Dead Water (6 page)

India’s epic, continent-spanning Grand Trunk Road is the vessel to which the village of Chhaphandi clings: a tapeworm sucking feebly from a greedy gut. The point is: the GTR splits at Kanpur and sends two highways sprawling westwards over the fields and paddies of Uttar Pradesh towards a distant reunion in New Delhi. The northern road has no separate name. The southern one is called the Sher Shah Suri Marg.

It is 1976, and raining.

In Chhaphandi’s market place children garlanded with flowers run from puddle to puddle, stamping and laughing. Old men sit grinning at nothing, displaying their dental decay. In the fields the first pale green rice shoots tremble in the downpour.

On the third day, under skies so low, so heavy, it’s as if you could reach up and stir the clouds with your fingers, it begins to dawn on the region that this is not a normal rain.

Cattle take shelter under the trees. Lovers retire to their rooms. The rain beats down all day and all night, and all the next day, and the next, heavier and heavier, filling ditches, bursting pipes, drowning the villagers’ crops under four inches of slurry and smearing the village of Chhaphandi with a weak solution of human and animal shit.

The rain stops. Chhaphandi holds its breath. Here and there the bank of a paddy collapses silently into the surrounding mud. A patch of the highway loses a couple of feet from its northern bank. A landslide buries two boys inside a latrine. The rivers swell but do not break their banks. It takes four days for the waters to drain away.

Under the eyes of jealous rain gods, the farmers of Chhaphandi walk their ruined fields. They stick their fingers surreptitiously into the sodden soil, testing its crumb. Some raindrops fall. By the afternoon the shower stops. In the evening it rains again, but not much, and the following day it stays dry, and some say that the skies are lighter, though they aren’t. On the sixth day the village comes alive again. Tata trucks laden with oxen draw up in the market place. Tempos rattle their way to this farm or that, labourers clinging to their sides. Under a sky the colour of lead the villagers begin to plough.

Rishi hasn’t even got his fly properly fastened before his mother is thrusting a basket into his hands. She leads him out into the pre-dawn gloaming, across sodden fields, to where his brothers are already at work. He is eight years old.

Over the years, the Ansaris have dug a network of ponds and canals to water their land. The rainwater in these ponds is still high and it wouldn’t take much for them to overflow again, inundating the fields. The water makes pale discs in the half-light: counters in some monstrous game of
pachisi
. Rishi becomes aware that he is surrounded, as in a dream, by virtually his entire family. His father Keshav. His two elder brothers, Aadi and Ram. Cousins, aunts, uncles. Still more distant relations – ones who live far off, in the next village or the next – grown men and women whose names Rishi barely knows. Together they work their way across the paddy, bent-backed, plucking and planting to a rhythm sustained by nothing but a common urgency – no chant, no clap, no song. They tread the flood’s yellow leavings deeper underfoot, into mud made oily by hurriedly scattered ox shit.

Hours later, and with much of the work finished, Rishi’s mother sends him back to the house to fetch the lunchtime chapattis. He returns, wobbling precariously along the narrow, mud-slimed embankments that parcel the paddies into regular squares, the grid forcing him into comic turns and switchbacks, like the gobbling yellow Pac-Man sprite he once saw in a fairground booth in Firozabad. It’s raining again, and the women, already soaked from the day’s labour, shelter under folds of sari. The men, in shirts plastered to their skin and trousers that look as if made of mud, chew their soggy bread, listless as cows. Seizing the chance of escape, Rishi slides away behind a line of trees.

The margosa trees mark the line of a stream fed by waters running off the Sher Shah Suri Marg. Old Samey Yadav’s Komatsu has straightened and narrowed the watercourse, making a sluice through which his own and the Ansaris’ paddies can drain. In so doing, Old Samey’s excavations have turned a gently meandering brook into a foul-smelling drain. Rishi knows better than to approach the edge of the culvert. Even from here, by the trees, he can see an edge of silver where the rushing waters lick the bank, far higher than usual.

He follows the watercourse upstream, towards the Sher Shah Suri Marg. There’s a stand of margosas beneath the embankment. Their serrated leaves, curved like the blades of ornamental knives, shiver in the downpour. Rishi looks up through the foliage at the road. Despite the rain there’s no let-up in the traffic at all. If anything it’s heavier, as farms and businesses haul plant and stores out of the path of the spreading flood. Horns bellow continually.

In the rain and the obscuring tremble of leaves, the traffic blends into one: a silver ribbon extending from horizon to horizon, a rope of silver that forever flows back on itself, like a propeller that, on reaching a certain speed, appears to slow and rotate the other way. Rishi rubs his eyes, but the illusion will not be shaken off. Tata trucks decked out like shrines add bright colours to the silver skin: glassy scales of blue and red and green. The great snake howls – and suddenly the trees are toppling around him, what was far is near, and Rishi’s eyes, too late, begin to process what has happened here: a truck has fallen, tipping a container down the embankment and through the trees towards him, over and over, booming and bellowing, like one of those elongated dice from the Howzat! cricket game.

It rocks to rest a few feet away from where little Rishi is standing, frozen with horror, under a rain of leaves. There’s a word painted along the box. He tries to read.

He tilts his head. He reaches up and runs his hand over the letters, back and forth, as though this might release their meaning.

The container doors swing open.

Though it’s gloomy outside, a false dusk, Rishi’s day-adapted eyes cannot make out the back of the container. The box might go on forever. He waits for his eyes to adjust. The darkness persists. He steps inside, over the aluminium lintel. His footfalls make no sound as he edges into the dark. Behind him the door swings in the wind, dimming and brightening the interior walls, and yet the back wall remains invisible. It becomes a dare for him, that welling dark. He takes another step, another – and stops dead. There is something in here with him. He hears a susurration so faint it could be anything: a sound, a scent, a movement of lightless surfaces against a lightless ground.

There’s commotion outside. Rishi turns gratefully back to the light.

Travellers on the Sher Shah Suri Marg have pulled over to investigate the accident. They’re slipping down the embankment, gathering around a margosa tree where the driver, thrown out of his cab, hangs from the topmost branches, dying.

The truck lies some way off on its back: a crumpled catastrophe, a ball of silver paper, screwed up and thrown away. An old, exhaust-filmed shoe dangles from its tailgate; the beam’s been snapped like a spent match into a careless V. So much for the trucker’s charm.

Washed up on the shores of Chhaphandi, the container’s pillaged as swiftly and efficiently as any sea-wreck cast against a cliff. Ancient feuds are forgotten, bad blood made good as the onlookers form a human chain to empty it. Old Samey turns up at the wheel of his Komatsu to haul the container away. He can use it for storage. Aadi and Ram come running up the track to see what’s going on, but the haul’s a disappointment. Wastepaper. Crushed glass. Plastic bags. Men wander off, muttering, back to their Tatas, their Tempos, their Standard Gazelles. Small white plastic barrels. They’re heat-sealed and the labelling on them makes no sense.

Barrels, small white plastic / US$000 TEU / 24.

Aadi pulls a machete from his belt, turns a barrel on its side – they’re easy to handle, no bigger than large paint cans – and chops through its neck.

The barrels contain a caustic granular yellow paste. Aadi pokes at the stuff with the tip of his knife. He cleans his knife off on the grass. The stuff is slightly reactive: soapy bubbles form where the edges of it react with the raindrops clinging to the grass. And there’s a smell, both caustic and rotten: mould growing on meal. Old Samey’s conclusion: it’s paint-stripper. Disappointed, he kicks the barrel into the stream. A few villagers, standing around, pick up canisters for themselves. Could come in useful.

At least the shipping container is in good nick. Aadi and Ram help Old Samey secure it to the bucket of his Komatsu and, yard by painful yard, he drags it out of sight of the road.

Halfway down the track, Rishi’s mum comes running up, wailing and rending her kameez. The Ansaris’ house has foundered in the flood! It is splitting, ruined, done! The roof beam has snapped! ‘Keshav! Keshav, what shall we do?’

That night, while Aadi and Ram and the other young men of the family fight to wrest the family’s belongings from the worsening flood, Rishi, his mum and dad, and his sister bed down in a barn belonging to their neighbour Old Samey. Safia curls against Rishi in the straw, gently snoring, while Mum mutters angrily in the dark to her husband, who wants only to sleep. What are we doing in a barn? Is there no room in the house? Of course there’s room. Who the hell does old Samey Yadav think he is, herding us into a barn like so many cattle? Go and speak to him, Keshav. Cause a merry stink, Keshav. Go on: show your son what you are made of. Show me.

A bad smell, both mealy and caustic, brings Rishi back to wakefulness. He opens his eyes. Light slides under the barn door. It ropes toward him, tangling across the dusty concrete floor. Red stars on a field of blue. Shreds of yellow light ribbon between softly glowing fields where the colours intermingle to make a white as soft and wet as peach flesh. Rishi’s breath catches in his throat. It’s beautiful. Uncanny. A dream that’s slipped into the waking world.

Aadi and Ram do not return that night, and in the morning they are nowhere to be found. Rishi follows his dad to the ruins of their home. It is not there. In its place, a muddy river flows. Something has happened to the land. It has buckled under the weight of the flood and the receding waters have dug new channels, shortcutting the river’s old weave.

Chhaphandi’s every field is mud. The flood has daubed every hedgerow with mud so thick the fields appear walled. There’s no green leaf anywhere. Buffaloes starve in their pens. Cows keel over in the roads. For two weeks the villagers of Chhaphandi wait to see which of their dead the disaster will leave behind for them to bury.

The drowned bodies of Rishi’s elder brothers are found wrapped around each other, tangled in the roots of a dead tree. Their funeral is postponed because there’s not enough dry timber for a pyre. Garlands have to be taxied over from Firozabad.

Rishi’s father, Keshav Ansari, walks around the funeral pyre, a flaming paper in his hand, lighting Aadi and Ram into the otherworld. The pyre’s been smeared with that yellow paint-stripper stuff to help it burn. In the overcast the flames spreading over the pyre are pale and yellow and harmless-looking, and the garlands smothering the corpse seem to be shrivelling and blackening by themselves.

At 2.00 p.m. on Sunday, 20 August 1995, the Kalindi Express to New Delhi hits a cow a mile and a half outside Firozabad, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

The cow makes no sound as it is swallowed. The rush of gas from its mouth, its anus, its ears, and from the corners of its eyes is consumed by the hiss of the train’s state-of-the-art braking system. The cow spasms as it vanishes under the locomotive: a steak jiggled into a blender. The cow’s hooves snap cleanly off, scissored between wheel and rail. Its chest, compressed, bursts open like a peach, revealing wormy innards that whip up to a froth, drowning the cow’s only, involuntary, moo.

The neatness of this butchery, its symmetry, impresses even this hardened driver and his engineer. Climbing down from their locomotive, they inspect the damage. ‘Is that a part of the cow, or a part of the train?’ Immune to revulsion, they are gripped by a childlike curiosity.