The Village by the Sea

by Anita Desai

  The cook stood watching and growled, ‘Look at them. Is this what they come all the way here for? They can bathe at home, more comfortably. But they’re mad, that’s what they are – mad.’

  But the next day, when the bread ran out, Mr de Silva had to get into the car and fetch more. He said to the cook, ‘Tell me all you need and I’ll go and do your shopping in Alibagh today so you won’t need to bother me again.’

  Hearing this, Lila darted out from the kitchen, stood before him with her hands clasped before her and her eyes cast down shyly, and asked what she had made up her mind to ask: ‘Sahib, can you take my mother to the hospital in Alibagh? If you are going in the car, may she and I go with you? She has been so ill and there is no doctor and no hospital here.’

  Mr de Silva looked shocked and stammered a bit, not knowing what to say, but his wife came running down the veranda and stood listening to Lila. ‘Why didn’t you tell me she was ill?’ she asked. ‘I always bring some medicines with me – I might have been able to help.’

  Lila looked at her with gratitude and explained, ‘She has been ill for so long – she has grown very thin and weak. I don’t know what medicine to get for her. A doctor must see her. There is a hospital in Alibagh. I thought – I thought if you can take her there – and I’ll work for you – then the money you pay me – uh – that can pay for the doctor and the medicine.’

  ‘Of course!’ exploded Mr de Silva. ‘Of course we will pay for the medicine. Go and fetch your mother.’

  That was a day of such excitement that Lila might have enjoyed it if it had not been for all the strain and worry that went with the excitement. She had hardly ever been to Alibagh before although it was only three kilometres away, and certainly never before sat in a motor car. Yet when she did so, she could only worry about her mother who lay stretched out on the back seat, moaning, with her head on Lila’s lap, looking so pale and sick that Lila wondered if she would reach Alibagh alive. She was so occupied with holding her mother’s head and keeping her covered with a sheet that she did not look out of the window at the road or the trees or the bullock carts and bus stops that they passed. Mr de Silva drove at great speed as if he too were afraid he might not get Lila’s mother to the hospital in time, and in a short while they were driving up the wide, quiet road to the hospital.

  Here Lila began to feel so helpless that she would not have known what to do if Mr de Silva had not been with her and helped her. ‘Wait here – I’ll go and fetch a stretcher and a nurse and go and speak to a doctor,’ he said through the back window and then marched off with the purposeful stride of a city man past the rows of patiently waiting villagers in the compound.

  He made all the arrangements and in a little while two men in white came with a stretcher and rolled Lila’s mother gently on to it and carried her in. Lila ran after them with a little bundle made up of a shawl, a towel, a comb and a metal tumbler. Then she ran up the steps and down the veranda after her, following her into a ward where the beds stood in a double row under the slowly revolving electric fans. The room was cool and darkened by the green paint on the window-panes. The stretcher bearers lifted her mother on to one of the beds and a nurse came hurrying forwards to make her comfortable.

  ‘Wait here – I’ll speak to the doctor, then I’ll take you home,’ said Mr de Silva, and Lila nodded and sat down beside the bed, trembling with fear and nervousness.

  ‘Don’t look so frightened,’ smiled the nurse as she straightened the sheets and arranged things on a small table by the bed. ‘We will look after her – we have very good doctors – you needn’t worry now.’

  The doctor came and examined Lila’s mother who had not opened her eyes or spoken but lay still and white under the sheet. Lila stood biting her lip and watching the doctor and trying to understand what he said to Mr de Silva in English. At last he turned around and spoke to her in Marathi. ‘Leave her here with us. It will take a long time to cure her, she is so emaciated. We will have to get many tests done to begin with, to find out what is wrong. That will take some days. We will send you the report – or you can come and fetch it after a week. But don’t worry – there is nothing wrong that we can’t put right.’

  Lila shook her head: she did not want to leave her mother. But Mr de Silva said, ‘You have your sisters at home – you must come. I will bring you back after a few days, I promise. Come along.’

  She was not brave enough to argue with him, so she followed him to the car but wept all the way home.

  That night when her father was leaving the hut, he stopped to stare at her while she tried to light a fire with some sticks, and growled, ‘Where’s your mother gone?’

  ‘I took her to the hospital in Alibagh,’ Lila whispered, still on her knees and not daring to look up.

  There was a dangerous roaring sound as he swayed on his feet above her like a tree about to fall. His shadow on the wall was made huge as a giant’s by the small flickering flames of the fire. ‘Why did you send her away without asking me?’ he roared.

  ‘You were – you were asleep, Father,’ Lila whispered.

  There was another roar from him. ‘I will go to her,’ he shouted. ‘Why did you take her away without telling me? I will go to Alibagh – I will find her. She can’t be left alone, you stupid girl.’

  ‘The nurses and doctors will look after her, Father,’ Lila cried, afraid he would go to the hospital and make a drunken scene.

  ‘Don’t answer back, girl,’ he shouted. ‘What do you know about anything? What makes you think you can manage things? You can’t.’ He kicked over an earthen waterpot in his rage so that it fell and broke with a crash, flooding the kitchen floor. This made him even angrier and he stamped on the pieces of clay, smashing them to bits while he shouted, ‘How could you leave her alone? What if she needs something? What if she asks for me? Did you think of that?’ He picked up one of the pots on the shelf and hurled it on the floor beside Lila who cowered. ‘Cook some food, quick – I will take it to her.’

  ‘It’s late, Father,’ said Lila, crying.

  ‘It’s not late – don’t answer back,’ he shouted, sweeping off a whole row of tumblers from the shelf. ‘Make the food at once. I’m going to take it to her at Alibagh,’ he roared and began to crash around the house, hurling things about, while Lila hastily began to roll out the chapatis and bake them, although tears ran from her eyes and blinded her.

  There was so little in the house to cook but she made up a small bundle of food and gave it to her father who went storming down the path in the dark, cursing all of them as he went, waking up all the stray dogs of Thul and making them howl.

  Suddenly Lila remembered something. Snatching up the lantern from its hook on the kitchen wall, she ran out to the log on the creek and called, ‘Father! If – if the Khanekar brothers come again to ask for money – what shall I do?’

  She could not make out her father’s face or expression in the dark but she could see him halt for a moment. Then he swayed, waved his arm about his head, and roared, ‘Do? Tell them to get off my land, that’s what.’

  ‘Father,’ she cried, in a trembling voice, ‘last time they killed Pinto because they said you owed them money for toddy –’

  ‘That’s a lie! I owe no one money,’ he roared, swaying about in the pandanus grove like a ghost. Then, in a slightly lowered voice, he called, ‘I will stop by their house and pay them. I will tell old Hira-bai to look after you girls till your brother comes back. Curse him, where is that rascal?’ Muttering, he went crashing through the grove to the Khanekars’ house.

  Lila stood listening tensely for sounds of a quarrel, but there were none. Of course, she realized, at this time of night, the brothers would not be at home, they would be out drinking. Probably only old Hira-bai was at home and she was certainly not as bad as the men. So she went back to the hut, feeling sure her father would go straight on to the toddy shop for his customary drink.

  He did not, however, come back the next day or the next. When Mr de Si
lva took Lila to visit her mother and collect the reports, she was frightened to find him sitting on the veranda outside her mother’s ward. He got to his feet when he saw them coming and stood in the doorway silently when Lila went in. As she passed him, she noticed that for once he did not smell of toddy. He looked so grey and old and bent that for the first time she felt sorry for him. Then she went in to see her mother and found her in bed but awake, washed and clean.

  The nurse stopped and smiled at her. ‘See, she is still here, your mother – we haven’t hidden her away. Doesn’t she look better? She is taking her medicine and she is better already.’

  Lila sat and held her mother’s hand, smiling in relief. Her mother smiled back at her silently.

  It was Mr de Silva who went to the doctor to collect the reports and explained them to Lila as they drove home. ‘She is suffering from anaemia. A very bad case of it, the doctor says. It is lucky we brought her here in time. They have done many tests – X-rays and blood tests and so on – and they found that she has a touch of TB too, just a slight one that they can cure with medicines. They are giving her injections and good food, and she will get well. Of course it will take time – they say you must leave her with them for some time. Your father has said he will stay and look after her. Is that all right?’

  Lila, who sat awkwardly in the back, not used to the slippery seat or the swaying motion of the car, had to nod and agree. She could do nothing else although a thousand worries clouded her mind and darkened her face.

  Mr de Silva seemed to be watching her in the little mirror that hung over the windscreen. ‘Don’t worry so much,’ he said kindly. ‘I have given your father a little money for his food since he wants to stay at the hospital. We are paying for the medicines – the hospital itself is free. You will be paid for the work you and your sisters do for us so you’ll have something for running your own household.’

  ‘But – you will go away soon,’ Lila mumbled.

  ‘Yes, we are going but a friend of ours is coming from Bombay to live at Mon Repos for a few months. He will be alone and he will need a servant to look after him because we are taking ours back with us. If you wash and sweep and cook for him, he will pay you a salary.’

  ‘For a few months?’ Lila asked disbelievingly. No one had ever stayed that long at Mon Repos. ‘But the monsoon will come.’

  ‘Yes, he wants to spend the monsoon at Thul. He is doing a study of – well, you will find out. He is a strange fellow,’ chuckled Mr de Silva, and swerved sharply to avoid a bullock cart on the road. When the car went steadily forwards again, he said, ‘So stop worrying now – you will have work and you will earn money and your mother will be taken care of at the hospital: your father is there to see to that,’ and he began to whistle cheerfully as if every problem had been solved. Lila was not quite so sure about that but she was glad not to have to say any more and to stare silently out of the window at the bare, baked fields as she wondered about the future. Ever since Hari had left, everything had become uncertain.

  She thought of Hari with such longing that tears stung her eyes and her fingers curled up in knots. It seemed as if Hari knew that, wherever he was, for when they got out of the car, Bela and Kamal were standing on the log over the creek, waving a yellow postcard in the air and screaming, ‘From Hari! Hari has written us a postcard!’

  ‘Hari?’ cried Lila, tumbling out of the car and running towards them. ‘Where is he? What is he doing?’

  9

  The work was not easy in that firelit kitchen of the Sri Krishna Eating House that seemed to grow hotter and hotter and never to cool down even at night. The eating house never quite shut and customers had to be served with tea and bread or bread and lentils whenever they demanded it, day or night. Jagu kept his promise of paying Hari a rupee a day which came to seven rupees a week, good wages for a young boy new to the work, and Hari was grateful for it. Since he also got his meals free, he could save all that money to take home to his family, and he was proud of the amount he was collecting for them. What he minded was not being able to leave the eating house and go home when the work was done. He was confined to it day and night: he worked in the kitchen and in the front room, washed and bathed under the tap at the back, ate his meals at the table when there was no customer around, and slept on the bench or sometimes on the dusty black floor. This was the hardest of all.

  Outside the traffic ground past all through the night: when the buses had stopped, there were still the hand-drawn carts rattling through the streets with goods from the railway station and warehouses for the markets, and cars and taxis at all hours. When the cinema houses closed after the last show, hundreds of people poured out and streamed past, shouting and blowing paper horns and singing songs from the cinema show. Then the lights were never put out in the city which was always lit up so that Hari’s tired eyes longed for the deep darkness and the quiet nights of his seaside village. He could hardly remember the soft sounds of the sea or the wind in the coconut palms or the feel of the clean sand between his fingers and under his feet – it was all so long ago and far away. He had only been away for one season, just the few months between winter and summer, but it seemed like a lifetime.

  He would have fallen ill from lack of sleep if he had not one night got up and gone out to sit on the pavement because it was a degree cooler there than in the eating house with its fiery heat and stale smells and stuffy air. The old watchmender, who had stayed late to finish some work on a watch he had promised to have ready, had come over to him after pulling down the steel shutter over his shop and said, ‘What’s the matter, Hari? Not ill, are you?’

  Hari shook his head and said nothing – he was so fuddled by tiredness and lack of sleep.

  ‘Can’t sleep in there, eh? Must be terribly hot and stuffy. This is a bad month – May – before the monsoon comes,’ he said, sighing, and lifted the black cap off his head to mop his bald pate with a large green handkerchief. ‘My room is as bad as the shop – it’s on the top floor, you see, in one of those buildings that overlook Grant Road station,’ he waved his handkerchief at the busy intersection before folding it and putting it away. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you go and sleep in the park, eh? Wish I could come too, it will be cooler – but my cat will be waiting for me, my old puss.’ He chuckled to himself, quite happily, and wandered off unsteadily.

  Hari was always to be grateful to the old watchmender for this advice for the park changed his life and made it easier to endure. It was only a city park – a dusty square with some patches of worn grass, iron benches, rows of canna lilies and some palm trees – surrounded by very old and shabby buildings – not to be compared with the beach and the coconut grove at home, but still, it had a bench to lie on, trees to look at, some pigeons and crows to watch, and even if the city never seemed to grow cooler and the night air was even staler than by day, used up by the millions of gasping city-dwellers, it was certainly more bearable than the eating house kitchen.

  Lying on the wooden planks of the bench, Hari could see the tattered fronds of the dusty palm trees over his head and even one or two of the brightest stars, struggling to shine through the dust and soot of the city. When he got up and put his feet down he felt grass under them, not the hard, cruel city concrete.

  The park was watched over by a policeman in khaki, a young man with a fierce, sharp-tipped moustache that he kept twisting as he stood with his baton tucked under his arm, keeping a sharp eye on the people who went in and out of the park. On the first night that Hari lay down on the bench to sleep, he stalked across and growled, ‘Get up, boy, go home. This is no place to sleep. Get up quick or I’ll take you off to the police station – you can sleep as long as you like there.’

  Hari had just felt the luxury of stretching out and putting his feet up after a hard day at the eating house and he sat up, miserable. ‘I have nowhere to go,’ he said, ‘I live here.’

  ‘Nowhere to go? I’ll show you where you can go,’ bellowed the policeman ferociously, waving hi
s baton over Hari’s head, and was about to bring it down with a crack when an old gentleman who happened to be walking by, tapping his walking stick before him, stopped and spoke to the policeman.

  ‘Why bully a poor harmless boy, Mr Mighty Policeman?’ he piped in a small, shrill voice like a child’s. ‘There are enough bad characters in this city – thugs, murderers, thieves, gamblers, drunkards – why not go after them instead? Why not start with those drunkards playing cards in that corner over there? They make life unsafe for us who live in this locality, we are all afraid to come to this park because of them – not because of this poor boy who has no home and nowhere else to sleep,’ he said.

  The policeman stood chewing his moustache uncertainly. ‘Hrumph,’ he grunted, not knowing quite what to do. The bent old man had made him feel ashamed of bullying a child when there was adult work to be done: tackling the real criminals of the city. ‘Hrumph,’ he said again, more loudly. ‘Who are these men? Where are they? I’d better go and see,’ he said, and went off. The old man gave a little chuckle, winked at Hari, and hobbled off, tapping with his stick.

  After that the policeman greeted him every night as he entered the park when his work was done, and Hari felt safe and even quite grand to have a policeman guard him while he slept.

  When he opened his eyes in the morning he saw pigeons tumbling in the dirty grey sky. They came whirring down in a flock to alight on the statue in the middle of the park where a man stood throwing handfuls of grain to them, and Hari watched delightedly as they waddled about on their pink claws, pecking and quarrelling. Every morning this man came to scatter grain for the pigeons and Hari watched them come and feed. Then there was an old woman in a widow’s white sari who brought a bag of flour to the park and painstakingly sprinkled a pinch of flour on every ant hill along the paths. She herself was like an old white ant, bent and hunched, crawling along with her weak eyes bulging as she strained to find ants to feed. Hari watched her, wondering. He certainly would not have spent his money on feeding birds and ants; he had his family to think of and was saving every rupee he earned for them.