The Truth (21 page)
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 vehicle. 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.
When at last he reached the top he found himself on a wide flat plateau. The air was cooler here and a breeze was blowing. Behind him, as far as the eye could see, the hills rolled away in waves of
brown and green. Apart from the odd plumes of smoke there was nothing in the broad landscape to suggest human habitation. Then he heard Kumar calling and reluctantly he set off, picking his way through the spiky bushes towards the other side of the hill. As he reached his two companions he found Kumar looking intently out to the west through a pair of binoculars. He offered them to Mabbut. But Mabbut didn’t need the glasses to see what lay on the far side of the mountain.
The vast agglomeration of the Kowprah refinery sprawled across the valley floor. Whereas the prevalent natural geometry of the Masoka Hills was smooth and rounded, the refinery was all hard angles and straight lines. With its cluster of grey funnel-like smelters and gun-barrel chimney stacks, it resembled some hulking battleship, the power cables its moorings, and the sinuous outlines of the paddy fields the water swirling around it. Kumar, voice raised against the wind, was pointing to one end of the complex, where the late afternoon sun glinted on two strips of water.
‘This small one, see! That is ash pond. Ash flurry from power plant. Big one is red mud pond. Sodium hydroxide. Mr Keith, company say no leaks, Mr Melville say many leaks. Into the streams and rivers. We say “You have poisoned us”. They say, “Look, no one want to farm here, so we can take more land for our refinery”.’
The plant gave off a menacing sense of purpose, of ramped-up energy. Mabbut knew about the terrific heat required to refine alumina, and the need to keep smelters such as these running twenty-four hours a day. What was the formula? Fourteen thousand kilowatt hours and 1,400 tons of water for one ton of aluminium? And he counted twelve smelters down there.
‘Mr Keith, look there. Please!’
Mabbut followed Kumar’s outstretched arm to a forest of cranes and the half-finished smelter pods rising at the point nearest to the hill.
‘They are building more, you see. You know why? Because they believe they will soon take these hills. See that?’
Mabbut could see it very well. Snaking away from the nearside of the refinery was a steel-framed conveyor belt, as yet unused, heading
up through the forest towards them, aimed straight at the Masoka Hills like a serpent’s tongue.
‘Can they be stopped?’ he shouted back to Kumar.
‘Everyone talk, everyone cry. Then everyone get given school or house or telephone. So everyone do nothing. Only one man on our side, Mr Keith! Only one man Astramex scared of now. You see.’
T
he night train to Bhubaneswar slowly gathered speed as it eased its way across the tracks at Kindara Junction and on to the line that led south. It was comprised of twenty dull green railway carriages, all of which had identical rows of open bunks running through them, stacked in threes on either side of a narrow gangway. Most passengers were already either asleep or preparing for bed. Occasionally there was the cry of a child or a low muttering between relatives as the last portions of food were shared out. At an open window at one end of the last coach but one, two people were very much awake. Keith Mabbut and Hamish Melville stood side by side, taking in the night air. Melville held an elegant leather-covered hip flask, filled, he said proudly, with the very best Indian whisky. Every now and then they had to flatten themselves against the door as large ladies in voluminous saris wafted by on the last toilet break before bed.
Two days had passed since Mabbut and Kumar had stood on the top of the Masoka Hills and seen the titanic industrial complex extending towards them. After the long, profoundly sad walk back down the hill and through the village, Mabbut had returned to Kumar’s family home, and, being barely able to move the next day, had sat beneath a spreading cassia tree feeling like an ancient scribe as he filled his notebook while Kumar, the modern tribesman, made repeated calls on his mobile phone. Which was how Mabbut had first learnt of what came to be known as the Kowprah Blockade. Apparently, on the night after they had returned from the sacred hill, a well-marshalled crowd of Masira Kidonga, Musa and Gyara people had emerged from the forest in the dead of night and occupied the road in front of the Astramex plant at the precise moment when three vast turbines intended to double production at the refinery had
arrived at the main gates. As the trailers approached, a thousand people had sat down in front of them, blocking the road and forcing the vehicles to pull up. At which point lights had flooded the area and cameras had begun to record the scene. Astramex’s security had been taken completely by surprise and their accusations of violent and illegal protest were contradicted by the highly skilful, professionally shot footage that appeared on the Internet within minutes. It was the largest mobilisation of indigenous people ever seen in India.
