The Village by the Sea (3 page)

‘We don't know how to,' Hari said.

‘As if we can't learn!'

‘Anyone can learn.'

‘Anyone can work machines. They will show us – then we will do it.'

‘We don't know anything about machines,' Hari protested. ‘We only know how to fish and how to grow coconuts.'

‘We will learn!' they shouted.

‘How can we? We haven't even finished school, we know nothing,' Hari said, with disgust and despair lining his young face and darkening his
black eyes. ‘You have to go to college to learn – learn engineering.'

‘College,' they scoffed. ‘College and school teach you nothing. Books don't teach you to work machines. We will learn in the factories.'

‘What factories are they? What will they make?' Hari asked, trying hard to be optimistic like them and stop feeling so worried and afraid.

But they could not answer.

‘I think – I think cycles.'

‘Someone said – motor cars.'

‘See, you don't know,' Hari said angrily. ‘You don't know anything.'

Ramu threw a coconut shell at him. Hari caught it and threw it back. It hit Ramu on the knee. He jumped up with a howl. The sleeping man woke up and roared at them. Ramu got up and ran. Hari chased him for a bit – then stopped – it was too hot to run. Hari went out on to the beach by himself.

He had seen Bela and Kamal, back from school, coming down the beach, each carrying a small brass pot and a little sickle knife in her hand. He
knew they were going down to the rocks to chip at barnacles – Lila must have told them to collect molluscs for dinner. He would not join them – the exposed rocks along the beach were already crowded with women and girls, all pick-pick-picking at the barnacles with their small sharp
koytas
to dig out and collect the molluscs in them. It was an occupation for women. He turned away and decided to go and fetch his net and fish.

Bela and Kamal, in their indigo blue school skirts, crouched on the rocks and picked at them with their
koytas,
digging out the little slimy molluscs from the hard barnacle shells and slipping them into the little brass pot Lila had given them to fill. Many of their school friends chipped and cut beside them, as did some of their mothers and grandmothers. Others were burying baskets of palm fronds deep into the sand where the sea would cover them up and soften them, to be dug out several months later and worked into ropes. Now that the weather was cooler, it was pleasant to work out in the sun on the beach. They were just like the gulls and curlews and reef herons that stalked the shallows, fishing together, although – unlike the birds – they could not keep quiet and chattered and gossiped.

‘Look, there goes Hema with her mother,' said Bela, pointing at two colourful figures on the beach – the mother dressed in a sari printed with bright flowers, purple and pink and orange, and the girl in a violet dress with a silver fringe.

Many of the women stared at their dazzling clothes and sniggered.

‘They've been to Alibagh to buy fish.'

‘Too fine to catch their own, eh?' said another.

‘They don't need to. You know Biju – when he comes back from his fishing trip, he has tons of fish in his boat, tons and tons – prawns and pomfret and
surmai
and everything. They don't need to buy any fish.'

‘Of course not – they
sell
it, they have so much.'

‘In Bombay, where you get double the price you would here in Thul or even in Alibagh.'

‘Twice?
Thrice
the price.'

‘That's why they have all those gold bangles,' said one child, enviously.

For a while all the women were silent and one could hear only their
koytas
chipping at the barnacles encrusted on the rocks, and the jingle of their glass bangles as they chipped. All the women in Thul loved bangles and although few could wear gold or even silver ones, all had
dozens of glass bangles – blue and green and gold, covering their arms from their wrists to their elbows, nearly. Bela and Kamal had far less, only six or eight each, which they had bought last Diwali at the fair. Glass bangles were cheap but did not last long, alas: they broke so easily but were pretty while they lasted.

Then one of the old grey-haired grandmothers, Kashi-
bai
, squatting on the rocks beside them, said, ‘And have you heard – Biju is going to build yet another boat?'

‘Another boat? But he has so many – why should he want one more?' the other women chorused.

‘It is to be bigger and faster than all the others. My man told me the other day, he had it from Biju himself – this boat is going to have engines, so they can go out in all weathers, as far as Saurashtra and Gujarat. They will go far out to fish – far, far out where there is still plenty to catch. Over here there is not enough left.'

‘No,' they agreed, ‘not enough left, so little left.'

‘Still,
our
men find fish here,' one women said. ‘
Ours
still fish here and find some.'

‘But so little,' sighed the others. ‘They bring home so little.'

Now Bela and Kamal were silent. Both were thinking, ‘At least your men bring home a little. Our father does not even go fishing. Hari has to fish with just a net. And he can catch hardly anything at all.' They did not say this. Instead, they crawled about on the rocks, prising open the little lids of the barnacles, scooping out the molluscs and filling their small brass pot as best they could.

In the silence of the late afternoon, with the tide out and the breeze still, they all heard a sound that was like a whisper or a sigh, a deep sigh uttered by the ocean itself. Then the sigh extended into a long rustling, rippling sound. It came from far out at sea. The ripple lifted itself out of the flat, dull ocean – a long, white line that lifted and rippled and rushed closer and closer to land till it dashed against the rocks in a shower of spray. The tide had turned. It was coming in now. Along with it came the evening breeze, fresh and cool and lovely. Tide and breeze both rushing at them now, the women stopped work and got up. ‘Time to go home,' they said, ‘time to start the dinner,' and they collected their sickles and brass pots and started walking up the beach in twos and threes, the women in their bright green and orange saris
and the girls in their blue and white school clothes, some chattering and laughing, others hobbling silently along.

Hari had seen them go as he brought his fishing net down the beach. He did not like to be watched, the only boy in the village with no boat and no job on the fishing boats. Also, he knew he could not hope to catch much in his net along the shore.

Still, he enjoyed it. He lowered his net into the surf and walked along, letting the coffee-coloured waves surge through it, and then dragged it out on shore. All he ever caught were a few gold and silver fish, too tiny to bother to pick up, gasping and swelling up as they puffed for air before they died. And three or four crabs – again too small to have any meat on them. He watched them lying on their backs and kicking their transparent legs in the air. A large black crow came hopping along to see what it could find. Hari amused himself by turning the crabs right side up so they could scuttle away down into the sea and safety. But the crow kept turning them
over on to their backs again with its beak. Finally Hari left the crow to it and walked on with his empty net.

The fishing fleet was coming in. The first boat was already close to the shore, within shouting distance, and no sooner had a fisherman on board shouted than a horde of women came streaming down the beach from the village by the creek. All were carrying baskets. Some couldn't wait for the boats to come to shore and plunged into the sea, with their saris tucked up at their waists, and waded out to the boats. The fishermen lowered heavy baskets of fish down to them. They set them on their heads and came wading back to shore. Two or three of the fishermen followed them. The boats would not be able to come up the creek till the tide was high.

Now all was loud and noisy on the beach where it had been so still and quiet before. The fishermen began to auction off the baskets of fish. The women poked into them and spilled out the contents on to the sand. There were mounds of pink prawns, still crawling and alive, long snake-like ‘Bombay duck', little flat shining pomfrets that really should have been left in the sea to grow, some blue-black speckled
surmai
that is so
delicious to eat, and a few large black crabs. The women became louder and noisier as they fought over the baskets, pushing each other out of the way as they bid for the catch.

‘Fifty rupees!' shouted a woman who had found a basket with some really large pomfrets that would fetch ten rupees each in Bombay, and the freshest, pinkest prawns. But ‘Sixty rupees!' bawled another. ‘Seventy!' shouted the third, a great, heavy woman wrapped in a purple sari, and when the other women hesitated, she opened up a loose cloth belt at her waist, removed a bundle of filthy notes from it and handed it over to the pleased, grinning fisherman. Bending to collect her basket, she hallooed loudly while the other women grumbled and bickered over the smaller baskets of fish.

In answer to her ringing halloo, a tonga came rattling down the beach. The brown mare's legs scissored along at great speed, the big wheels spun over the wet and glassy shore, the tonga-driver raised his whip and cracked it in the air, and the tonga went right through the surf and out of it till it reached the band of women and their baskets.

Again the bargaining began.

‘Two rupees to the highway bus stop,' offered one woman who had bought a bag of prawns.

‘Three rupees!'

‘Five!'

But again the large woman who had so much money tied in her belt won. ‘Six,' she said flatly, and without waiting for an answer from the tonga-driver, she climbed in with the basket. The tonga creaked, the horse staggered, but the tonga-driver set his cap at an angle, cracked his whip and set off at a trot up the sandy path along the creek to the highway where the woman would sell the fish to a lorry driver come to collect fish from the villages, or else get into the bus and go to Alibagh bazaar to sell it herself. The other women bickered over what was left, and Hari turned away – there was nothing more to watch.

He wished he could have bought one of those fish for his family. Better still, he wished he could have caught one. But his net was empty. He trailed it behind him as he walked back in the soft mauve twilight, whistling to himself.

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.