The Village by the Sea (15 page)

She thought of Hari with such longing that tears stung her eyes and her fingers curled up in knots. It seemed as if Hari knew that, wherever he was, for when they got out of the car, Bela and Kamal were standing on the log over the creek, waving a yellow postcard in the air and screaming, ‘From Hari! Hari has written us a postcard!'

‘Hari?' cried Lila, tumbling out of the car and running towards them. ‘Where is he? What is he doing?'

The work was not easy in that firelit kitchen of the Sri Krishna Eating House that seemed to grow hotter and hotter and never to cool down even at night. The eating house never quite shut and customers had to be served with tea and bread or bread and lentils whenever they demanded it, day or night. Jagu kept his promise of paying Hari a rupee a day which came to seven rupees a week, good wages for a young boy new to the work, and Hari was grateful for it. Since he also got his meals free, he could save all that money to take home to his family, and he was proud of the amount he was collecting for them. What he minded was not being able to leave the eating house and go home when the
work was done. He was confined to it day and night: he worked in the kitchen and in the front room, washed and bathed under the tap at the back, ate his meals at the table when there was no customer around, and slept on the bench or sometimes on the dusty black floor. This was the hardest of all.

Outside the traffic ground past all through the night: when the buses had stopped, there were still the hand-drawn carts rattling through the streets with goods from the railway station and warehouses for the markets, and cars and taxis at all hours. When the cinema houses closed after the last show, hundreds of people poured out and streamed past, shouting and blowing paper horns and singing songs from the cinema show. Then the lights were never put out in the city which was always lit up so that Hari's tired eyes longed for the deep darkness and the quiet nights of his seaside village. He could hardly remember the soft sounds of the sea or the wind in the coconut palms or the feel of the clean sand between his fingers and under his feet – it was all so long ago and far away. He had only been away for one season, just the few months
between winter and summer, but it seemed like a lifetime.

He would have fallen ill from lack of sleep if he had not one night got up and gone out to sit on the pavement because it was a degree cooler there than in the eating house with its fiery heat and stale smells and stuffy air. The old watchmender, who had stayed late to finish some work on a watch he had promised to have ready, had come over to him after pulling down the steel shutter over his shop and said, ‘What's the matter, Hari? Not ill, are you?'

Hari shook his head and said nothing – he was so fuddled by tiredness and lack of sleep.

‘Can't sleep in there, eh? Must be terribly hot and stuffy. This is a bad month – May – before the monsoon comes,' he said, sighing, and lifted the black cap off his head to mop his bald pate with a large green handkerchief. ‘My room is as bad as the shop – it's on the top floor, you see, in one of those buildings that overlook Grant Road station,' he waved his handkerchief at the busy intersection before folding it and putting it away. ‘Tell you what, why don't you go and sleep in the park, eh? Wish I could come too, it will be
cooler – but my cat will be waiting for me, my old puss.' He chuckled to himself, quite happily, and wandered off unsteadily.

Hari was always to be grateful to the old watchmender for this advice for the park changed his life and made it easier to endure. It was only a city park – a dusty square with some patches of worn grass, iron benches, rows of canna lilies and some palm trees – surrounded by very old and shabby buildings – not to be compared with the beach and the coconut grove at home, but still, it had a bench to lie on, trees to look at, some pigeons and crows to watch, and even if the city never seemed to grow cooler and the night air was even staler than by day, used up by the millions of gasping city-dwellers, it was certainly more bearable than the eating house kitchen.

Lying on the wooden planks of the bench, Hari could see the tattered fronds of the dusty palm trees over his head and even one or two of the brightest stars, struggling to shine through the dust and soot of the city. When he got up and put
his feet down he felt grass under them, not the hard, cruel city concrete.

The park was watched over by a policeman in khaki, a young man with a fierce, sharp-tipped moustache that he kept twisting as he stood with his baton tucked under his arm, keeping a sharp eye on the people who went in and out of the park. On the first night that Hari lay down on the bench to sleep, he stalked across and growled, ‘Get up, boy, go home. This is no place to sleep. Get up quick or I'll take you off to the police station – you can sleep as long as you like there.'

Hari had just felt the luxury of stretching out and putting his feet up after a hard day at the eating house and he sat up, miserable. ‘I have nowhere to go,' he said, ‘I live here.'

‘Nowhere to go? I'll show you where you can go,' bellowed the policeman ferociously, waving his baton over Hari's head, and was about to bring it down with a crack when an old gentleman who happened to be walking by, tapping his walking stick before him, stopped and spoke to the policeman.

‘Why bully a poor harmless boy, Mr Mighty Policeman?' he piped in a small, shrill voice like
a child's. ‘There are enough bad characters in this city – thugs, murderers, thieves, gamblers, drunkards – why not go after them instead? Why not start with those drunkards playing cards in that corner over there? They make life unsafe for us who live in this locality, we are all afraid to come to this park because of them – not because of this poor boy who has no home and nowhere else to sleep,' he said.

The policeman stood chewing his moustache uncertainly. ‘Hrumph,' he grunted, not knowing quite what to do. The bent old man had made him feel ashamed of bullying a child when there was adult work to be done: tackling the real criminals of the city. ‘Hrumph,' he said again, more loudly. ‘Who are these men? Where are they? I'd better go and see,' he said, and went off. The old man gave a little chuckle, winked at Hari, and hobbled off, tapping with his stick.

After that the policeman greeted him every night as he entered the park when his work was done, and Hari felt safe and even quite grand to have a policeman guard him while he slept.

When he opened his eyes in the morning he saw pigeons tumbling in the dirty grey sky. They came whirring down in a flock to alight on the statue in the middle of the park where a man stood throwing handfuls of grain to them, and Hari watched delightedly as they waddled about on their pink claws, pecking and quarrelling. Every morning this man came to scatter grain for the pigeons and Hari watched them come and feed. Then there was an old woman in a widow's white sari who brought a bag of flour to the park and painstakingly sprinkled a pinch of flour on every ant hill along the paths. She herself was like an old white ant, bent and hunched, crawling along with her weak eyes bulging as she strained to find ants to feed. Hari watched her, wondering. He certainly would not have spent his money on feeding birds and ants; he had his family to think of and was saving every rupee he earned for them.

A little later, when he went to the pump in a corner of the shrubbery to wash, he saw the schoolchildren pouring by with their satchels across their shoulders. They all wore the same clothes – grey shorts or skirts and light blue shirts or blouses – faded and mended, and they all had their hair oiled and combed down very flat. Some
went by in laughing, racing groups, others had to be led by their mothers or grandparents to the school building at the end of the park. Watching them, Hari thought of his sisters, Bela and Kamal, in their indigo blue skirts, skipping and running down the village road to the school by the hill, and wondered when he would see them again. He wished he had given them his address after all so that they could write and send him news of home.

The boys in the kitchen, now that they knew he was there only to help them and not to take away their work or food, looked at him with less hostility and sullenness. Jagu seemed pleased with Hari, too, and sometimes handed him a glass of tea in the middle of the day or, when he had a few moments to spare, sat down at one of the long wooden tables, drummed loudly on it and sang a song in a dialect Hari did not know, wagging his head to the tune and rolling his eyes. When he caught Hari listening and smiling, he smiled back. Then Hari knew that he too had a village somewhere that he called home, that he remembered it and that the memory made him happy. It was just that he was a silent, hardworked, worried man and had no time and no gift for
speech that might have made him a friend as well as a benefactor.

It was the watchmender, Mr Panwallah, who was truly a benefactor, the kindest and most helpful of all. One afternoon, during those hot, still hours when there were no customers for a change, Hari was standing in front of the eating house, idly watching the traffic because he was too tired to do anything else, and Mr Panwallah called to him to come and sit beside him on the bench behind the counter in his shop.

‘Want to help?' he asked. ‘Want to learn how to make a clock tick? I'm just going to open this big grandfather clock sent me by an old Parsee family for repair – you'll be able to see the workings plain. Don't often get a piece like this any more – wall clocks, yes, and electronic gadgets – but you don't often come upon a grandfather clock like this. It's a real piece of luck, being able to show you one of this size. Look,' he said, swinging open the door at the back and revealing the machinery to a fascinated Hari who felt as if the door had opened into a new and strange house. Mr Panwallah showed Hari what was wrong with it, what had made it stop. ‘Interesting, isn't it? How would you like to learn? Tell you
what – I'll take you on as an apprentice – in the afternoons, when you don't have to work in the kitchen. You don't have much to do between two and four, do you? Of course you will have to ask Jagu first. I can pay you a little, not much, and you can help me for two hours a day. Perhaps I can make a watchmender of you. That's not a profession many know. How would you like that, eh?'

Hari could not believe that he actually meant that, that he was actually willing to share his secrets with a village boy who was working as a cook's help in a beggars' kitchen. The man's kindness and the possibility that he might make something of his life, learn to put his hands to good use, handle tiny, delicate tools and work upon intricate, complicated machinery, made him feel so dazed that he could not speak and only nodded silently.

‘Here, let's start at once so we can see if you have a taste for it,' chuckled the old man, handing him a tiny screwdriver with a green handle like glass.

‘My hands are too dirty,' Hari mumbled in shame.

‘Dirty, are they?' laughed Mr Panwallah. ‘Oh, just wipe them on this towel here. They're all
right now.' He seemed delighted to have an apprentice: he enjoyed company as much as Jagu did not. ‘You've got clever fingers, I can see. Now here's a useful little tool – hold it like this and I'll show you what to do.'

That was how Hari became an apprentice watchmender and saw that it was possible to have a future, that one did not remain where one was stuck always but could move out and away and on. One needed to make great efforts for this to happen, but it helped to have a little luck as well. He got Jagu's permission to spend the slack afternoon hours at the watchmender's without any trouble – Jagu was taciturn, but good-natured – and he set to learning the craft with a will. He began to brighten up and look happy and alive, and the old watchmender smiled to see him at work, frowning with concentration and eagerness.