The Village by the Sea Read Free Page B

Bhola and Mahesh – they used to play on the beach together and go hunting with their dogs, and wrestle and climb coconut trees and go to the occasional stage shows that were put on in the village on festival nights. Now they were too old to play and they just sat or lay about under the casuarina trees, talking.
    What did they talk about?
    ‘We will get jobs – then we will have money.’
    ‘
How
will we get jobs?’ Hari asked, sitting up suddenly and filling his hands with fistfuls of sand. ‘They will bring men from the cities to work in the factories.’
    ‘No, they won’t,’ all three boys shouted in protest.
    They were silent for a minute, then one said, ‘How can they? City people won’t come to live in a village. Where can they live? There’s nowhere for them to live, and no shops, no cinema. They won’t want to come here. We live here – we can work in their factories.’
    ‘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