The Village by the Sea

by Anita Desai

  A little later, when he went to the pump in a corner of the shrubbery to wash, he saw the schoolchildren pouring by with their satchels across their shoulders. They all wore the same clothes – grey shorts or skirts and light blue shirts or blouses – faded and mended, and they all had their hair oiled and combed down very flat. Some went by in laughing, racing groups, others had to be led by their mothers or grandparents to the school building at the end of the park. Watching them, Hari thought of his sisters, Bela and Kamal, in their indigo blue skirts, skipping and running down the village road to the school by the hill, and wondered when he would see them again. He wished he had given them his address after all so that they could write and send him news of home.

  The boys in the kitchen, now that they knew he was there only to help them and not to take away their work or food, looked at him with less hostility and sullenness. Jagu seemed pleased with Hari, too, and sometimes handed him a glass of tea in the middle of the day or, when he had a few moments to spare, sat down at one of the long wooden tables, drummed loudly on it and sang a song in a dialect Hari did not know, wagging his head to the tune and rolling his eyes. When he caught Hari listening and smiling, he smiled back. Then Hari knew that he too had a village somewhere that he called home, that he remembered it and that the memory made him happy. It was just that he was a silent, hardworked, worried man and had no time and no gift for speech that might have made him a friend as well as a benefactor.

  It was the watchmender, Mr Panwallah, who was truly a benefactor, the kindest and most helpful of all. One afternoon, during those hot, still hours when there were no customers for a change, Hari was standing in front of the eating house, idly watching the traffic because he was too tired to do anything else, and Mr Panwallah called to him to come and sit beside him on the bench behind the counter in his shop.

  ‘Want to help?’ he asked. ‘Want to learn how to make a clock tick? I’m just going to open this big grandfather clock sent me by an old Parsee family for repair – you’ll be able to see the workings plain. Don’t often get a piece like this any more – wall clocks, yes, and electronic gadgets – but you don’t often come upon a grandfather clock like this. It’s a real piece of luck, being able to show you one of this size. Look,’ he said, swinging open the door at the back and revealing the machinery to a fascinated Hari who felt as if the door had opened into a new and strange house. Mr Panwallah showed Hari what was wrong with it, what had made it stop. ‘Interesting, isn’t it? How would you like to learn? Tell you what – I’ll take you on as an apprentice – in the afternoons, when you don’t have to work in the kitchen. You don’t have much to do between two and four, do you? Of course you will have to ask Jagu first. I can pay you a little, not much, and you can help me for two hours a day. Perhaps I can make a watchmender of you. That’s not a profession many know. How would you like that, eh?’

  Hari could not believe that he actually meant that, that he was actually willing to share his secrets with a village boy who was working as a cook’s help in a beggars’ kitchen. The man’s kindness and the possibility that he might make something of his life, learn to put his hands to good use, handle tiny, delicate tools and work upon intricate, complicated machinery, made him feel so dazed that he could not speak and only nodded silently.

  ‘Here, let’s start at once so we can see if you have a taste for it,’ chuckled the old man, handing him a tiny screwdriver with a green handle like glass.

  ‘My hands are too dirty,’ Hari mumbled in shame.

  ‘Dirty, are they?’ laughed Mr Panwallah. ‘Oh, just wipe them on this towel here. They’re all right now.’ He seemed delighted to have an apprentice: he enjoyed company as much as Jagu did not. ‘You’ve got clever fingers, I can see. Now here’s a useful little tool – hold it like this and I’ll show you what to do.’

  That was how Hari became an apprentice watchmender and saw that it was possible to have a future, that one did not remain where one was stuck always but could move out and away and on. One needed to make great efforts for this to happen, but it helped to have a little luck as well. He got Jagu’s permission to spend the slack afternoon hours at the watchmender’s without any trouble – Jagu was taciturn, but good-natured – and he set to learning the craft with a will. He began to brighten up and look happy and alive, and the old watchmender smiled to see him at work, frowning with concentration and eagerness.

  ‘Good, Hari, good,’ he said again and again, encouragingly, ‘that’s very good. By the time the monsoon comes, I’ll have finished giving you your first lessons. By the time the monsoon is over, you’ll be mending watches on your own.’

  Hari looked up at him, silently, grateful for the suggestion that time would pass.

  ‘Yes,’ said the old man, looking at him. ‘Maybe I’ll make you smile at last – or even laugh, eh?’

  The visitor who was to stay at Mon Repos through the monsoon arrived in Thul the day before the de Silvas left and in the hubbub and confusion, Lila and her sisters did not become aware of his presence immediately. He came on the bus from Bombay and walked down the path, carrying his own bag, and therefore made no grand, impressive entrance. The family was so large and noisy that an extra person in its midst made no difference at all. Only the dog, Misha, seemed to be barking and running around more excitedly than usual.

  Lila was busy helping the cook clear the kitchen and pack their belongings. Her sisters went to collect flowers for the memsahib before she left – allamanda and hibiscus and frangipani blossom, and garlands of jasmine for the children. The children were all over the veranda, quarrelling over the shells and pebbles they had collected on the beach and which their mother refused to let them take back to their flat in Bombay. ‘At least, not all – you can choose just a few of the best,’ she told them, which caused much heartache as they looked through their collections and decided what to take. Bela and Kamal giggled at the sight – they themselves were so used to the shells and pebbles littered on the beach that they hardly noticed them.

  At last the luggage was loaded on to the car and the family climbed in, leaning out of the windows to call goodbye to Lila and her sisters.

  ‘Don’t you worry about your mother,’ Mr de Silva said again and again. ‘You leave her in the hospital for the monsoon, d’you hear – it’s too wet and damp in your hut during the rains and she is better off in the hospital with your father to keep an eye on her. I’m going to stop in Alibagh to give him some money to keep him going till she is well and they can come back. The doctor thinks he can send her home at Diwali – will that be all right?’

  Lila nodded and nodded, grateful to him for repeating what she had already been told but she liked to hear again. It was so quiet in their hut without Hari, without Father or Mother, without even Pinto, and would be even quieter now with the de Silvas gone from Mon Repos.

  ‘And look after Sayyid Ali Sahib well,’ Mrs de Silva called. ‘Be sure to see he eats his meals – it’s the sort of thing he forgets to do, so you will have to remember. He is a very great man – take good care of him. I’ve left enough money with you to give him fish and milk and eggs every day, and he likes vegetables – so get plenty of vegetables. Clean the kitchen every night before you lock it up so that cockroaches and rats and snakes don’t come –’

  The children on the back seat shrieked for that reminded them of the snake their mother had come upon in the kitchen last night and that had hurriedly disappeared into a cupboard. ‘OOOH, snakes!’ they screamed, and their father decided this was the time to leave so he started the car and set off with a jolt that made their dog bark wildly with excitement as he hung his head out of the window and saw the coconut trees whirling past him and Lila and Bela and Kamal standing on the log over the creek and waving goodbye.

  When the car had gone and they were left standing alone, staring at the suddenly quiet house, they saw who it was who was to stay on at Mon Repos – a thin elderly man with a white beard and spectacles on his nose. He did not notice them
at all for he had a pair of binoculars glued to his eyes and was staring intently into the trees. The girls stared at the trees, too, wondering what he was looking at. There seemed to be nothing there but then they heard a rustle and an ashy grey and russet bird flew out, trailing a long russet tail behind it as it came out of the foliage and around to the back of the house. The man lowered his binoculars with a sigh and drew out a book from his pocket and began to scribble in it.

  Lila and her sisters tiptoed around the corner and into the kitchen so as not to disturb him.

  ‘What is he doing?’ they whispered as they quietly washed the dishes that had been left behind in the sink.

  ‘Who knows?’ Lila shrugged. ‘He is here to study something, the sahib said.’

  ‘Study what – the birds?’ asked Bela, and Kamal laughed at the idea, it was so ridiculous.

  ‘Anyway, he won’t notice us at all – we just have to cook his meals and call him to come and eat them,’ said Lila.

  That was what they did. Now they had not their mother to look after, or Hari or their father, they quietly cooked and marketed and swept and washed for the strange gentleman who never spoke to them, only glanced through his spectacles at the food when they called him for his meals, and disappeared for the whole day sometimes, carrying his binoculars over his shoulder and a bag full of books and pencils. Sometimes they ran into him as he stumbled about the marsh, splashing through the mud and reeds, or sitting very quietly on a stone under the trees, staring intently at everything – except people. He seemed hardly to notice that there were any people in Thul; they did not appear to interest him at all. But he was polite and quiet and gave no trouble at all since he had neither complaints nor demands and so they did not mind his oddities or even giggle at them much except once when he stepped backwards off the log into the creek with a splash and they had to run to help him up and to retrieve his bag and papers and spread them out on the veranda to dry. Then they noticed that his papers were covered with careful pencil sketches of birds. They were wonderstruck.

  ‘See, he is studying the birds,’ whispered Bela as they knelt on the veranda tiles, carefully separating the wet sheets and spreading them out in the sun.

  ‘Studying the birds?’ whispered Kamal and burst into uncontrollable giggles. But Lila frowned at them and told them to take care, the drawings were so beautiful, they must not spoil a single one.

  The strange gentleman came out of his room in dry clothes and stood watching them worriedly. Then, ‘Thank you, thank you,’ he said gratefully and took some money out of his pocket to give Bela and Kamal. ‘For sweets,’ he said in a mumble, and hurried away in embarrassment.

  He looked just as embarrassed when he paid Lila her salary at the end of the month and she whisked out of sight as quickly as possible, then ran round the house and across the creek to their hut, laughing with joy. It was wonderful to earn money. There was enough now to stock their kitchen with rice and tea and sugar, and Lila went every week to the hospital in Alibagh by bus to take some to their father who bought extra milk and fruits for their mother with it. The money made everything possible and Lila hoped the gentleman would stay on and on so that she could continue to earn money.

  ‘But no one stops in the monsoon,’ Kamal said. ‘Everyone goes away when the monsoon comes. Only we stay.’

  10

  ‘The monsoon is coming!’ shouted old Mr Panwallah, stepping back from the sea wall as a huge wave came crashing against it, throwing out a whiplash of spray at the crowd collected on the promenade to watch. ‘See, Hari, the monsoon is coming!’

  Hari nodded, laughing as the spray drenched him. The crowd fled backwards as yet another wave came to break against the wall with a crash, and another. The whole sea was in turmoil, great black waves rearing out of it and storming towards the shore. There were no clouds in the sky yet, but the sea seemed to know they were on the way, and was rushing forwards and upwards to meet them.

  Mr Panwallah had brought Hari to the Worli seaface to see the approach of the monsoon. He said he did this every year on a day in the first week of June. He had pulled down the shutters of his shop early, straightened the black cap on his head, asked Jagu to give Hari an evening off, and brought him here on the bus. He had also insisted on buying Hari a green coconut and a paper cone filled with puffed rice. Hari was shaking the cone into his hand and eating the puffed rice just like one of those lucky children brought here by their parents for an outing, enjoying themselves on the merry-go-rounds set up along the promenade and buying balloons and ice creams and coconuts. It made him feel one of them, a child again – not a small, shrivelled adult keeping up with the other adults in a hard world. The roaring wind off the sea with its salt tang, the sharp sting of spray from the waves and the sight of the great ocean stretching out all the way to Africa made him feel lighter and happier than he could remember feeling for a long time.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Panwallah,’ he remembered to say.

  He did not know that evening how hard the monsoon made life for the people of Bombay.

  On the tenth of June it came storming out of the sea and pouring on to the city just as Mr Panwallah had said it would. Like all the other citizens of Bombay, Hari stayed indoors and watched the rain like a great sheet being flung upon the city, and the water rising in the streets. The street in front of the eating house became first a gutter – all the rubbish of a year suddenly lifted up and carried away in a rush – and then a river. The drains became blocked, the rising tide forced the water up the big drain holes back into the streets, and they were flooded. Cars broke down and stalled in knee-deep greasy water.

  For a while the urchins of the city had a wonderful time out in the rain, putting their shoulders to the cars and pushing them up to the higher reaches and earning some coins from the drivers. Hari and the two boys from the kitchen went out and made some pocket-money, too, and for the first time Hari saw his two fellow-cooks laughing as in drenched shirts and shorts, with wet faces and streaming hair, they demanded money from the drivers and heaved cars and taxis out of the first patches of waterlogging.

  The city was washed clean not only of a year’s dirt but also of the summer’s heat, and the sudden dramatic drop in temperature gave everyone a lift: it was like a picnic, or a holiday. In fact it was a holiday for all the schoolchildren who could not get to school dry and therefore were not sent at all, and the office workers who could not get to work because buses and trains had stalled in the water that rose higher by the minute. ‘Soon we’ll need boats!’ the urchins shouted as they splashed through the flood.

  But it was not really a holiday for Hari and the two boys in the kitchen. Coolies and handcart pullers who could not get any work done came to sit in the Sri Krishna Eating House and asked for tea and hot meals. Jagu called in the boys from the street to get down to work. They worked overtime, without any break. The coal and the wood had all gone damp and it was difficult to get a fire started. When they did, it did not burn but smouldered and smoked, getting into their eyes and throats and making them cough and rub at their eyes with grimy hands. The customers brought mud into the eating room which had to be cleaned up constantly with a rag and a pail that soon seemed filled with mud. Sometimes they were made to go out and fetch cigarettes and then they were drenched and could not get dry but shivered miserably.

  By evening Hari was more tired than he had ever been before, and it was still raining, pouring. He suddenly realized he would not be able to sleep in the park tonight – and perhaps not on any night during the monsoon.

  When Jagu put out the light and took out the key to lock up the place for the night, Hari knew he could not go out into the rain and there was nothing to do but stretch out on the bench in the suffocating room and try to sleep. Of course he could not. That night he felt like a prisoner on his first night in jail.

  It rained day and night, week after week. Even when the rain slowed from a downpour to a drizzle and the floods receded, nothing dried out, everything remained dam
p and muddy, and smelt. Every time Hari went out to empty the rubbish pail or to buy cigarettes for the customers, his shirt was soaked again and he spent the rest of the day with the wet cloth clinging to his body. He began to cough so badly that his chest hurt.

  Mr Panwallah next door felt even worse and sniffed and coughed and wheezed without stop. One day he did not appear to pull the shutter up: he was sick. Hari had seen him red-eyed and feverish at the counter one day, leaving all the work to Hari because his head ached so badly, and the next day he did not come. Now Hari had no escape at all from the kitchen and the eating house, since he could go neither to the watch shop nor to the park. Locked up day and night in the Sri Krishna Eating House, he began to feel like a prisoner condemned to live in a prison cell.

  Jagu must have sensed this. One night, when he was locking up the kitchen, he stopped to look at Hari, who would not lie down but sat on the floor, hugging his knees and coughing into his lap.

  ‘You’re ill,’ he said. ‘You had better come along with me. Come, I’ll take you home.’

  Hari was so grateful for the invitation to go anywhere that he got up and followed Jagu out of the shop and down the road without a word. He had no idea where Jagu lived or where he was being taken but he went: he was so grateful to be taken to someone’s, anyone’s house.

  Jagu was the proprietor of a ‘restaurant’, the owner of an eating house on a busy street and had plenty of customers, yet his house was in a slum, one of those colonies of shacks made out of rags and flattened tin cans that are called zopadpattis in Bombay. There were not enough houses or flats in the city for the millions of people who came to work in it and earn a living in it, and since there were not enough, the rents of even the smallest flats were too high for people like Jagu. He counted himself lucky to be able to rent a shack in a zopadpatti.