The Truth

by Michael Palin

  He took one more drag on his cigarette then flicked the stub past Mabbut into the darkness.

  ‘So, forgive me, Keith, if I’m not quite ready for the file marked “Hamish Melville, Living Legend”.’

  He half rose, as if to bring the evening to a conclusion, but Mabbut held up his hand. Melville had set out his case. Now it was his turn. And perhaps his last chance.

  ‘Look, I apologise for being devious and secretive, but the really important thing is that I took on this book because I believe in the same things as you do. I always have. I fought big companies because I knew they were lying, and that in some cases people were dying because of those lies. I like to think that, in a very tiny and marginal way, I was fighting the same battles as you. The difference between us is that I’m that lowest form of human life, a journalist. But we need the public eye to help us fight our battles. Being heard by as large an audience as possible is what we have to do. You have been very successful at what you do – getting projects cancelled, saving lives and livelihoods – but you never have to explain yourself to anyone.’

  Melville made to speak.

  ‘With respect, Mr Melville, I know what you’re going to say. “So what? Why should I?” That you couldn’t do what you do without privacy. But what you can’t expect is that people such as myself, and others who see you as a role model for getting good things done in a shitty old world, should be incurious about how you do it. You may think of me as a spy, but all I can say is that I’m spying for the best possible reason, which is that I think the world is a better place because of you, and I want more people to follow your example.’

  Melville stood. He sniffed the air and looked up into the sky.

  ‘Weather’s due for a change,’ he said, not altogether happily. Then he checked his watch.

  ‘We’ve an early start.’

  Mabbut nodded and reached for his phone, but Melville kept his hand on it.

  ‘I’ll hang on to this if you don’t mind.’ He smiled. ‘Security precaution.’

  EIGHT

  Kumar’s shouts woke him from a very deep sleep. Mabbut felt desperately tired. His bag, full of dirty laundry, lay beside him. He felt sticky and grubby and he was sure he was beginning to smell.

  As soon as he’d emerged from his tent, Kumar and the younger boys moved in to dismantle it. Melville, who had found a freshly pressed kurta from somewhere, seemed positively energised by the lack of sleep. If he’d been discursive the previous night, there was no sign of it this morning. He was deep in discussion with Kinesh and Mahesh. Mabbut went over behind the tree, peed and cleaned his teeth. Anything more elaborate would have to wait till later. When he came back, Melville was at the table holding a flask.

  ‘Coffee?’

  ‘Please.’

  He poured Mabbut a cup.

  ‘I apologise for last night,’ he said briskly. ‘I was defending my territory.’

  He held the cup out to Mabbut.

  ‘Maybe I’ve just grown cynical over the years. I assume everyone who wants to know more about me is out to stop me doing what I do. But you helped us yesterday, and the boys like you, so here’s the deal. Instead of taking you to the station, I will give you Kumar and a car. He knows these tribal areas, he’s Masira himself. Go with him and you will at least have a chance to see the people we’re fighting for, and what they’re fighting against. Then, maybe, we’ll have something to talk about.’

  He drained his cup and indicated the stocky figure of Kumar, who was loading Mabbut’s bag into the back of an old Land Cruiser.

  ‘Are you sure you can spare him?’

  Melville held out his hand.

  ‘Think of it as the first and last day of our new public relations department.’

  He laughed loudly, and walked off to confer with a group of village elders. There was much grasping of hands and clasping of arms. It was as if something was in the wind.

  Mabbut climbed into the Land Cruiser and settled himself beside Kumar, who was checking his rear-view mirror. Kumar was a local, with thick long hair, a square and homely face and broad features.

  Ahead of them, Melville climbed into another car with Mahesh and Kinesh. The headlight beams stabbed out and they started to move, rumbling over the hard red clay past spectral groves of eucalyptus and mahua. As the first hint of light crept into the eastern sky, Mabbut wondered how he could have done things differently, and if he had, whether he would now be travelling with Melville.

  After a half-hour or so, Mabbut was woken by the crackle of a radio. Kumar pulled a receiver towards him and words were exchanged. Kumar nodded approvingly, replaced the receiver, and accelerated along a partly tarmacked road. Mabbut looked to his left just in time to see Melville’s vehicle peel off, bounce up a dirt track and disappear into the forest. He thought he saw Melville wave goodbye.

  ‘Where are they going?’

  Kumar ignored the question. ‘Mr Melville says I am your guide now. There are many things he wants me to show you.’

  They made their way north-west, on gently rising ground which led deeper into the interior than Mabbut had been before. This was a largely empty land. Weathered rocks and scrubby bush with the shadow of the hills away to the west. It was a landscape both serene and sinister. At the top of an incline Kumar pointed out the remains of a mobile-phone mast, destroyed by the Maoists a month before. They passed a police post, so heavily fortified it looked like something from a war zone. A few miles beyond that, stacks of concrete sleepers marked a wide strip of land from which the trees had been cleared, awaiting, Kumar explained, the go-ahead for a railway to the refinery. Then suddenly the car slowed and he pointed excitedly into the distance.

  ‘That is my home.’

  Mabbut could make out a misty, russet-brown ridge a few miles ahead. It looked much like any of the other low, wooded ranges that ran one after the other as far as the eye could see. After a few miles the road narrowed and the scrubby trees turned into woodland, which then turned into forest. Then they were out of the trees and on to a flat, cleared plain. They entered a small town at the junction of a road and a railway. At the far end of a crowded main street they came to a long, high wall topped by coils of razor wire. Mabbut glimpsed through the gates a well-kept campus and a sign proclaiming the Masoka Hills Agricultural College.

  Why would anyone put razor wire round an agricultural college, Mabbut asked. Because Astramex paid for it, Kumar replied, and they have many enemies. On the far side of the town, with the walls of the agricultural college still visible, they came to a small settlement of traditional low thatched houses surrounded by smaller brick and concrete units with tin roofs. Kumar’s family lived here, and Mabbut met his thin but sharp-eyed father, his quiet, shy sisters and two or three children who followed his every move with increasing amusement. His mother, he said, had died in childbirth many years ago and now his father had another wife. She was in the fields that day gathering rice for winnowing. They were a happy group, and Kumar proudly showed off his new friend.

  ‘I tell them you love our land,’ he said with a grin. His parents had lived up in the hills, but when the road was built and the interior opened up to industry the missionaries came and converted his people from animism to Catholicism. In return for saying their Hail Marys they now had a school, electricity and new houses. They were the lucky ones, according to Kumar. Their land was safe from the mining. For the moment.

  It was the hottest time of the day, and Kumar suggested they stay overnight with his family. The next day he would take Mabbut to the hills. They would visit the villages of the remotest tribes, the ones most threatened by the mining. Kumar explained it would involve a long walk, so they would start early.

  The rest of the day was spent meeting relatives, a steady trickle of whom passed by to see the foreigner. In the late afternoon they walked round the village. Mabbut was shown a freshly painted, tinroofed building that doubled as a school and church. He met the man who owned the only television set in the village,
which he generously set up in the middle of the main street every night. He inspected the new concrete buildings and had his shirts washed for him in the pond at the back of the houses. The people couldn’t have been more friendly, but there was something sad about Kumar’s village, Mabbut thought. Some spirit seemed to have gone out of it. The embarrassed giggling of the young when his father sang traditional songs, the T-shirts and jeans that the children wore, all gave the impression that an old way of life had lost its relevance. But Kumar clearly regarded what had happened to his village as a good thing, the perfect third way between assimilation and extinction. To him, contact with the outside world was acceptable as long as religion, rather than commerce, was the driver. In one generation it had enabled him to realise opportunities he’d never have dreamt of.

  As they finished their evening meal and talked of the day, Kumar chided Mabbut.

  ‘Why aren’t you writing all these things down, Mr Journalist?’

  Mabbut felt guilty. He wasn’t writing because he was far less certain about everything now. If Astramex represented the wrong way, then what was the right way? To leave people who didn’t want to change alone? To offer them some change but not too much? Could – should – the modern world tolerate ignorance, even if it was blissful ignorance?

  Mabbut promised Kumar that he was taking it all in and would write up his notes later. So, after the meal was cleared away, and with Kumar’s family and friends gathered around him in the glow of the lamp, Mabbut reached into his bag, pulled out his notebook and began to write.

  A look of deep disappointment crossed Kumar’s face.

  ‘You have no laptop?’

  Early the next morning they went into the town, parking the car up by the station.

  ‘Now we walk.’

  Kumar had made it clear to Mabbut that white men in vehicles, indeed vehicles of any kind, would not be welcome in the village they were going to see. The Gyara tribe who lived in the hills were the most cut off from the outside world and also the most threatened by the mining company’s plans. If Mabbut and Kumar were to get access they would have to approach, as equals, on foot. The village was ten kilometres away.

  As they crossed the railway line and began the climb across scrubby grassland small groups of men and women came down the path towards them. Some of the women were young, still girls, with coarse dark hair arranged in waves and combed outwards so that it resembled small black bonnets. Decorations abounded; clips, pins, combs and small knives for cutting fruit were tucked into their hair, with small brass rings through ears and nostrils and heavier, wider rings through pierced, stretched earlobes. Their arms bore fine-patterned tattoos and they were swathed in multicoloured saris and cotton wraps. Most carried goods in large woven baskets on their heads. Two of the women, Mabbut noticed, were carrying babies as well. The women walked together, chatting as they went. The men, dressed in shorts and cheap shirts, carried axes and bundles of wood on their heads. They were all on their way to the market in town, Kumar told him, to sell things like fruit and firewood in exchange for dried fish, salt, oil, spices, wine and tobacco.

  Kumar greeted these people in their dialect and passed on to Mabbut any information he’d gleaned; the pineapple harvest was good; they were sacrificing a buffalo in a nearby village and much sago palm would be drunk; three babies had been born in the last week.

  After a while there were fewer people passing and Mabbut and Kumar spoke less as the track began to climb steeply and the forest grew closer and thicker around them. The heat was building too, despite the cooling shade of the trees, and Mabbut frequently had to stop to get his breath back. There were rewards to be had. No noise, no cars, no electricity pylons or security fences. A pristine, sylvan world, with shafts of sunlight piercing the forest canopy, highlighting the yellow butterflies as they fluttered above the shallow streams. In occasional clearings banana, pineapple and jackfruit trees grew, and sometimes there was pasture for goats and cows.

  They had been moving for almost two hours when they turned a corner. Ahead of them, where the slope flattened out, was the village they had been looking for. It wasn’t fundamentally different from the tribal villages Mabbut had already seen – a rectangular layout, long low houses on either side of a central open area – but here, deep in the forest and high up the hill, there was a much greater feeling of isolation. Unlike the town, where they were outsiders to be exploited, this was very much the Gyaras’ land. This was their world, and theirs alone. Here, Mabbut had to adapt to their way of life, rather than the other way round.

  Kumar, too, seemed a little in awe. For quite some time he stood respectfully at the edge of the woods. Then, beckoning Mabbut to stay close to him, he walked slowly towards the houses. No sooner had they moved than a terrific din broke the silence. Half a dozen excitable khaki-brown mongrels raced through the village and ranged themselves between the buildings and the two men, blocking their approach. Mabbut, who’d never been comfortable in any sort of dog-versus-man situation, hung back. Their arrival seemed to have the opposite effect on Kumar, who beamed at the line of panting jaws and thrashing tails as if this were the invitation he needed.

  The dogs continued to bark, more for the sake of it than from any great sense of conviction, but they soon grew bored and scattered back to the other end of the village. An imperious black hen appeared from between the houses, her chicks scuttling along behind. A dusty bicycle leant against a pile of wood. At the centre of the open area was a neatly arranged group of stones. Mabbut pointed to it. Kumar nodded.

  ‘That is the place for sacrifices. The old villages still have them. They sacrifice a cow or a goat and scatter the blood to make the fields more fertile.’

  ‘Do you have sacrifices in your village?’

  Kumar smiled, almost shyly, and shook his head.

  ‘No. We don’t have them any more.’

  There was little or no movement from the houses, but as they walked by them Kumar called out softly and Mabbut could hear the odd, shy greeting in return. He became increasingly aware of faces peering back at him from beneath the beetle-browed roofs; mostly women and children, crouched together away from the heat of the day. Across the entrance to one house two young girls lay stretched out, propped languidly on their elbows like odalisques. They were dressed in all sorts of finery and returned Mabbut’s gaze quite unselfconsciously. There were few men to be seen, apart from one old man who lay alone at the entrance of a house, his lean frame shaken every now and then by a hard, bronchial cough.

  There was an atmosphere of inertia, though even as the thought occurred to him, Mabbut realised this was his own interpretation, based on little more than the fact that they weren’t getting up to shake hands or offer him tea and biscuits. They were certainly not listless. When Kumar talked to them the children looked as bright and mischievous as children should be. A little girl, sitting on her mother’s knee with three gold rings through each of her ears and a pin through her nose, examined Mabbut curiously. An older girl, her neck draped with strings of beads and metal necklaces, watched him warily out of the corner of her eye as she leant forward to shoo away the dogs.

  While Kumar was busy dispensing sweets to the children, Mabbut peered into one of the front rooms. The ochre walls were delicately inscribed with dots and triangles and stick figures. There were similar markings around the smoothly carved doorways and on the beamed ceiling. He crawled inside. It was cool and dark and soothing and Mabbut felt comfortably enclosed as he squatted on the hard earth floor. Outside, the barking became more sporadic but the coughing more persistent. He must have stayed in the room for some time because when he emerged, blinking against the light, he found Kumar talking to a man he hadn’t seen before. The latter was young and desperately thin, with a small round face and intense close-set eyes.

  ‘Mr Keith!’ Kumar exclaimed. ‘This man will take us to the top of the hill. The sacred hill.’

  Mabbut thought ahead, to the ten kilometres already separating them from the v
ehicle. He was hot and hungry and every muscle ached, but there was a look in Kumar’s eye that brooked no refusal. He nodded, reached for his water bottle and took a long drink. By the time he’d screwed the top back on, the other two had already set off. Mabbut heaved on his backpack and, catching the eye of one woman, he raised his glance heavenwards. To his surprise she laughed.

  They proceeded out of the village past orange and banana trees and a weathered timber frame on which strips of meat had been hung out to dry. The dogs summoned up enough energy to yap and bound about at their departure, but once they were in among the trees the silence of the forest returned, and with it the feeling that they were in an ageless world, free of any human context. There was only the faintest of tracks to follow, and as the cover thickened around them it was clear that without their guide they would have quickly become lost.

  They must have climbed for a half-hour before the guide stopped and pointed ahead. Kumar stopped too and pointed to the last few metres of the hill, which rose steeply to its crest. He turned and shouted back to Mabbut, whose heart was thudding alarmingly.

  ‘From here is where they mine!’

  His indignation rang round the forest.

  ‘All this,’ he raised his arms above his head and pulled them apart violently, as if tearing open a curtain, ‘gone!’

  It was then that Mabbut finally understood the magnitude of what would happen when Astramex came for their bauxite. Deliberately ripping forty feet from the top of these secluded hills was almost unimaginable. From here, looking back the way they had come, down to the sleepy village two hours’ walk away from the rest of the world, with its barking dogs and coughing man and smoke rising lazily from the fires, the scale of the potential destruction induced a sort of giddiness.

  Kumar set off after the guide, pushing towards the crest of the hill. Mabbut looked up. Beyond him more trees and then the open sky. He took a deep breath and started to scramble after them.