The Village by the Sea by Anita Desai

feet and set down into one of the waiting boats.
    By the time the sun was up, turning the dull sea into peacock blue and emerald green and lighting up the city of Bombay on the far shore like a white castle made of sand, or salt, blinding against the hot blue sky, all the boats had been loaded and were setting out like a shoal of dolphins over the waves.
    It was fourteen kilometres from Rewas to Bombay. All the way the farmers and fishermen shouted and sang. Their voices rang from boat to boat. They were all in high spirits; it was such a rare outing for them who usually never gave up a day’s work to leave their villages, it seemed almost like a holiday. Adarkar had to shout continually to remind them why they were going to Bombay. His voice was getting so hoarse, one of the older fishermen finally tugged at his shirt, hanging out over his
dhoti
and wet with perspiration, and said, ‘Sit down, son, sit for a while. Keep your breath for all the shouting you are going to do in Bombay. When we get there we will shout so every man in the city hears us, never you fear. Sit and have a little rest. Give our brother some tea to drink,’ he called to the men in the boat. One of them produced a clay cup which was still half full of tea, the rest having spilt earlier. They passed it to their leader who sat down and drank gratefully. Another produced a sweet lime, peeled it and passed him the segments one by one to suck. He was grateful to them and took their advice.
    Hari who had bought neither tea nor fruit at the pier nor food from home in the night, sat very quietly on the floor of the boat and no one paid
him any attention at all. There was no one else from Thul in his boat; it was full of strangers from other villages along the coast, and he sat listening to them, feeling very tired, hot and thirsty, and very afraid of the journey he had undertaken without thinking at all, simply because he had been upset and angry and simply could not bear to live another day in Thul in the old way. The time for change had come, he had felt that. He had had to make the break he had been thinking about for so long. Had he done wrong?
    Of course there was no question of turning back. Having joined this ‘procession’, there was no way he could back out of it short of leaping into the sea and swimming home. Once in Bombay, he would have to stay, work and earn a living. Was he really ready for that? He felt unsure. He looked back over his shoulder at the flat, marshy coast of Rewas, too far for him to reach. Putting his head down on his knees, he closed his eyes in despair.
    ‘Look at the boy,’ someone said. ‘Whose son is he? Have you nothing to eat, son?’ Here, take this,’ and he was handed a cold, dry
chapati
, folded into a triangle. He took it although his throat was so dry he thought he could not possibly
chew it or swallow it, but to be polite he bit into it and it gave him a little nourishment and strength.
    He needed that for it was the most strenuous day of his life.

    He was silenced by awe when he saw the city of Bombay looming over their boats and the oily green waves. He would have liked to stand and stare as he disembarked from the boat at the Sassoon docks, aching and stiff from the long ride in the jam-packed boat, but there was no time, no leisure for that. His fellow passengers were pushing and shoving and jostling past him and he was carried along by them. They pushed and shoved because they were in turn being pushed and shoved by the Bombay crowds that thronged the docks – people in a hurry to get something done, so many people in such a great hurry as the villagers had never seen before. It was only out of the corner of his eye that he saw, briefly, before being pushed on, the great looming sides of steamships berthed at the docks, cranes lifting and lowering huge bales, men bare-bodied
and sweating carrying huge packing cases, boxes and baskets on their heads and shoulders, grunting as they hurried, women like the