The Village by the Sea (11 page)

Once another procession passed directly in front of theirs and they had to stop and wait till it wound past them. To Hari's utter amazement, all the people marching in it were women. They held up banners, raised their fists in the air and shouted, ‘Bring down the prices! We want oil! We want sugar! We want rice at fair prices!' and ‘Long live Women's Society for Freedom and Justice!' Then all the women would shout in one voice, ‘
Jail
' and surge forwards. At their head was a grey-haired old lady who waved not her fist but a wooden rolling-pin in the air and all the others laughed and cheerfully encouraged her to hold it high and wave it. Some held cooking pots and beat on them with long-handled cooking spoons, making a great din that they seemed to be thoroughly enjoying.

Hari and the other Alibagh villagers stood open-mouthed in amazement: they had not brought along a single woman with them, had not thought it necessary, had been sure that they, the menfolk, could manage it all on their own and the women would only be a nuisance. Here in Bombay it seemed women did not trust men to manage for them, and they were determined to organize their affairs themselves. It was a very strange new idea to Hari and he did not join in the laughter or the jokes that followed in their wake, but walked on soberly after they had passed, wondering what his mother and Lila would have thought of it.

Now they had the policemen flanking them, waving their batons and keeping them in orderly rows. It seemed they were quite used to such processions and knew exactly how to handle them and direct them. Hari found they were being led around a large circle around which were great domed buildings surrounded by parks and trees. ‘Look, look, the museum,' someone cried, and another asked excitedly, ‘Will we be able to visit it?' But no, they were being led to a square between large, old, grey office buildings and there, in the centre of the square, was an empty pedestal.
‘Black Horse. Black Horse,' Hari heard the men saying and he asked, ‘But where is it?' ‘Don't you know?' someone said. ‘It was taken away when the British left – the people of Bombay did not want to see a foreign ruler after independence, not even a stone one.' ‘Oh,' said Hari in gravest disappointment, for he would dearly have liked to see the emperor upon his horse. He stood stock still, staring at the empty pedestal and trying to picture the black horse on it, while the other villagers came to stand beside him. The traffic continued to pour around them as if no one cared why they had come or what they were doing here.

A wooden ladder had been set up beside the pedestal and a thin, elderly man with a white beard, a stranger to the men from Alibagh, climbed on to it. He held a megaphone to his mouth and began to speak. Hari tried to ignore the traffic, the horns blaring and the wheels churning, and to catch a few words of the speech.

‘I have come here to speak to you, and speak for you, because I believe in your way of life, because your green fields and the sea are valuable to all of us as they are to you. Our trees, our fish, our cattle and birds have to be protected …'

Hari wondered who he was and why he spoke so passionately. He looked like a city man – neat, clean and educated – not like a man from the village used to rough work in the sun and dust. Yet he spoke of fish and cattle and trees with feeling and concern. Why did he care so much?

As if he had heard Hari's thoughts, he answered, ‘You may wonder why I, a citizen of Bombay, care to join my brothers from the village and speak in their cause. Maybe you do not trust me to speak for you. In a way, you are right because I do have selfish reasons. All the citizens of Bombay are concerned. These factories that are to come up in Thul-Vaishet will pump deadly chemicals into the air – fertilizer cannot be manufactured without polluting the air for miles around. Sulphur dioxide, ammonia and dust will be scattered far and wide. Recently the ruling government stipulated that no fertilizer complex should be located within fifty miles of big cities. But you know how far Rewas is from Bombay – it is only fourteen kilometres as the crow flies. As it is, Bombay is heavily industrialized, crowded and polluted. How much more pollution can we stand? Do you know that in Japan organic mercury was pumped into the sea, it poisoned the
fish and the fish poisoned the people who were unlucky enough to eat them …'

Hari strained to listen but the noise of the traffic that was so unfamiliar distracted him. He felt sure the cars and buses were all charging straight at him and if he did not keep a sharp lookout he would be run over. He shifted about uneasily and the men around him bumped into him and talked over his head to each other. The speaker's educated accent was difficult to follow.

‘If you are forced to give up farming and fishing, you will have to leave your village and come to Bombay to find work,' he was saying. ‘Look around the city now that you are here: is there room for twenty to fifty thousand more people? Do you think there can be enough jobs here, or houses? See how the poor and unemployed live here. Do you wish to change your life in the country amongst your green paddy fields and coconut groves for the life of beggars on the pavements of the city?'

Hari gave a quiver. He felt certain the bearded gentleman was talking to him, questioning him. His mouth fell open with wonder: how did he know Hari had come here to find work? Hari had told no one, he hardly knew his own mind, but this speaker seemed to know more than even he
did about himself. ‘Who is he?' he asked Mahe who was standing beside him and listening with his mouth open.

‘Sayyid – they say his name is Sayyid Ali – something like that,' Mahe answered. ‘Not one of the political leaders. Don't know why they've got hold of him to speak to us.'

‘He speaks well,' Hari said, ‘very well.'

But now he was bowing and climbing down the ladder and a small man in a faded cotton bush-shirt and with wire-rimmed spectacles on his nose was climbing up gingerly to take his place. He was handed the megaphone and began to speak in a squeaky, high-pitched voice. Not only was his voice difficult to follow but Hari could not understand what he was talking about – it was all new and strange. How did these strangers, these city people, know more about Thul and the other fishing villages of the coast than he himself did? He felt more ignorant than he had ever felt in his life.

‘You have come from Alibagh,' the man began, ‘a place that means home to you, but to us who work in the meteorological observatory, it means the home of the world-renowned Alibagh geomagnetic observatory, the only one of the type
in the world. It was established here in Bombay in 1841, not far from where you are standing, but in 1904 it was shifted to Alibagh because Bombay decided to electrify its tram service which would have created a disturbance in the readings of the observatory …'

‘Huh?' grunted Mahe, lifting his turban to scratch his head. ‘What is all this observe-nobserve he is talking about?'

‘Don't know,' whispered Hari, trying to hear and learn.

‘Now if the fertilizer factory is built near Alibagh, the electric currents and large masses of iron that are brought into the neighbourhood will again vitiate the magnetic observations.'

Hari frowned. He understood less and less.

‘We supply information to the Survey of India and to the ONGC – the Oil and Natural Gas Commission. It is essential that our functioning is not disturbed or interrupted. It has been uninterrupted since 1846. We cannot allow it to break down now.' His voice broke and he gulped and stopped to mop his brow with a large handkerchief. One could see this man was used to working in an office, not to speaking at public meetings. ‘We – you – all of us should be proud of
it. It must be – er – preserved at all cost.' Then he gave up the megaphone and stumbled down into the crowd which applauded out of relief that the speech was over. The speaker himself was smiling weakly with relief.

‘Who is he? What is he trying to tell us?' everyone was saying to each other.

‘Have you seen this observatory in Alibagh?' someone asked. ‘I don't know where it is.'

‘Yes, yes, it is a small white house by the sea – I know it,' said another sagely. ‘But I did not know it was so important.'

‘World-renowned, he said.'

‘It must be if he says it is.'

‘Yes, yes, very important,' they nodded, impressed.

But another young man, large and hefty, shouted over their heads, ‘Preserve a rotten old observatory just because it is so old? What about our farms, our crops, our boats? That is what we have come here to see about – not that man's dusty old office or his files or his job.'

‘Yes, yes, that too,' an older man placated him. ‘Here, have a smoke, then we will see about our land and boats.'

Now a third man mounted the pedestal. It was their own leader, Adarkar, and so they cheered
him loudly although the heat was beginning to wilt them.

His speech soon revived them because it was in their own village dialect and he spoke of the things they knew best. He repeated all he had already talked of before – the richness of their land, the excellence of their crops, of how these must not be given up or destroyed for the sake of the factories, of how they must not be misled by promises of money or jobs, they were unlikely to get any – and everyone nodded and clapped.

‘We have come to tell the government we don't want the miserable sums of money they are offering us – our land is too valuable to sell. We are not going to be turned into slaves working in their factories, we have always worked and lived independently and been our own masters. Now let us march to Mantralaya and give our petition to the Chief Minister himself. Let us march, brothers!' and he lifted up his arms and roared the last words.

The roar spread through the whole crowd like a wave surging through it and breaking on the rocks. Suddenly confusion broke out and the crowd began to dissipate and Hari found that the men who had been standing beside him were now drifting away. He hurried first after one
group and then after another, wondering where they were going and if he was meant to follow.

Catching the large, hefty young man by his arm, he begged for instructions. ‘Do we all have to march to Mantralaya now?'

Just then he heard a voice shout over the megaphone: ‘Friends, make your way back to the Sassoon docks where our boats are waiting for us. Only five farmers will go to Mantralaya with the petition. I am one of them. When we have seen the Chief Minister Sahib, we will join you at the docks and travel back together …'

‘There, you've had your answer,' said the young man, shaking off Hari's hand from his arm and walking off.

Hari stood watching the crowd fade away down the road. He felt deserted and friendless. None of his friends from the village had come – they were the ones who were sitting happily at home waiting for the fertilizer factory to come up and employ them. He had left them to join the march in order to get away from Thul and get to Bombay, and he knew he did not really belong to the march, he had no fields or fishing boats to fight for, nor did he know any of the marchers who were mainly farmers and fishermen, not
the sort of people who would know his landless, boatless, jobless father. He felt now that he belonged neither to one group nor the other. He belonged to no one, nowhere. The others had left him behind. He was alone in Bombay.

In the little hut no one gave a thought to the march or even to the launching of Biju's boat. After Hari had run out of the house, the girls had turned to their mother's bed and taken turns at sitting beside her through the night, giving her sips of water to drink and putting damp cloths on her forehead. Sometimes Bela or Kamal, half asleep, would murmur, ‘Is Hari back?' and Lila would shake her head silently.

They were all so worn out by that long night that they fell fast asleep just before the sun came up. There was no Pinto today to rush out into the dewy grass and chase the heron into the marsh, barking. Even Lila slept with her head on the edge of her mother's bed, quite forgetting about the rock in the sea or her usual dawn prayers.

Waking up, she was aghast to see how bright it was. The white morning light was a shock,
and so was Pinto's silence and Hari's strange disappearance. She thought he must surely have come back in the night after walking off his anger but he was nowhere around. She frowned a little as she got up, then turned immediately to see her mother and the pale, still figure on the bed, still burning with fever, drove every other thought and worry out of her head.

‘Kamal, Bela,' she told her sisters when she had woken them up and given them tea. ‘Go to the bazaar and get some ice for Ma. See if Hari is there. Call him, he may have stayed in the village at night to see the drama in the temple. Tell him to come home and bring some ice.'

The girls found a few coins on the kitchen shelf and set off down the beach at a run, not even stopping to watch the efforts being made to launch Biju's boat. In any case, most of the villagers appeared to have lost interest in it – there was hardly anyone there except the boys Biju had hired to control the winches and drag the ropes. Bela and Kamal did not linger but went straight to the ice shop in the market. There they ran into Lila's friend Mina who was carrying home a bag of vegetables.