled answers and turned his head away from the hot toddy breath that accompanied the
mumbles. Finally he shook his head and went up the steps to the veranda to say to his wife, ‘Useless, drunken villagers – dead drunk in the morning. What can you do for them? They're hopeless.'

Hari led his father back to the hut, his heart like a stone inside him, heavy and cold. Even when the de Silvas had got into the car, along with their princely dog who looked out of the window and waved his plume of a tail in excitement, and Mr de Silva leaned out of the window and gave Hari some money and said, ‘Good fellow, you did a good job of the car. If you ever come to Bombay, I'll give you a job as a car-cleaner,' Hari did not, could not smile. He took the money and stood silently watching as the car bumped its way down the sandy path and disappeared into the coconut grove.

Then Lila set Pinto free at last and, giving one yelp of joy, Pinto went madly chasing the car right out of Thul.

Hari was still in a silent rage about his father's drunkenness, about the Bombay man's insulting words, when he went to see if the factory was
coming up at last. He did not know if Mr de Silva would remember his promise to give him a car-cleaner's job if he ever did get to Bombay or even if he wanted it any longer. Nor did he have any idea if Biju would give him a job on his boat when it was built. So he had to see if the factory had come up and if he could get a job there: that now seemed like the best of the three choices before him.

But when he went to the site below the hill, he was disappointed to find the tin hut locked, the yellow lorry gone and only a few big concrete pipes littered on the ground to show that anyone intended to build there. When would such small beginnings ever grow into a mighty factory full of humming machines waiting to be worked by Ramu and Hari?

He walked in a circle round the pipes, almost as if he expected to see them move, but there was no movement except for a brown grasshopper that jumped out of a clump of grass on to a pipe, and then off again. So, throwing a pebble from one hand to the other and trying to whistle away his disappointment, he started walking up the hill to the temple on top, wondering what would become of it.

Steps had been cut into the red, gravelly soil of the hillside, making it easy to climb. As he brushed through the dry, golden grass that grew at the sides, he met a shepherd coming down the hill with a herd of goats. He wore a white
dhoti
and a large magenta turban and his goats were black and white and chocolate brown and followed him in a cloud of dust, bleating and calling to each other. Some of them got stranded on a spur and called frantically to the others who were already at the foot of the hill. Finally the most desperate of them bounded forward and then all the rest took heart and went streaming after him to catch up with the herd now crossing the highway to the dry fields where the winter paddy had just been cut. The shepherd's bright magenta turban could be seen as a single speck of colour in all that dust.

Hari went on up to the top with his head flung back in order to watch a pair of huge kites that seemed to be having a game in the evening sky – floating and rolling on currents of air, always close together as if they were performing a dance. He watched them as they went rolling and tumbling away in the still clear air, over the field where the girls' school stood, over the rich green belt of palms and bananas that hid his own house, and out over
the sea itself, majestic and purple now with the sun dipping into it as royally as a king going to his repose. Then they vanished from sight.

When he thought of all his troubles – his drunken father, Mr de Silva's insult, the lack of work and money – Hari wished he too could soar up into the sky and disappear instead of being tied to the earth here, trudging round the temple which was not even a pretty one. It was only a little cell of bricks with a painted idol of Krishna and his cows in it. Looking at it through the open door without going in, Hari remembered the shepherd he had just seen and wondered if he, too, played a flute like Krishna. Everything belonged here, everything blended together – except for himself. With his discontent, his worries and his restlessness, he could not settle down to belonging.

He knew in his heart that he would leave one day. Thul could not hold him for long – at least not the Thul of the coconut groves and the fishing fleet. Perhaps if it really did turn into a factory site one day, he would stay on here, living a new kind of life. Otherwise he and his family would surely and slowly starve, fall ill like his mother, and die. No! He would go away – cross the sea in
a boat, somehow find his fortune in Bombay, either with Mr de Silva's help or even without it. He felt very much alone.

Then he heard someone strike a match and jumped around to see a man standing behind him with a cigarette in his mouth. It was someone Hari did not know – a thin, dark man wearing a blue shirt over white pyjamas. He was staring at the idol, too.

Then he looked down at Hari. ‘You from the village?' he asked, nodding in the wrong direction.

‘From Thul, yes,' said Hari, pointing at the belt of coconut palms.

‘Hmm,' said the stranger, ‘I've met some of these Thul people.'

‘Do you live here?' asked Hari, curious.

The man did not answer but pointed to the shack below.

‘There?' asked Hari in amazement. ‘You live in that hut? Did you come from Bombay in a lorry?'

The man nodded, smiling a little at Hari's excitement.

‘Then you must be – you must be – the new factory –'

‘I'm not the factory,' the man laughed. ‘It's not going to be just one factory anyway – it is going
to be a whole city of factories. Factories, housing colonies, shopping centres, bus depots, railway heads, engineers and workers – a whole city is going to be built here.'

‘Here, in Thul?' wondered Hari, not able to believe his ears.

‘Here, stretching from Thul to Vaishet, Vaishet to Rewas, and Rewas to Uran,' said the man proudly, pointing with one finger first at the coastline with its belt of coconut estates, then swivelling up the Thul road to the highway and along it to an old stone quarry that lay across the road from the hill, and then along the highway to the coastal village of Rewas. ‘The new Thul-Vaishet fertilizer complex,' he said in a ringing voice.

‘What is that?' asked Hari, not ashamed of showing himself an ignorant villager because he was so keen to know.

‘You don't know what that is?' the man asked scornfully. ‘You will learn. You will soon learn.'

‘No, but tell me,' Hari said eagerly. ‘What will they make at the factory?'

‘Fertilizer, I told you,' the man sounded impatient.

‘What is that?' Hari asked.

The man had to smile, however grimly. These villagers were such pumpkin-heads, they knew
nothing. ‘Chemicals,' he said, using another word that Hari did not know. ‘Different kinds of chemicals to put in the ground – nitrogen, ammonia, urea – to make things grow.'

‘Oh,
manure
?' asked Hari, deeply disappointed. All this vast complex, modern and scientific, to be built only to make manure for the fields?

‘No, not manure, pumpkin-head. This is to stop people from following their cows and buffaloes around and collecting their dung to put in their miserable fields. Here the factories will produce tons and tons of chemicals to be sent all over the country and sold to farmers.
Rich
farmers,' he added, with another scornful look at Hari's torn shirt and bare feet, ‘with
much
land. Chemicals for big farms, chemicals to make crops grow better than you can ever see them grow in fields like yours.'

‘We use fish manure for our coconut trees,' Hari told him, smarting from the gibe about villagers and their buffaloes. ‘It is very good for coconuts.'

‘Pph! How much fish manure can you collect? Here they will make thousands of tons, tens of thousands of tons, and send it all over India and even export it.'

‘Really?' said Hari politely, trying to grasp this strange new concept. ‘And it will be made in many different factories?'

‘Yes, of course, not one factory, but a number of factories. Industrial estate – that is what it is to be. Have you seen the one at Thana, near Bombay?'

Of course Hari had not so he shook his head and made no sound.

‘This will be even bigger. What do you know?' the man seemed suddenly angry and began to walk downhill. It was steep and he had to throw himself heavily from one step to the other, his shoes slipping on the red gravel. Hari, barefoot, followed quickly and lightly, still curious, still wanting to know.

‘How is fertilizer made?' he asked. ‘What are the machines like? Are they worked with oil or coal? Who works them?'

‘They will need people to work them,' the man shouted over his shoulder. ‘A railway line will be laid. People will come from all over to work in Thul.'

‘From where?' cried Hari, leaping from step to step and rock to rock, waving his arms to keep his balance.

‘From everywhere,' shouted the man. ‘From all over India. They will get jobs here.'

‘And what about us?' Hari cried, running after him now that they had reached the foot of the hill. The stubble cut his feet.

‘You?' the man wheeled around and glared at him. ‘Can you work in a factory, you
boy
?'

‘I can learn,' said Hari bravely, trying to keep his voice steady. ‘I think I can. I need a job.'

Suddenly the man stopped glaring, or roaring. His face softened and his eyes looked kinder. ‘So,' he said, ‘you need a job, eh? Hungry, eh? No food in the house? Sick mother, drunken father, sisters to be married off and no dowries, eh?'

Hari was so astonished that he gave a gasp. How did this stranger know about his family? Had he been finding out about him? Why? Did he see Hari as a prospective factory-worker? Would he give Hari a job? ‘How do you know?' he asked in a whisper.

The man spun around with the same expression of scorn cutting across his face. ‘You villagers – you're all the same. Pumpkin-heads. Drink toddy and lie drunk under the coconut trees all day. Go fishing and drown yourself in the sea. Leave the women to manage. Old women and girls going
hungry in the village. Mongrels howling in the night. Pah! What a place, your Thul. What a bunch of pumpkin-heads. All alike. I'll be happy when I can hand over charge here –' he waved at the heap of concrete pipes lying on the ground – ‘and go home. To Bombay. Bombay!' he sang, lifting his arms up in the air, and then dived into his hut and slammed the door shut.