The River and the Book Read Online Free PDF

one could explain. The villagers said the water was poisoned by the chemicals the company used to keep the cotton free of pests. Some villagers rowed upstream to the new settlements and saw the irrigation works with their own eyes. They returned pale with shock: they said that the cotton fields stretched as far as the eye could see, that the earth was scarred with gigantic piles of upthrown yellow earth and that the workers were as numerous as ants. They understood then that the Tarnish were planning to steal their river to feed the cotton. “Cotton is thirsty,” said Kular. “It needs a lot of water.”
    When the angry villagers demanded to be paid for their losses, the chief engineer told them to go away, and when they wouldn’t leave, he called up the soldiers, who fired their guns over their heads and set fierce dogs on them. After that, the villagers were afraid, but they were also angry.
    The wars didn’t start until the level of the River began to fall. Kular was unsure what had happened next, because there were many different stories. The villagers began to attack the irrigation works, creeping upstream at night to wreak acts of sabotage: a lock broken here, an engine destroyed there. Every time something was broken, the Tarnish took their revenge on the Pembar people. Soldiers would come to a village and arrest young men at random, forcing them to work on the canals with the Tarnish prisoners. That was a harsh sentence, because the Tarnish hated the Pembar people. The Tarnish prisoners stole their food and beat them, and if the young men tried to escape, they were often caught and shot. When they died, their bodies were thrown without ceremony into the River, to be found by their grieving families or to rot, undiscovered and unshriven, far away from home.
    The hatred between the Pembar and the Tarnish people grew thick and bloody until at last, in the middle of the previous winter, the chief engineer was murdered. Some said his throat had been cut, others said that he had been shot, some said it was villagers who did it, others that it was his own workers. Whatever happened, the Tarnish men blamed the Pembar people. The army ordered that an entire village a few miles north of Kular’s be burned down, and every grown man shot dead. So that is what the soldiers did. And the workers kept building the canals and farming the cotton just as if nothing had happened.
    “After that,” said Kular, “it was open war.” He paused and looked down at the table, his face dark with grief and hatred. “We cannot win,” he said. “They have machine guns and soldiers, and we have a few rifles, a few angry farmers.” For a moment his eyes went blank again. “They shot my wife,” he said. “They came to our village and burned it down, and they murdered women and children. And they shot my wife as we were fleeing in the boat. They don’t care what they do. Yet we have no choice but to fight them. If we have no water, we cannot live.”
    We all nodded. This is something River folk understand in their bones. Now we knew why our River had sunk so low this summer.
    “But it’s not so bad here,” said my father uncertainly. “Even though there is a drought. We’re a long way from the cotton fields.”
    A strange expression crossed Kular’s face. “That was what our village said last spring,” he said. “Do you think they will stop? They are still building the irrigation works. There are already fields of cotton as far as you can see, but they want more. They say they will make the Plains of Pembar look like a snowfield. Every year they will plant more cotton, and every year there will be less water for us. They don’t care if we starve. They don’t care if they poison the water. And they are killing the River. Soon it will die, and so will we.”
    There was a silence, and I knew that all of us were afraid. I glanced at my grandmother, and I saw that none of this was news to her. She had already seen it in the