A Village by the Sea – Anita Desai
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Anita Desai?s novel, The Village by the Sea, is a vibrant narration of perseverance and hope in distress. It is a saga of changes and adaptation, a little of evil and more about the goodness of nature and human kindness.
Based on true events, it is a story set in a small coastal village Thul near Bombay. The two main characters of the novel are a brother and sister duo, 13-year-old Lila and 12-year-old Hari. They have two young school-going sisters, Bela and Kamal, a chronically ill mother and a good-for-nothing drunkard father. Their father had sold his paddy fields, fishing boat and even cattle long back to pay his toddy debts. Eventually the burden of looking after the family falls on the small shoulders of Hari and Bela, which they take on themselves with a sense of duty. Lila does the household chores and takes care of her sisters and ailing mother and Hari earns a little money by doing odd jobs or by selling vegetables he grows in his garden.
Close to their hut is a country house, Mon Repos, owned by a rich family of De Silvas from Bombay. Occasionally, De Silvas come to Mon Repos for holidaying and Hari and Lila work for them as part-time domestics to earn some extra money. Mr De Silva is a kind man and he gets impressed by the hard work of Hari. He gives Hari his city address as an invite to work for him in Bombay.
On one evening Hari finds a recently raised hut near the village. The man living in the hut tells Hari that soon there will come up a fertilizer factory. He says the paddy fields and coconut groves of 14 villages from Rewas to Alibagh will be acquired by the government to build roads, railway tracks and housing colonies. The news spreads in the village like wildfire and the villagers become apprehensive about their future. There are mixed reactions among the villagers on the factory. Some are optimistic of getting jobs in the factory and some fear the consequential pollution, loss of livelihood and impact of industrialization on their ways of life. Local MLA Aderkar also comes to the village and speaks of the havoc the fertilizer factory will wreak on their lives.
There is also a ?well-to-do? burly and boastful man Biju in the village who even has a TV set that does not catch signals. He builds a big fishing boat fitted with a diesel engine. Children spoof him when the boat overturns before it goes into the sea.
Hari is in dire need of money to educate his sisters, treat his ailing mother and above all to make both ends meet. For money he needs a job and he has three choices, De Silvas in Bombay or the factory or Biju?s big boat. One day when he returns home, he finds his sisters weeping over their dead dog Pinto. Lila tells him that their drunkard neighbour poisoned Pinto because their father did not return the debt he owed to him.
Enraged and frustrated by his own helplessness he decides to leave his home for Bombay. He joins a group of protesting farmers and fishermen led by Aderkar on a boat and reaches Bombay. All protesters gather to hear politicians, NGOs and others at Kala Ghoda. Many people speak on the looming hazards of the proposed factory on the flora and fauna and the life of the native villagers. An old man, Sayyid Ali (famous ornithologist Dr Salim Ali) also speaks on the subject. When the crowd is dispersed, he goes to De Silvas? apartment in a building at Malabar Hills but is driven