The Village by the Sea

by Anita Desai

  He was still standing and staring at his hands when Lila came down the path from their hut, a water pot held against her hip with one hand and Hari’s lunch of a few dry chapatis tied in a cloth in the other, and their short black and white dog Pinto following at her heels. Pinto darted forwards when he saw Hari and came hurrying to meet him. Lila followed slowly. She was tired and she did not like to see Hari standing idle in the empty field. But she only said, ‘Here – eat,’ and handing him his lunch, went to the well to fill the water pot.

  Hari followed her and helped her to draw up the bucket after it had plopped into the still green depths of the well, frightening a small frog or two, slowly filled and grown heavy at the end of the rope. Then he sat down on the edge of the well to eat his bread. There was nothing to eat with the chapatis but a pinch of salt and a few green chillies Lila had plucked from a bush near their hut.

  She stood watching him, her hands on her hips.

  ‘What will we do?’ she said suddenly.

  Hari knew exactly what she meant, but he did not like to tell her so. He did not feel like talking. He never did talk much and always preferred to think things out very slowly and carefully before he did. So he went on eating his dry bread and chillies.

  ‘Father’s still lying there, asleep. He sleeps all day. He will only get up at night and go straight to the toddy shop,’ Lila said, almost crying.

  ‘Let him,’ said Hari.

  ‘Hari, he will kill himself drinking the toddy those wicked men make and sell.’

  ‘Let him,’ Hari said again, chewing.

  ‘And Mother? And Mother?’ cried Lila. ‘And us? What about us? Who will look after us?’

  ‘He does not look after us,’ said Hari, spitting out the end of a very sharp chilli. ‘We look after ourselves, don’t we?’

  ‘But how?’ cried Lila. ‘We don’t go to school any more, you and I. Only Bela and Kamal go – and next year we won’t be able to buy them any new books. We hardly eat anything but this dry bread, or dry rice, every day. There’s hardly ever any money to buy anything with in the bazaar – only when we sell our coconuts to the Malabaris. The only time we eat fish is when you go fishing. Father never does. And then, Mother: how will Mother get well if she never gets any medicine?’

  Now Hari hunched his shoulders. He did not like Lila to say – to scream aloud – all these things that he knew and thought about all the time. What could he do? He worked in the field, he climbed the trees and brought down the coconuts to sell. When he had time, he took a net and fished along the shore. What more could he do? He knew it was not enough but it was all he could do.

  ‘What can I do?’ he mumbled. ‘I’m doing what I can.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lila, with tears beginning to tremble in her eyes. ‘But don’t you think we have to do something more now, Hari?’ she pleaded.

  This made Hari stop chewing, put away the remains of his lunch and stare at her while he thought of a way to answer her and reassure her. ‘Something will come along, Lila,’ he said at last. ‘The boys in the village say a factory is to be built in Thul and everyone will get jobs there. Perhaps I will get one too.’

  ‘When?’ cried Lila.

  ‘I don’t know. Not now, not for a long time. In the meantime – in the meantime I’ll look for work. The next time the de Silvas come from Bombay I’ll ask them if they can take me back with them and give me work.’ This was an idea he had had but never spoken of before. He was quite surprised to hear the words out loud himself. So was Lila.

  ‘In Bombay?’ she cried. ‘Then you would have to leave us, Hari?’

  ‘Yes. If I am to stay here, I could get work on a fishing boat – I will ask and we’ll see.’

  Lila nodded. She felt relieved now to think Hari was growing up and would soon be able to find work and earn money. Of course he was still young, a year younger than her, and she could not expect him to work and earn like a man. Change would not come suddenly or quickly to their home and family, but it would come. She had to believe that it would come.

  She got up and bent to pick up the heavy water pot. Hari bent too, to help, and together they lifted it on to her head. She stood for a moment to get her balance and then walked away, back to the hut. Now she could go back to work. Pinto followed her, just as he always did, devotedly.

  Hari could not work any more. Although he had felt hopeful when talking to Lila of the future, he now wondered if he could really do anything about it. He stared at the dry, stony field that he had to plant with vegetables. What if he did clear and dig the field and sow some aubergines and marrows? The vegetables would be eaten. Then there would be nothing. It was simply not enough.

  He walked down to the sea which was heavy and still and glittering in the noonday sun. The tide was far out. The fishing fleet stood becalmed at the horizon as if it had come to the end of the world and could go no further, its sails hanging slack at this still time of day. Only the pariah kites wheeled in the sky, up in the very dome of it, looking down on the crawling sea and the little creatures on earth from their great height and distance. Now and then they whistled thin, shrill whistles. And the pigeons cooed and cooed in the great banyan trees, sounding as if they were trying to console.

  Hari sat down in the grove of casuarina trees where it was always shady and even a little breeze murmured through the soft grey needles of the old twisted trees. It was the coolest and shadiest spot on the whole beach and Hari was not the only one to seek it out at midday. One of the old men who owned the coconut grove next to theirs lay there asleep, his head on a pile of casuarina needles, his turban spread over his eyes. He was a bad-tempered, drunken old man and Hari was careful not to wake him.

  He put his hands behind his head and leaned against a tree trunk, half closing his eyes against the glare from the sea. Out of the white-hot sky one of the floating kites swooped suddenly down, snatched up something on the beach and swooped upwards again. Hari opened his eyes to see what it was that dangled helplessly from its beak. A pair of kites chased after it, the prey dropped from its beak and Hari saw that it was a dead snake.

  He was going to get up and go and inspect it when Ramu came cycling up and stopped under the trees, along with two other boys from the village who, like Hari, had given up going to school although not for the same reasons as Hari. He could no longer pay the fees, low as they were, nor buy books which they could easily for their fathers owned fishing boats and went out to fish and brought home catches they could sell to the dealers who took them to Bombay in lorries. They had simply grown bored with school and were waiting for some opportunity to come along which would bring them money and a good time. They were quite old enough to help their fathers fish but they did not like to, thinking it a boring occupation for uneducated men.

  Hari, Ramu, Bhola and Mahesh – they used to play on the beach together and go hunting with their dogs, and wrestle and climb coconut trees and go to the occasional stage shows that were put on in the village on festival nights. Now they were too old to play and they just sat or lay about under the casuarina trees, talking.

  What did they talk about?

  ‘We will get jobs – then we will have money.’

  ‘How will we get jobs?’ Hari asked, sitting up suddenly and filling his hands with fistfuls of sand. ‘They will bring men from the cities to work in the factories.’

  ‘No, they won’t,’ all three boys shouted in protest.

  They were silent for a minute, then one said, ‘How can they? City people won’t come to live in a village. Where can they live? There’s nowhere for them to live, and no shops, no cinema. They won’t want to come here. We live here – we can work in their factories.’

  ‘We don’t know how to,’ Hari said.

  ‘As if we can’t learn!’

  ‘Anyone can learn.’

  ‘Anyone can work machines. They will show us – then we will do it.’

  ‘We don’t know anything about machines,’ Hari protested. ‘We only know how to fish
and how to grow coconuts.’

  ‘We will learn!’ they shouted.

  ‘How can we? We haven’t even finished school, we know nothing,’ Hari said, with disgust and despair lining his young face and darkening his black eyes. ‘You have to go to college to learn – learn engineering.’

  ‘College,’ they scoffed. ‘College and school teach you nothing. Books don’t teach you to work machines. We will learn in the factories.’

  ‘What factories are they? What will they make?’ Hari asked, trying hard to be optimistic like them and stop feeling so worried and afraid.

  But they could not answer.

  ‘I think – I think cycles.’

  ‘Someone said – motor cars.’

  ‘See, you don’t know,’ Hari said angrily. ‘You don’t know anything.’

  Ramu threw a coconut shell at him. Hari caught it and threw it back. It hit Ramu on the knee. He jumped up with a howl. The sleeping man woke up and roared at them. Ramu got up and ran. Hari chased him for a bit – then stopped – it was too hot to run. Hari went out on to the beach by himself.

  He had seen Bela and Kamal, back from school, coming down the beach, each carrying a small brass pot and a little sickle knife in her hand. He knew they were going down to the rocks to chip at barnacles – Lila must have told them to collect molluscs for dinner. He would not join them – the exposed rocks along the beach were already crowded with women and girls, all pick-pick-picking at the barnacles with their small sharp koytas to dig out and collect the molluscs in them. It was an occupation for women. He turned away and decided to go and fetch his net and fish.

  Bela and Kamal, in their indigo blue school skirts, crouched on the rocks and picked at them with their koytas, digging out the little slimy molluscs from the hard barnacle shells and slipping them into the little brass pot Lila had given them to fill. Many of their school friends chipped and cut beside them, as did some of their mothers and grandmothers. Others were burying baskets of palm fronds deep into the sand where the sea would cover them up and soften them, to be dug out several months later and worked into ropes. Now that the weather was cooler, it was pleasant to work out in the sun on the beach. They were just like the gulls and curlews and reef herons that stalked the shallows, fishing together, although – unlike the birds – they could not keep quiet and chattered and gossiped.

  ‘Look, there goes Hema with her mother,’ said Bela, pointing at two colourful figures on the beach – the mother dressed in a sari printed with bright flowers, purple and pink and orange, and the girl in a violet dress with a silver fringe.

  Many of the women stared at their dazzling clothes and sniggered.

  ‘They’ve been to Alibagh to buy fish.’

  ‘Too fine to catch their own, eh?’ said another.

  ‘They don’t need to. You know Biju – when he comes back from his fishing trip, he has tons of fish in his boat, tons and tons – prawns and pomfret and surmai and everything. They don’t need to buy any fish.’

  ‘Of course not – they sell it, they have so much.’

  ‘In Bombay, where you get double the price you would here in Thul or even in Alibagh.’

  ‘Twice? Thrice the price.’

  ‘That’s why they have all those gold bangles,’ said one child, enviously.

  For a while all the women were silent and one could hear only their koytas chipping at the barnacles encrusted on the rocks, and the jingle of their glass bangles as they chipped. All the women in Thul loved bangles and although few could wear gold or even silver ones, all had dozens of glass bangles – blue and green and gold, covering their arms from their wrists to their elbows, nearly. Bela and Kamal had far less, only six or eight each, which they had bought last Diwali at the fair. Glass bangles were cheap but did not last long, alas: they broke so easily but were pretty while they lasted.

  Then one of the old grey-haired grandmothers, Kashi-bai, squatting on the rocks beside them, said, ‘And have you heard – Biju is going to build yet another boat?’

  ‘Another boat? But he has so many – why should he want one more?’ the other women chorused.

  ‘It is to be bigger and faster than all the others. My man told me the other day, he had it from Biju himself – this boat is going to have engines, so they can go out in all weathers, as far as Saurashtra and Gujarat. They will go far out to fish – far, far out where there is still plenty to catch. Over here there is not enough left.’

  ‘No,’ they agreed, ‘not enough left, so little left.’

  ‘Still, our men find fish here,’ one women said. ‘Ours still fish here and find some.’

  ‘But so little,’ sighed the others. ‘They bring home so little.’

  Now Bela and Kamal were silent. Both were thinking, ‘At least your men bring home a little. Our father does not even go fishing. Hari has to fish with just a net. And he can catch hardly anything at all.’ They did not say this. Instead, they crawled about on the rocks, prising open the little lids of the barnacles, scooping out the molluscs and filling their small brass pot as best they could.

  In the silence of the late afternoon, with the tide out and the breeze still, they all heard a sound that was like a whisper or a sigh, a deep sigh uttered by the ocean itself. Then the sigh extended into a long rustling, rippling sound. It came from far out at sea. The ripple lifted itself out of the flat, dull ocean – a long, white line that lifted and rippled and rushed closer and closer to land till it dashed against the rocks in a shower of spray. The tide had turned. It was coming in now. Along with it came the evening breeze, fresh and cool and lovely. Tide and breeze both rushing at them now, the women stopped work and got up. ‘Time to go home,’ they said, ‘time to start the dinner,’ and they collected their sickles and brass pots and started walking up the beach in twos and threes, the women in their bright green and orange saris and the girls in their blue and white school clothes, some chattering and laughing, others hobbling silently along.

  Hari had seen them go as he brought his fishing net down the beach. He did not like to be watched, the only boy in the village with no boat and no job on the fishing boats. Also, he knew he could not hope to catch much in his net along the shore.

  Still, he enjoyed it. He lowered his net into the surf and walked along, letting the coffee-coloured waves surge through it, and then dragged it out on shore. All he ever caught were a few gold and silver fish, too tiny to bother to pick up, gasping and swelling up as they puffed for air before they died. And three or four crabs – again too small to have any meat on them. He watched them lying on their backs and kicking their transparent legs in the air. A large black crow came hopping along to see what it could find. Hari amused himself by turning the crabs right side up so they could scuttle away down into the sea and safety. But the crow kept turning them over on to their backs again with its beak. Finally Hari left the crow to it and walked on with his empty net.

  The fishing fleet was coming in. The first boat was already close to the shore, within shouting distance, and no sooner had a fisherman on board shouted than a horde of women came streaming down the beach from the village by the creek. All were carrying baskets. Some couldn’t wait for the boats to come to shore and plunged into the sea, with their saris tucked up at their waists, and waded out to the boats. The fishermen lowered heavy baskets of fish down to them. They set them on their heads and came wading back to shore. Two or three of the fishermen followed them. The boats would not be able to come up the creek till the tide was high.

  Now all was loud and noisy on the beach where it had been so still and quiet before. The fishermen began to auction off the baskets of fish. The women poked into them and spilled out the contents on to the sand. There were mounds of pink prawns, still crawling and alive, long snake-like ‘Bombay duck’, little flat shining pomfrets that really should have been left in the sea to grow, some blue-black speckled surmai that is so delicious to eat, and a few large black crabs. The women became louder and noisier as they fought over the baskets, pu
shing each other out of the way as they bid for the catch.

  ‘Fifty rupees!’ shouted a woman who had found a basket with some really large pomfrets that would fetch ten rupees each in Bombay, and the freshest, pinkest prawns. But ‘Sixty rupees!’ bawled another. ‘Seventy!’ shouted the third, a great, heavy woman wrapped in a purple sari, and when the other women hesitated, she opened up a loose cloth belt at her waist, removed a bundle of filthy notes from it and handed it over to the pleased, grinning fisherman. Bending to collect her basket, she hallooed loudly while the other women grumbled and bickered over the smaller baskets of fish.

  In answer to her ringing halloo, a tonga came rattling down the beach. The brown mare’s legs scissored along at great speed, the big wheels spun over the wet and glassy shore, the tonga-driver raised his whip and cracked it in the air, and the tonga went right through the surf and out of it till it reached the band of women and their baskets.

  Again the bargaining began.

  ‘Two rupees to the highway bus stop,’ offered one woman who had bought a bag of prawns.

  ‘Three rupees!’

  ‘Five!’

  But again the large woman who had so much money tied in her belt won. ‘Six,’ she said flatly, and without waiting for an answer from the tonga-driver, she climbed in with the basket. The tonga creaked, the horse staggered, but the tonga-driver set his cap at an angle, cracked his whip and set off at a trot up the sandy path along the creek to the highway where the woman would sell the fish to a lorry driver come to collect fish from the villages, or else get into the bus and go to Alibagh bazaar to sell it herself. The other women bickered over what was left, and Hari turned away – there was nothing more to watch.

  He wished he could have bought one of those fish for his family. Better still, he wished he could have caught one. But his net was empty. He trailed it behind him as he walked back in the soft mauve twilight, whistling to himself.