The Village by the Sea

by Anita Desai

  Now the surf was rushing up around the rocks that Lila had scattered with flowers that morning. Soon the red and white powder sprinkled on it would be washed away, and the petals that stuck to it, too. Next morning someone would come and scatter more.

  Up on the grassy bank where the path came down from their hut, Bela and Kamal were still skipping and playing. They were playing ‘Lame’. Bela was hopping on one leg and trying to catch Kamal who was running about on two in a small square marked with pebbles. Bela lurched forward to catch her sister by the skirt, Kamal stepped aside and Bela fell on her knees.

  ‘Don’t roar,’ Hari said, climbing up the bank. ‘You weren’t hurt.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Bela, getting up and dusting her knees.

  ‘Look how dusty you’ve made your skirt,’ said Hari.

  ‘Lila will wash it.’

  ‘Hmm – Lila has to do everything.’

  ‘Have you caught any fish?’ Bela asked quickly, to change the subject.

  They could see his net was empty. ‘You took home some molluscs, didn’t you?’ he asked.

  Now Pinto came running down the path as if to call them before it was quite dark. The shadows from the coconut grove had spread all over the beach now, only the deep rose and orange glow of the sun in the west did not fade but grew more vivid and intense. The evening star was already out in the sky, the calm and radiant Venus, brighter even than the moon which was quite pale by comparison, a disc of milky white floating in the deep blue-black sky. As it grew darker, the moon and the star grew brighter.

  ‘Pinto! Pinto!’ Kamal called, running up the path towards him.

  Pinto had been named after the man from whom they had taken him as a pup. He had come to the village to ‘do business’. No one knew quite what his business was. He lived in a hut behind the ration shop with a dog for company, cooking for himself, strolling about the village and talking to people. He had become friendly with some of the men at the toddy shop, including their father, and asked him if he would like to go to Goa to work on the barges that carried iron ore from the mines down the river to the ships at sea. Their father thought he would like to go to Goa where the toddy was supposed to be especially fine, and he paid the man fifty rupees as his bus fare. Then, the day before they were to leave, along with several other jobless men from the village, Mr Pinto disappeared. Their father could not believe it, and sat stunned at the toddy shop all day. Coming home from school, Kamal heard the dog and the puppies crying in the deserted hut and picked up the smallest and weakest of them to take home. That was all they had in return for their father’s fifty rupees. Later they learnt of many other men who had been duped by the man Pinto.

  Of course no one could hold that against his dog or its puppies. Pinto was small and furry, black and white, and brave as a lion. He loved Kamal who had rescued him, but he was most devoted of all to Lila who stayed at home all day with him and never deserted him. Only Hari never touched him and looked at him accusingly always. Every time he saw Pinto he was reminded of his father’s foolishness. Of course many other men in the village had been fooled as well. In fact, it had happened before – clever tricksters from the city coming and duping the ignorant villagers. It maddened Hari to think about it. He was not clever but he was not going to be fooled.

  He followed the dog and the two girls slowly up the path, past the ghostly white walls of Mon Repos to their own hut where a lamp was lit and Lila was cooking their dinner.

  Dinner was a hot curry made mainly of chillies and the few molluscs that the girls had collected floating in the red gravy, and some of the coarse, thick rice that they bought cheaply in the village shop.

  Lila carried a plateful in to their mother and then sat on the kitchen floor and ate with her sisters and brother while Pinto waited quietly for the leftovers.

  ‘Where’s Father?’ Hari asked in a low voice. ‘Gone out?’

  Lila nodded. They both felt relieved that he should be out of the house and disgusted because they knew he had gone to the toddy shop to drink all night with the other village drunkards.

  Late at night Lila and Hari who were still awake heard the men coming home – their father and the three brothers from the neighbouring farm who drank together every night. The moon had set and it was deeply, intensely dark. The brilliant, flashing stars lit up the sandy beach but their light did not filter through the close-woven palm leaves in the grove where it was black as pitch. The men had had a lantern with them when they set out from the village but it had fallen and broken as they bumped into each other and into the tree trunks. They had laughed when it smashed and tinkled to bits on the stones, it was their wives who would think of the cost of a new lantern and more oil and wail bitterly over the loss. Now they tried to find their way home in the dark, calling to each other and singing to keep up their spirits.

  They made so much noise that all the stray dogs of Thul woke up on hearing them and howled in alarm and protest.

  Lila and Hari, who knew their father was among them, tried to shut out the sounds by covering their heads with their pillows. Lila hated and feared the noise so much that she cried to herself. Hari did not cry but he bit his lip and thought, ‘Maybe a poisonous snake will bite him. He may step on one and be bitten, there are so many of them and it is dark. Then he would die.’ He did not say that in fear, he said it with hope, as if he wished that was what would happen.

  A little later there was a thump against the front door. Their father flung it open, jarring the whole house so that the walls shook and the palm-leaf thatch rustled. Pinto got up and gave a sharp yelp of alarm. Their father hissed at him, then bumped and lurched his way into their mother’s room. They heard her begin to say something in protest, but he growled at her, then fell down in a heap and snored.

  There was silence then. But the silence was not calm and lovely, it was full of fear and anger and nightmares.

  2

  Lila would go to the market at Thul today. She had to buy rice and perhaps some sugar and tea. Hari had brought down six bunches of coconuts and sold them to the Malabaris who came from Bombay in a lorry, so she had some money to spend. After Bela and Kamal had left for school, she took out her best sari from the green tin trunk in the corner of the room she shared with her sisters, and wore that. It was pink and had a pattern of brown flowers on it, and a border of violet. It was quite a cheap cotton sari but she wore it so seldom that it still looked fresh and new, and made her look so much younger and prettier than when she was dressed in an everyday sari which was always either dark green or dark purple, a single unpatterned colour, of thick cloth that stood much wear and tear. She herself felt younger and happier, and she took the market bag off its nail on the kitchen door and called goodbye to her mother who seemed to be asleep and did not answer, then set off down the beach that was brilliant with morning light and already hot.

  A few other women were walking along to market with big black umbrellas to shield them from the white, blinding sun. The whole sea glittered with reflected light – it was like a mirror broken into bits and shining. Only the two small rocky islands of Undheri and Kundheri made two blobs in all that brightness. One of them had a small fort built long ago and empty now except for lizards. There was a breeze and the big dhows and catamarans swooped along as swiftly as birds, carrying their cargo up the coast to Gujarat and Saurashtra.

  There was some commotion on the beach where a lorry had come and unloaded some timber. Now it was stuck in the sand. The driver was cursing loudly. Some of the village boys, the ones who did not go to school, came to help. They were spreading palm leaves on the sand under the wheels and trying to push the lorry out of the ruts on to them.

  As Lila walked past, the wheels churned and threw up sand, then the lorry heaved and roared and was on its way.

  ‘Next time, send your timber in a bullock cart,’ one of the boys shouted after the driver and they all hooted and laughed.

  ‘You think I would drive a bullock cart?’ the driver
shouted at them from the window.

  ‘Bullocks don’t stick in the sand like your fancy motor,’ they screamed, but he was gone.

  Lila did not stop to listen to more but hurried on, the soles of her feet burning on the hot sand. Then she came to the great banyan trees and the feathery-leaved drumstick trees that threw some shade on to the flat parched earth around the village and here it was cooler.

  The village road leading to the market was lined with houses, some of them of solid brick and whitewashed, with bright floral patterns painted on their veranda walls, and others made of mud, with tattered palm leaves for roofs. But large or small, rich or poor, each had a sacred basil plant growing in a pot by the front door. Children and mongrels were playing in the dust, women were cleaning rice or throwing out pails of dirty water into the lane.

  At the end of the lane was the temple. It was not very old or beautiful, it had four brick pillars supporting a tiled roof, an unwalled court and a small alcove that housed an idol. That was all. But there were several young men on the steps, sitting and playing drums and singing.

  Lila could not help staring, and a young girl who was watching from a brick house across the lane called to her, ‘See, Lila, the actors have come. They are going to do a play tonight.’

  Lila smiled and went up to her friend Mina. ‘Which play? Do you know?’

  ‘I don’t know, but it will be the same they always have of course,’ said Mina who had seen them all, living as she did across from the temple where they were always staged. ‘It will be the Radha-Krishna story, or the Rama-Sita, or the Nala-Damayanti. They always do those, you know.’

  Lila had been to very few. ‘Will you go and see it?’ she asked enviously.

  ‘I will sit on my veranda and see!’

  ‘You’re lucky to live here, in the village.’

  ‘Come and watch it with me.’

  ‘I can’t come out at night.’

  ‘Why not? Hari can bring you.’

  ‘Hari and I can’t go out together and leave the little girls alone.’

  ‘What can happen to them? Your mother and father are there.’

  But Lila shook her head without explaining. ‘I have to go and buy some rice and sugar. Will you come?’

  Mina had nothing to do, it seemed – her parents were trying to find her a husband – and she came. They strolled down the lane together, past the women who sat on the two sides of it, each with a banana leaf spread out before her on which she placed her wares – usually just a few shining purple aubergines, a bunch of spinach, five or six bananas, maybe a green coconut or two, and always handfuls of flowers, pink and white and yellow flowers plucked from the hedges and bushes. Mina bought some to make a garland for her hair. For a little more money, you could buy a ready-made one.

  Lila could not spend money on such things. She went to one of the two grocery stores on the market square where one could buy rice, eggs, potatoes, sugar, oil, tea and sweets, and bought her rice there after carefully fingering all the varieties and choosing what seemed best at the lowest price.

  There were many others waiting to be served. As they stood about, picking potatoes out of the buckets or trickling rice through their fingers, they gossiped. Lila and Mina learnt what the timber on the beach was for.

  ‘Did you see, Biju’s timber has come from Alibagh?’

  ‘Oh, that was Biju’s timber? For the boat?’

  ‘And the diesel engine? Has that come too?’ Someone sniggered.

  ‘They will come – you’ll see. Biju is not fooling us. He can buy two diesel engines with all his money.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  Lila and Mina turned back. Lila’s shopping bag was full and heavy.

  ‘My father says Biju has made all his money by smuggling.’

  ‘Smuggling?’ Lila was not really as surprised as she sounded. She had heard this before. ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘Of course I believe it. How else could he have a television set in his house?’

  ‘It doesn’t work, Hari says, because we are too far away from the TV station in Bombay.’

  ‘Perhaps they will go away to Bombay – when they’ve made enough money.’

  Lila and Mina had never been further than Alibagh, the district headquarters two miles away. But they had heard of more adventurous people getting into the bus on the highway or the ferry at Rewas and going all the way to that great city across the sea. When they were smaller, they used to play at ‘going to Bombay’, but that would not do any longer.

  Now Lila turned out of the village lane on to the beach, and it was more bare and white and blazing hot than before.

  ‘Come at night to see the play,’ Mina called after her.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Lila called back, knowing that she would not.

  Now Biju’s boat was being built. The village children – Hari often amongst them – would come and stand in groups of three and four to watch. Biju had got workmen from Alibagh to build his boat, he did not think the villagers at Thul could do it although they had been building boats all their lives. So the villagers liked to watch the Alibagh workers and to jeer at them. Sometimes that made Biju so angry that he shouted at them. It was always noisy.

  Biju would come waddling down to watch the work in progress. A small boy would carry a folding chair down to the beach from his house and plant it on the sand for Biju to sit on. Biju would lower himself on to it very gingerly, twitching up his loose dhoti and sitting down very uncomfortably. He would obviously have been more comfortable squatting on his heels in the sand as the others did, but now that he was such a great ship-owner, he felt he had to sit on a chair unlike the rest of them.

  Sometimes his wife came waddling down from the house to watch, too. She did not have a folding chair to sit on so she would stand till she got tired and went back to the house. It was a big, double-storeyed brick one set in a huge, gloomy estate of coconut and betelnut palms, grown so closely together that no light filtered through the leaves. Everywhere were signs of their wealth – they had several deep wells, many bullock carts, a row of bullocks, hens and ducks, piles of firewood, a pigeon house and the famous television set – the only aerial in Thul perched on the blue tin roof of their house. The house had its name painted in big crimson letters on a tin signboard: Anand Bhavan, House of Joy. But because of the closely planted trees and the lack of light and the untidiness of the big yard it looked more gloomy than joyful. Certainly Biju’s wife trailed back to it slowly without any expression of joy. She knew how the villagers gossiped about them and she did not like it.

  Almost the whole village stopped to watch the big boat being built at some time or the other. No one else owned such a large boat or even worked on one. Perhaps they were jealous and that was why no one had a good word for it. Or perhaps they really did not believe it would do well at sea being so large and clumsy and built by those Alibagh workmen at that. But in a way they were proud, too, that someone in Thul was able to build such a thing, even if it was Biju who everyone knew was dishonest and perhaps a smuggler.

  ‘Smuggler, smuggler, smuggler,’ children whispered behind their hands while they watched, and giggled till Biju roared at them and made them fly.

  ‘Biju will go to jail! Biju will go to jail!’ they sang as they ran, and he was much too fat and old to catch them and beat them as they deserved.

  ‘Do you think we have smugglers in our village, Hari?’ Bela and Kamal asked at night when they were lying in bed, not quite asleep.

  ‘Of course we do.’

  ‘What do they smuggle?’

  ‘Silver and gold.’

  ‘No – o – o!’

  ‘Yes, of course. That’s how they get so rich.’

  ‘Where do you think they get it from – the silver and gold? Can you find it in the sea?’

  ‘No, sillies, it’s brought from foreign countries that have gold and silver mines and where it is cheaper than here. It is brought in dhows from Africa, from Arabia – and unloaded into fishin
g boats that go out to meet them in the sea. It’s put into the smugglers’ boats and brought to shore, and sold here for much money.’

  ‘You’ve never seen that.’

  ‘No,’ Hari admitted, ‘I haven’t, but we’ve all heard about it. All you women love gold and silver jewellery so much, and buy such a lot of it, so the smugglers make a lot of money. Biju is supposed to make his money that way.’

  ‘They say he’s going to build the biggest fishing boat in Thul.’

  ‘It will be the best one, too. I wish I could get a job on it.’

  ‘Do you? On Biju’s boat?’

  ‘Yes, why not?’

  ‘Oh, don’t work for Biju, Hari. You just said he’s a smuggler. He may turn you into a smuggler too.’

  ‘Then I’ll be rich, like him,’ Hari chuckled, ‘and buy you gold necklaces and silver toe-rings.’

  But, ‘Oh no,’ they cried in alarm. ‘The police will catch you and put you in jail.’

  ‘Then they will take me to Bombay. At least I will get to Bombay.’

  ‘Do you want to go away to Bombay?’ they whispered, frightened by his bitter tone.

  ‘Of course I do, don’t you?’

  They began to whisper to each other – they shared a bed – and a little later, when they heard a low groan from their mother in her room, Hari hushed them and they fell silent and were soon asleep. While Hari lay awake, listening to their deep, even breathing and the deeper, louder breathing of the sea outside, he thought about the boats that sailed there so freely and could go to Bombay, to Africa, to Arabia if they liked. If only he could sail away in one of them – even if only to Bombay.

  Bombay! He stared out of the window at the stars that shone in the sky and wondered if the lights of the city could be as bright, or brighter. It was a rich city: if he could get there, he might be able to make money, bring home riches, pieces of gold and silver with which to dazzle his sisters.

  No! he told himself, closing his eyes. That was a foolish dream. He could not afford dreams, he must be practical and think out a scheme. That was not easy and the effort made him tired so that he gave up and fell asleep.