THE LAST SWIMMERS IN TOWN
The sky those days had begun to look dust colored. When the wind blew at the dam site it carried layers of dust in to the tents of the engineers and masons near by.
The boy wandered to the construction site one evening. Half a dozen engineers with helmets on their heads discussed something animatedly.
They were building something mammoth, one of them told him.
A dam.
‘A dam?’ He asked.
‘A huge dam. The highest in India.’
The Bhilangna flowed quietly some distance away as they talked, looking at the long row of slow moving trucks loaded with mortar and grout and boulders that looked like giant skulls from far.
Subrat didn’t know what a dam was. His brother Vidya told him later what it meant. He heard him with wonder and asked what would happen to the river when the dam came up.
The river would turn in to a little lake. Their city, the old historical city of Tehri, would submerge under the river.
‘And where will all of us go?’
It sounded like a joke to Subrat.
‘To some other place.’
‘It sounds like a joke. I have never heard about a city being submerged.’
‘Everything sounds like a joke to a kid.’
Vidya sounded a bit annoyed, the way he did when asked uncomfortable questions.
To Subrat it felt like the strangest thing he had known till date in his little life of eight years. There was no logic to the thing he told himself looking at the slow rising dust in the west.
‘Why should they build a dam here only?’ He persisted with his queries.
Vidya was six years older. He seemed to know everything about everything Subrat asked.
This time Vidya didn’t tell him anything but switched on the tape recorder and started humming an old Bollywood song that he played every evening.
What sort of people did this to a beautiful river Subrat wondered alone. Was it necessary to build a thing that would wipe out an old town? His head was full of many questions.
Was it possible that certain mysteries only spawned questions and no answers? Perhaps the dam was one of those bizarre things that would only be about endless questions and no answers he told himself remembering Vidya’s annoyed face. There was no point thinking too much about it.
That night he prayed silently to the gods to stall the construction of the dam. It was an absurd prayer he knew as he murmured his wish, eyes closed, listening to Vidya snore by his side. All night he felt restless dreaming about the river and the city and twice he got up to drink water even though he didn’t feel thirsty.
Like a seasonal rash on skin, his restlessness had disappeared by morning.
‘What kind of people plan dams?’ He asked Vidya, first thing as their eyes met.
Vidya laughed.
‘Are you crazy? I hope you weren’t dreaming about it all night.’ He laughed.
‘I was actually dreaming about it. I want to know.’ He replied squirming a little.
‘The government. ’Vidya said. He added nothing because they had to get ready for the school.
Government sounded like a heavy word to Subrat. It was bigger than most words he knew and its sound was ugly on the ears.
Vidya couldn’t exactly explain what the word meant. He settled for ‘ a group of people running the nation’ after a bit of thought.
‘I hate the government.’ Subrat declared as they crossed the green bridge that morning.
Vidya laughed.
‘You don’t know a thing about the world yet. The government creates a lot of wonderful things for us.’ He tried to sound wise.
‘The roads we travel on, the electricity we get, the beautiful parks that you see in the big cities… its all the work of government.’ He added in an effort to show his awareness of things.
Subrat nodded confusedly.
Standing next to them on the bridge were two old men murmuring something , eyes closed. They were chanting Sanskrit shlokas, mumbling prayers to the gods, their faces calm. It was a brief prayer. They opened their eyes and threw a coin each in the river after a moment and bowed as if the river were a living person.
Subrat was amused by the sight but would understand in later years that the city dwellers revered the river as a deity. Everyone prayed to it like that- eyes closed, murmuring their prayers, throwing coins in it, coins that sank to the bed of the river like magic seeds which presumably would bloom in to good luck some day.
~
The first time Subrat swam in the river he was fourteen. There was a group of boys that gathered near the green bridge every Sunday. Vidya was the leader of the pack. He swam the longest , to parts where other boys didn’t go and emerged last out of the waters every time.
‘I know you do that to show your superiority.’ Subrat said to him one day. He had begun to admire Vidya for his fearlessness.
‘Do what?’ Vidya laughed.
‘Swim to the deeper parts.’
‘I like it. The day you learn how to navigate those parts you will leave the shallow side.’
‘But that is not going to happen any time soon.’ Subrat said.
The engineers had told him they would divert the route of the river in a year.
‘If you practice better you might do that in six months.’ Vidya said sounding a little annoyed now.
Subrat was starting to feel strange. It was because he was living in a strange time in a strange place he told himself. He wondered if there would be a river to swim in the new city and if he would feel happy at all when the time to go finally arrived.
He had begun to love his swims in the river. But each time he swam he thought about the absurdity that was going to take this enchantment away from all of them.
There were days after the swim he stayed back after Vidya had gone home. He threw pebbles at the whirlpools and talked with the engineers on site.
Did they not feel bad? The work they were doing would displace a lot of people.
They were doing their work, they said. Everyone was supposed to do their work. That is how the world flourished.
He heard them speak the same thing over and over again. Every time they spoke he sensed a displeasure in their replies. May be because he was the only one asking them these things. Why was he the only one asking those things he wondered . Others looked fine enough with the way things were going. He decided not to bother them with his silly talk anymore.
More practice at swimming was combined with less talk.
Things he disliked previously- mathematics and singing- he resumed with a feeble vigor. He would swim hard and long and return home quietly, often before Vidya. Sometimes he saw a group of protesters sitting on the municipality ground shouting slogans against the dam and paused in his walk.
They were aimless rebels he had heard Vidya say many times. He saw a rage on their faces, a rage that sometimes
made him feel one with them but he desisted from joining them.
Months later he stopped going for the swim. There were better things to do he said when Vidya asked.
‘Like?’
‘Watching movies. Reading joke books. Listening to the songs your tape recorder plays.’ He said with a shrug.
Vidya thought he was only pretending and would return back to his normal ways in a week or so. But a month passed and then two. Subrat didn’t visit the river bank. The boys who swam with him called him one morning and he told them he was tired.
He watched them go from the roof top and envied their happy gait. Unlike him they were fine with the idea of the city’s death and the coming of a new one. Perhaps he lacked something , something superior that they seemed to possess, a quality of the mind or the heart that allowed them to carry on regardless of the events.
A month more passed like this and he felt good staying back. The clouds of dust had become more dense and opaque and he looked at them without too much thought. The noise of the trucks carrying boulders and grout didn’t irk him much.
When he visited the river after a gap of six months he felt nothing.
A group of boys was readying for a swim. He knew them. He had swum many times with them. They waved at him and asked him to join them. He shook his head and looked at them from where he was with a smile.
‘Not today.’ He said.
‘They will divert the river the next week.’ One of them said.
He didn’t know that. It snapped something within him.
He saw them screaming and hopping and whistling and laughed a muffled laugh.
He tried to process their feelings the way he did all the time.
Their lives, like his own had been transfigured by the city and the river to an extent that an outsider couldn’t imagine.
It was a love borne of a deep connect with life, with the sky and the river and things like these, a love that was beyond people caught in the trap of daily living. Only months ago he was possessed by this, this savage love that sometimes had made him feel odd about himself.
He was trying hard to detach himself from strong emotions all these months, trying his best not to feel strongly for things that didn’t mean anything to the vast majority of people.
He was better without that old love, without its dangerous intensity, he told himself now. It would drain him. The daily grind was a sufficient condition for a tolerable life. He had become similar to other men in his feelings for the city finally. He didn’t wish for more.
He heard the happy scream of boys and it made him come out of his thoughts. They had taken their shirts off and were running towards the river pulled in by its spell.
He felt momentarily dwarfed by their strong passion.
Then seeing some of them look quizzically at him he laughed and took off his shirt. He could swim one final time and feel his old love for the river again.
Anil Petwal is a writer and a public servant living in Dehradun,India. His words have been published/ are forthcoming in The Punch Magazine, The Ayaskala Magazine, Lavender Lime Literary and other places. He is presently querying for his first novel and is working on a book of poems.He can be reached on Twitter at-@IamAnilPetwal.