The Village by the Sea Read Online Free PDF Page B

course I believe it. How else could he have a television set in his house?’
    ‘It doesn’t work, Hari says, because we are too far away from the TV station in Bombay.’
    ‘Perhaps they will go away to Bombay – when they’ve made enough money.’
    Lila and Mina had never been further than Alibagh, the district headquarters two miles away. But they had heard of more adventurous people getting into the bus on the highway or the ferry at Rewas and going all the way to that great city across the sea. When they were smaller, they used to play at ‘going to Bombay’, but that would not do any longer.
    Now Lila turned out of the village lane on to the beach, and it was more bare and white and blazing hot than before.
    ‘Come at night to see the play,’ Mina called after her.
    ‘Perhaps,’ Lila called back, knowing that she would not.

    Now Biju’s boat was being built. The village children – Hari often amongst them – would come and stand in groups of three and four to watch. Biju had got workmen from Alibagh to
build his boat, he did not think the villagers at Thul could do it although they had been building boats all their lives. So the villagers liked to watch the Alibagh workers and to jeer at them. Sometimes that made Biju so angry that he shouted at them. It was always noisy.
    Biju would come waddling down to watch the work in progress. A small boy would carry a folding chair down to the beach from his house and plant it on the sand for Biju to sit on. Biju would lower himself on to it very gingerly, twitching up his loose
dhoti
and sitting down very uncomfortably. He would obviously have been more comfortable squatting on his heels in the sand as the others did, but now that he was such a great ship-owner, he felt he had to sit on a chair unlike the rest of them.
    Sometimes his wife came waddling down from the house to watch, too. She did not have a folding chair to sit on so she would stand till she got tired and went back to the house. It was a big, double-storeyed brick one set in a huge, gloomy estate of coconut and betelnut palms, grown so closely together that no light filtered through the leaves. Everywhere were signs of their wealth – they had several deep wells, many bullock carts, a row of
bullocks, hens and ducks, piles of firewood, a pigeon house and the famous television set – the only aerial in Thul perched on the blue tin roof of their house. The house had its name painted in big crimson letters on a tin signboard:
Anand Bhavan
, House of Joy. But because of the closely planted trees and the lack of light and the untidiness of the big yard it looked more gloomy than joyful. Certainly Biju’s wife trailed back to it slowly without any expression of joy. She knew how the villagers gossiped about them and she did not like it.
    Almost the whole village stopped to watch the big boat being built at some time or the other. No one else owned such a large boat or even worked on one. Perhaps they were jealous and that was why no one had a good word for it. Or perhaps they really did not believe it would do well at sea being so large and clumsy and built by those Alibagh workmen at that. But in a way they were proud, too, that someone in Thul was able to build such a thing, even if it was Biju who everyone knew was dishonest and perhaps a smuggler.
    ‘Smuggler, smuggler, smuggler,’ children whispered behind their hands while they watched,
and giggled till Biju roared at them and made them fly.
    ‘Biju will go to jail! Biju will go to jail!’ they sang as they ran, and he was much too fat and old to catch them and beat them as they deserved.

    ‘Do you think we have smugglers in our village, Hari?’ Bela and Kamal asked at night when they were lying in bed, not quite asleep.
    ‘Of course we do.’
    ‘What do they smuggle?’
    ‘Silver and gold.’
    ‘No – o – o!’
    ‘Yes, of course. That’s how they get so rich.’
    ‘Where do you think they get it from – the silver and gold? Can