by Anita Desai
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.
Hari stood staring at the shut door, seething with all the questions he had wanted to ask and now could not. He heard the man singing to himself, some loud and rollicking song from a Bombay film. Then the door opened, the man’s face appeared in the crack, shouting, ‘Pumpkin-head! Still standing there, staring? Get away, will you, leave me alone. Can’t stand to see your pumpkin-face. Take it away – go – come back when you’ve learnt what chemicals are, what factories are, what fertilizer is good for!’
As Hari lurched homewards over the dusty ruts of the village road, a bicycle dashed past him, its bell ringing wildly. It was Ramu of course, but an unusually speedy Ramu.
‘Have you heard?’ he shouted back over his shoulder at Hari. ‘Biju’s deep freeze has arrived. A lorry brought it from Bombay.’
He sped away and did not notice that Hari shook his head: he had lost interest in old Biju the smuggler’s boat. It would go out to sea and drown in the monsoon storms, the deep freeze sink to the bottom of the sea. Hari’s head was filled with a vision of shining factories, tall chimneys, clouds of strange-smelling smoke, people like ants going through the big gates – and amongst them a boy in khaki shorts and a torn shirt, himself.
It was dark when he went up the path through the coconut grove. Pinto came barking towards him. He did not bother to pat him or speak to him but let him leap at his side, lovingly brushing against his legs as he walked. He could see a small fire burning in the hut, illuminating it as if it were a lamp, and the dark figures of his three sisters huddled around it, framed by the doorway.
He stepped on to the log that lay across the creek and stared at them. They could not see him in the dark and did not know he was there. Their heads were bent, they were silent, only their outlines were lit up by the flames of the small, smoking fire. They looked frightened, tired and hopeless in that huddled position in the half-dark.
Lila, Bela and Kamal. He seldom thought about them, or their lives, because they lived so close together in that small hut, sharing the same kind of life. It was the hard life that occupied him, entirely, so that he could not see them separated from it, as people, as individuals. Lila,
Bela and Kamal – his three sisters, one older and two younger than him. Here they were, with nothing but a small smoking fire to light their hut or give them comfort while he was away.
What were they waiting for? What were they hoping for? They could never look forward to working on a fishing boat or in a factory, as he did. They would have to marry, one day, and he would have to see to it since his father would not. He would have to find them husbands, and buy them their wedding finery – silk saris and gold jewellery – and arrange their weddings to which the whole village would have to be invited. The bridegrooms might demand a dowry – a bicycle or even a scooter. Gold buttons, coins and jewellery. A cow or a buffalo. A piece of land. He had heard of the fantastic demands that bridegrooms made and that parents had to meet. How could he ever meet them? Even if he found a job, he would never earn enough to buy them such riches. He would have to borrow money from the village money lender and then pay him out of his salary, for years, perhaps all his life. And that was if he ever earned a salary, if he ever had a job. He must have a job if he was to find his sisters a way out of this dark, gloomy house and the illness and drunkenness and hopelessness that surrounded them like the shadows of the night.
He knew he could never earn enough in Thul to help his whole family. He would have to go to Bombay. Bombay was a great city, a rich city, a city crowded with people who had jobs, earned money and made fortunes. He had to get there somehow. How? When? That was still not clear to him.
He went into the hut, Pinto bounding ahead of him. They looked up at him. Their sad, frightened faces made him cry out, ‘What has happened?’
3
It was their mother. They had noticed something strange about her ever since Lila took in her morning tea and found she could not even lift her head to sip it. When Lila placed an arm under her head to raise it a bit, she felt the skin burning and dry with fever. She called, ‘Ma’, and the woman fluttered her eyelids but did not open her eyes or smile. ‘Bela, Kamal,’ Lila called, and when the little girls came running, told them to fetch cool water from the earthen jar in the veranda and a rag to dip in it. She placed the wet rag on her mother’s forehead and sat beside the bed, holding her mother’s wrist. It was limp between her fingers.
‘What is it?’ whispered the girls, bending over the bed and staring. They were dressed and ready for school but they would not move from the bed.
‘She has fever today,’ Lila murmured. ‘High fever. Go tell – go and tell –’
‘Who?’
‘What?’
Lila bit her lip as she tried to think of an answer. After a while she spoke in a trembling voice that she tried to control. ‘Go and see if you can find Hari in the field. Tell him to go to the village and ask – no, there is no doctor there.’
‘Should he go to Alibagh?’ Bela whispered anxiously, trying to help.
‘No, that’s no use – no Alibagh doctor will come all the way here,’ Lila sighed. Then she said, ‘Go to the Khanekars next door, Bela. Go and ask Hira-bai to come. Or to send a doctor. She knows doctors. She is interested in herbs and cures. Perhaps she will come herself.’
‘But –’ said Bela.
‘What if they are all – you know?’ said Kamal, with a glance at the drunken heap of her father snoring on the mat in the darkest corner of the room.
‘You have to go. Don’t talk to the men. Go straight to Hira-bai.’
‘She drinks, too, you know,’ the girls warned.
‘Not all the time,’ said Lila sharply. ‘Go anyway, and see.’
The two girls did not argue any more but ran. As they crossed the creek by the fallen log, Pinto came dashing out of the tall grasses on the bank and met them with a delighted bark, making a heron that stood hunchbacked on a stone, staring into the marsh, give a frightened shake of its dull, grey-brown feathers, rise on its toes and flap away into the top of the pandanus grove. Other birds were startled too and called or flew out – the old hidden crow-pheasant warned ‘coop-coop-coop’ and a pair of drongoes swooped upwards into the sunlight, glinting blue-black. The bhindi tree shook down some of its yellow blossoms on to their heads.
Bela and Kamal ducked beneath its branches and scuffled through the dense shrubbery that separated their hut from their neighbour’s grove. Suddenly Bela stopped, spreading out her arms to protect Kamal. Then she sighed. ‘Oh it’s only a skin,’ and Kamal, peering over her shoulder, saw a six-foot long snake skin draped over a clump of spider lilies near Bela’s foot, transparent and shimmering like a beautiful veil. It stirred in the breeze and seemed almost alive. Its mouth was open, and there were even two little holes for the eyes – it was so perfect and whole. But it was only a dry skin, probably discarded the night before, so the girls held hands and hurried past it to the Khanekars’ estate.
The Khanekars lived in a large, sprawling untidy house in the midst of all that vegetation, the weeds crawling closer to their mud walls and the vines climbing over the thatch roof. The yard was littered with heaps of firewood, empty clam shells, a few clucking hens and some shabby grey laundry spread out to dry over the bushes. It was all neglected and shabby. At one time they had groves of betel leaf, banana plantations, poultry and a tank in which they kept freshwater fish. But the three brothers who owned the land did not care for agriculture or fishing and after their father died, they stopped working altogether and drank the toddy they brewed themselves and sold what was left to other drunkards. Their wives had left them and gone back to their parents in other villages. Only their old mother, Hira-bai, kept house for them. She was fond of toddy, too.
However, to the relief of the little girls, she was sitting cross-legged on a string bed outside her house, competently chopping up a heap of betel nuts into small slivers that she dropped into a large metal box at her side. Her mouth was stained a deep red from the betel leaves and betel nuts that she chewed all day. She opened that crimson mouth in a surprised grin when she saw them and automatically adjusted the fold of her purple sari over her grey head as women always did when visitors appeared.
‘Ho, Bela. Ho, Kamal. What brings you here? Your father sent you for a pot of toddy this early in the morning?’ she shouted, and burst into loud laughter which made a man, invisible in the house, call out, ‘What’s up, Mother?’
Bela and Kamal stopped short at some distance from her. Kamal twisted one leg about the other and put her finger in her mouth. Bela did the same.
Hira-bai cackled with laughter. ‘Don’t like to say, eh? Don’t like to ask for toddy? Don’t be shy. We know what men are like. You know, and I know, so why be shy?’
The girls shook their heads at her, speechlessly.
‘Eh? No toddy, you say? Then what’s it you want? Money for toddy?’
More vigorously, they shook their heads till their plaits flew.
‘Not money for toddy? Well – your ma sent you then? For money for rice? For tea? Is that it? No rice in the house? Now girls, before you ask for any, I’d better warn you –’
Suddenly Bela could bear it no longer. Breaking away from Kamal, she came a few steps closer and said quickly in a hoarse voice, ‘We don’t want money. We don’t want rice. We haven’t come to ask for any. My mother is sick and my sister sent us to tell you to please –’
‘Sick?’ the old woman stared at Bela and stopped laughing. ‘I know she is sick. She is always sick. Is she worse then?’
Bela nodded rapidly. ‘She has fever. We have no medicine. Can you call a doctor to see her?’
The old woman began cutting betel nuts again with her powerful scissors. She mumbled to herself as she did so. Then she stopped chop-chopping the hard little wooden nuts and spoke in a different voice. ‘I’ll tell you what. I heard the old man who comes to the village with his cow blowing his horn and banging his drum early this morning. He can’t have gone far. I’ll send word to him to turn around and come back. I’ll send him to you. He has good herbs, powders and barks. Go and tell Lila,’ she said, nodding to them encouragingly so that her sari s
lipped off her head and showed the grey hair dyed bright orange with henna.
Bela and Kamal turned and fled, fighting their way through the shrubbery back to the safety of their home. But before they came to the log across the creek they heard a yelp and turned to see Pinto, who had stayed back to sniff at the chickens in the coop and the fish bones in a heap by the house, come limping and squealing after them, his tail between his legs and his ears flattened. Either the old woman or one of the men in the house must have flung a stone or a coconut at him and hit him in the leg. He came up to them whining and they hurried him home before any more stones could be flung.
At the hut there was nothing to do but wait. Lila did not say anything about school as she went about her housework in a silent, tight-lipped way, now and then going to see to their mother, and the girls stayed outside the hut, playing in a quiet, subdued way, drawing patterns in the sand and decorating the patterns with flower petals. Now and then Lila gave them some task to do and these they did at once, without arguing. They fetched water from the well, washed the pot in which the tea had been made, cleaned the rice for their lunch and then searched around the shrubbery for firewood.
At last they heard the throbbing of the drum and the long eerie blasts on the trumpet which meant the medicine-man was near. He was preceded by the little dwarf cow that he dressed in tassels and necklaces of beads, with an embroidered cloth covering her hump. They had often seen him take the rounds with her, offering bundles of grass to people who would buy the bundle and feed it to the cow. Feeding the cow was a pious act and they were glad to pay a little and perform it. It brought him some money but not enough so he combined this occupation of ushering the sacred cow around the villages with the selling and administering of medicines that he found in the forest and prepared himself. He was a sharp-looking man and he kept all kinds of powders and pills in packets tied into the folds of his white dhoti and his pink turban. With these he treated the villagers for their boils, aches and fevers. He was also known to perform special puja for those who were too ill to benefit from his powders – the mad, the unhappy and the dying. All this gave him the air of a magician, of witchcraft, which made the girls shiver slightly when they heard him approach.