by Anita Desai
Instead of trying to net fish along the shore or digging in the arid field, Hari spent more of his time now standing with the other village boys and watching the work on the boat. The rough timber was being planed – the planks glowed in the sun, red-gold. It was good timber, not the coconut tree trunks they used themselves, but real wood, beautiful wood. It did not smell of the fish and the sea as everything else in the village did, but of timber, sawdust, forests, distant and wonderful things – dry, lasting, valuable. The smell of it made Hari’s nostrils tingle.
Biju sat uncomfortably on his folding chair and watched, too. When anyone came near enough for him to address, he would boast about it. ‘It is going to have a diesel engine and also a refrigerator. A deep freeze,’ he pronounced slowly, more impressed than anyone else by the unfamiliar words. ‘Then the boat can sail for six days and the catch can be put in the deep freeze and it will not spoil. It will still be fresh when it is taken to Bombay.’
‘Frozen, not fresh,’ Hari murmured, but Biju did not hear.
‘How much will it cost, Biju?’ asked one awe-struck villager who owned nothing but two goats and a cooking pot and could not picture the amount of wealth that Biju commanded.
‘Oh, two lakhs – two and a half lakhs, maybe,’ Biju said, trying to be casual about it, but rolling his eyes in horror at the expenditure.
‘So much!’
‘It doesn’t matter. Once it is on the sea, it will fetch me fifty thousand rupees a day, at least,’ Biju said, proudly.
Hari drew pictures in the sand with his toe as he stood listening. He really could not picture that amount any more than the simple goatman could, although he had spent a few years at school. He, too, was dazzled by the picture Biju drew of the future even if he did not quite believe in it. There was too much danger at sea, too much risk. He knew how many men lost their lives at sea, how many were drowned each monsoon, how many boats were wrecked and never came back at all. At the same time the thought of sailing far, far out to sea and never coming back or else only with riches untold, attracted him strongly.
When Ramu came by on his cycle and said, ‘Hey, Hari, come with me,’ he turned and went with him, plodding along in the deep, hot sand, wondering whether to side with Biju or with those who disbelieved Biju.
Ramu certainly did not believe him. ‘It’s only a fishing boat,’ he said, ‘even if it will have a deep freeze. You know what the monsoon is like – one storm and the boat will go smash like a matchbox, just like all the other boats. It won’t be strong enough to sail during the monsoon, so what’s the use? It’s just bogus.’
‘He will make a lot of money during the fishing season anyway,’ said Hari.
‘And what will he do when the fishing season is over? Sit on the beach and mend nets like all the other old men? No, it’s better to have a job, to earn daily wages. And then there are all the other benefits – free lunch in the canteen, a doctor to see to you if you’re ill, paid holidays – that’s the life.’ Ramu rang his bicycle bell loudly and cheerfully.
‘And you think you can get a job like that in Thul?’ Hari sounded doubtful, even more doubtful than he had been about the greatness of Biju’s boat.
‘Of course! Let the factory come up, Ramu will be the first in the line for a job,’ Ramu shouted and rang the bell again, so loudly that a pair of egrets sitting on the back of a buffalo and picking at its ears took fright and flew off into the coconut grove for shelter.
‘I will have a try, too,’ Hari said. ‘That’s what I’ll do, too.’
He saw now that there were two or three possibilities. Even if all he could do now was to fish and sell coconuts, later on he would be able to choose between a factory job, a job on a big fishing boat like Biju’s or a job in Bombay if someone helped him to get there. Although it excited him to think that life held so many possibilities, it also frightened him. The men in Thul had never had to make such choices; they had never had to consider anything beyond fishing and farming along these shores. Now that was not enough. Hari saw that like Biju, although on a different scale, he would have to make a choice no one else in the village had made before. How? Who would help him? He walked along silently, worrying.
He would have gone on worrying and worrying in this way if an unexpected distraction had not arrived in the form of a heavily loaded car bumping over the grassy bank, dodging between the coconut trees and raising a cloud of dust in the narrow path before it came to a standstill in front of Mon Repos, the white bungalow that stood empty most of the year. It was the de Silvas, the family that came from Bombay to spend an occasional holiday in it and bring it suddenly to life for a few days. They had bought Mon Repos a year ago from the Vakils who had been one of the first Bombay families to build holiday cottages on the Thul beach. But they had grown too old and frail to come often and, after the house had stood empty for several years, sold it to the de Silvas who were young and energetic and seemed heartily to enjoy life on the beach. Whenever they came, life changed for the family in the little hut, too. Immediately there was a hubbub, all kinds of excitements and expectations, and of course work to be done, employment to be had, and wages.
Hari, Bela and Kamal stood by their door under the frangipani tree, tense with excitement, watching and holding Pinto back as he barked at the unfamiliar sight of a car and strangers till his voice was quite hoarse. There was a commotion in the marshy creek that separated the hut from the house, too – herons, egrets, kingfishers and moorhens all flapping into the dense greenery of the pandanus, the casuarina and the bhindi trees for shelter.
‘Do you think they have come here for good?’ Bela whispered.
‘Hunh – who would live here if he had a house in Bombay?’ Hari scoffed.
‘But look how much luggage they’ve brought – it can’t be just for a few days,’ Bela said, and it was true that an unbelievable number of boxes and bags and baskets were being taken out of the car, out of the boot and off the luggage carrier so that anyone would have thought they had come to stay for ever.
Seeing the visitors staggering towards the house with their bags, Hari went to help. They carried all the baggage into the veranda and Hari went back to the hut, but one of the children from the house came running down the path to call him back.
When Hari went up the veranda steps he saw Mrs de Silva standing there, dressed in an outlandish costume unlike anything worn by the women in Thul and really not very much of it either so that Hari had to cast his eyes down and not look. She held out a basket and some money and asked Hari to go and buy some fish from the market. ‘It must be very fresh,’ she said over and over again. ‘And we will want milk in the morning, and eggs. Can you get some – very, very fresh?’ Hari had run errands like these for them before, whenever they had come for a weekend during this past year, but she always seemed to forget or else not to recognize him. City people had poor memories, Hari thought, or perhaps they saw so many hundreds of faces in the streets every day that they could not tell one from the other. But he only nodded and took the money and the basket from her and set off.
The next few days he was kept busy by them, buying their fish on the beach when the fishing fleet came in, and fetching eggs and milk from the village market. He also fetched bottles of soda water for their drinks in the evening when they liked to sit outdoors under the palms, on the metal folding chairs they had brought with them from Bombay, and sip at drinks.
They had brought their servants along, too – a cook who made their meals for them, and an ayah who washed their clothes and herded the smaller children down to the beach, carrying their towels and buckets and spades for them. It was a sight to see them all playing and splashing in the sea, screaming and laughing as the waves tumbled them over and the surf washed over their heads. Hari and his sisters watched discreetly from behind the bushes and the shrubs in the grove, but the Thul villagers walking up and down the beach on their errands stopped to stare and laugh. The people of Thul went into the sea to launch their boats or catch fish,
not to swim and splash like fish or frogs. They thought the visitors from Bombay definitely touched in the head.
Although they did nothing but play or lie around and rest, everyone else around them was kept very busy. The cook and the ayah were not able to cope with all the work and Hari was engaged to help. (Earlier, his father had worked for them.) The cook made Hari cut and clean the fish when he brought it in and sometimes chop and slice the vegetables as well. The ayah asked him to sweep the house, so full of sand and spider webs after being shut and empty all this time. Then Hari had to call Lila to help. Lila tucked up her sari, fetched her broom and came to sweep. The children followed her about, fascinated by her glass bangles and the flowers she wore in her hair. When she stopped sweeping to smile at them, they came closer to admire her finery. They themselves wore no jewellery although they had enough clothes to change every day and sometimes twice a day. She promised to bring them flowers for their hair, too, and they followed her down the path to her hut.
‘Kamal, Bela – come and make them some garlands,’ she called to her sisters who had shyly wrapped themselves around the veranda posts as they watched them come. They unwrapped themselves, giggling, and went to collect jasmine.
The children took the garlands home to show their mother.
Next day when Lila came to sweep the house for them, she took along some marigolds and allamanda flowers and a few blooms from the hibiscus mutabilis bush that grew beside their hut so that she could show the children how the snow white blossoms plucked that morning slowly turned to shell-pink by noon, then darkened to rose by evening and to a dark crimson knot by nightfall. She smiled to hear them cry, ‘Magic! Magic flowers!’ in amazement whenever they went near the flowers she had put in a glass of water on the table: for her it was an everyday occurrence, something she could watch from her kitchen window, as common as the sweets they sucked continually and which were so rare and wonderful to her.
One evening when they sat on their veranda, for the wind was blowing hard from the sea and it was chilly, they had beside them a pot of sand into which they had stuck a branch of the casuarina tree. When Hari took their soda to them, he was puzzled to see it decked with bits of coloured paper that fluttered in the wind, and silver stars and gold balls that spun and bobbed and danced. The group on the veranda was especially gay and excited and loud that evening as grown-ups played games with children and they all sang and laughed till late at night. They ate their dinner very late and Hari reported how, while washing dishes in the kitchen, he had seen them set fire to a ball of food on a plate before eating it – he couldn’t say why.
When Lila next went in to sweep, she had to clear away heaps of torn, coloured paper lying on the floor. As she carefully folded up the torn sheets and put them away in a neat heap, the mother came up and said, ‘Oh, just throw them away – Christmas is over.’ Puzzled, Lila carried away the paper to their hut for Bela and Kamal to see and use. ‘Christmas is over,’ she said and, to her surprise, the girls knew what that meant and nodded. ‘Yes, Christmas. Our teacher told us about it at school. It is the birthday feast of a baby who was born long, long ago in a stable,’ said Bela. ‘Like Krishna, who was born in a prison,’ explained Kamal when Lila looked puzzled. ‘But why did they cover the tree with coloured paper and stars?’ she asked, and they could not answer: their teacher had said nothing about a tree. Just then the children from the house arrived to bring them a packet of boiled sweets each, which they accepted in shy silence and later ate with noisy abandon.
‘Give one to Pinto. Poor Pinto,’ said Lila, feeling sorry for Pinto who had been having a very bad time for the family had brought their dog with them – a great golden creature with a plume for a tail, as beautiful as a princess in a story – and they were so afraid noisy, excited Pinto would bite their beauty whom they called Misha that they made Hari keep Pinto tied to a tree or a veranda post all day while Misha ran about in the garden, golden and gleaming and silky. At first Pinto barked and barked in fury, but when he saw it was no good, he simply lay down on the sand and sulked. He was so hurt that when Bela offered him a sweet, he turned his head away.
But soon the cloud lifted for Pinto, and one morning the car was being loaded and readied for the drive back to Bombay. Mr de Silva made Hari fetch a bucket of water and wash the car and wipe it first. As he stood watching and smoking a pipe, he said, ‘Yes, that’s the way. Look here, this house is falling to pieces. We need a watchman, someone to take care of it while we’re away. We may not be able to come again for months and it can’t be left to rot all that time. We’ll pay a small salary – not much since there won’t be much work, just keeping an eye on it, opening it up and airing it now and again, and letting us know if it needs repair. D’you think your father could do the job? He used to be around but I haven’t seen him on this visit. Where is he?’
Hari was excited. He hurried home, knowing his father was in, lying on his mat in a dark corner. ‘Father,’ he said, the word rusty in his throat, he used it so seldom. ‘Father, the man is calling you. He wants to give you a job.’
‘Hunh? A job?’ said his father, getting off the floor and coming to the door. Hari managed to guide him down the path to the house where Mr de Silva stood waiting by the car, watching it being loaded. But his expression changed when he turned towards Hari and his father. He asked a few short questions but frowned at the long, mumbled answers and turned his head away from the hot toddy breath that accompanied the mumbles. Finally he shook his head and went up the steps to the veranda to say to his wife, ‘Useless, drunken villagers – dead drunk in the morning. What can you do for them? They’re hopeless.’
Hari led his father back to the hut, his heart like a stone inside him, heavy and cold. Even when the de Silvas had got into the car, along with their princely dog who looked out of the window and waved his plume of a tail in excitement, and Mr de Silva leaned out of the window and gave Hari some money and said, ‘Good fellow, you did a good job of the car. If you ever come to Bombay, I’ll give you a job as a car-cleaner,’ Hari did not, could not smile. He took the money and stood silently watching as the car bumped its way down the sandy path and disappeared into the coconut grove.
Then Lila set Pinto free at last and, giving one yelp of joy, Pinto went madly chasing the car right out of Thul.
Hari was still in a silent rage about his father’s drunkenness, about the Bombay man’s insulting words, when he went to see if the factory was coming up at last. He did not know if Mr de Silva would remember his promise to give him a car-cleaner’s job if he ever did get to Bombay or even if he wanted it any longer. Nor did he have any idea if Biju would give him a job on his boat when it was built. So he had to see if the factory had come up and if he could get a job there: that now seemed like the best of the three choices before him.
But when he went to the site below the hill, he was disappointed to find the tin hut locked, the yellow lorry gone and only a few big concrete pipes littered on the ground to show that anyone intended to build there. When would such small beginnings ever grow into a mighty factory full of humming machines waiting to be worked by Ramu and Hari?
He walked in a circle round the pipes, almost as if he expected to see them move, but there was no movement except for a brown grasshopper that jumped out of a clump of grass on to a pipe, and then off again. So, throwing a pebble from one hand to the other and trying to whistle away his disappointment, he started walking up the hill to the temple on top, wondering what would become of it.
Steps had been cut into the red, gravelly soil of the hillside, making it easy to climb. As he brushed through the dry, golden grass that grew at the sides, he met a shepherd coming down the hill with a herd of goats. He wore a white dhoti and a large magenta turban and his goats were black and white and chocolate brown and followed him in a cloud of dust, bleating and calling to each other. Some of them got stranded on a spur and called frantically to the others who were already at the foot of the hill. Finally the most desperate of them bo
unded forward and then all the rest took heart and went streaming after him to catch up with the herd now crossing the highway to the dry fields where the winter paddy had just been cut. The shepherd’s bright magenta turban could be seen as a single speck of colour in all that dust.
Hari went on up to the top with his head flung back in order to watch a pair of huge kites that seemed to be having a game in the evening sky – floating and rolling on currents of air, always close together as if they were performing a dance. He watched them as they went rolling and tumbling away in the still clear air, over the field where the girls’ school stood, over the rich green belt of palms and bananas that hid his own house, and out over the sea itself, majestic and purple now with the sun dipping into it as royally as a king going to his repose. Then they vanished from sight.
When he thought of all his troubles – his drunken father, Mr de Silva’s insult, the lack of work and money – Hari wished he too could soar up into the sky and disappear instead of being tied to the earth here, trudging round the temple which was not even a pretty one. It was only a little cell of bricks with a painted idol of Krishna and his cows in it. Looking at it through the open door without going in, Hari remembered the shepherd he had just seen and wondered if he, too, played a flute like Krishna. Everything belonged here, everything blended together – except for himself. With his discontent, his worries and his restlessness, he could not settle down to belonging.
He knew in his heart that he would leave one day. Thul could not hold him for long – at least not the Thul of the coconut groves and the fishing fleet. Perhaps if it really did turn into a factory site one day, he would stay on here, living a new kind of life. Otherwise he and his family would surely and slowly starve, fall ill like his mother, and die. No! He would go away – cross the sea in a boat, somehow find his fortune in Bombay, either with Mr de Silva’s help or even without it. He felt very much alone.
