MONEY TREE (27 page)

As they jolted down into the hollow of the valley they could see the same blasted scenery that Anila and her companions had crossed on foot just two weeks before. If anything, it was worse. The fields had been harvested
. They stood bone dry and stubbled as though devoured and salted by a retreating army. The last tufts of green on the low shrubs and thickets had given up the fight and had turned the same dull ochre as everything else. The cancer spread from the valley floor up the hillsides where some last green tinges at the rim suggested what the valley had once been like when the river had run through it. Meera was shouting above the grind of the engine and the crunching of the jeep’s body on its springs.

‘This was all green once. Just a few years ago.’

‘What happened?’ called Erin, grasping at the chance to take her mind off the nausea.

‘Our government has big ideas. One administration starts off a grand project, they get voted out, and the next one cancels it, or they run out of money, or it all gets too hard. Usually it’s twenty layers of officials who all have to be bought. Maybe that works the first time. But a big project means doing it in phases, and every new phase requires more paperwork and more bribes.’

‘And this is what happened here?’

‘
The Indian Government is very proud that we have built over 5,000 dams. Regardless of the Adivasi.’

‘The Adivasi?’

‘The original people. The ones who have always lived here.’

‘What happened?’

‘We don’t know. Isn’t that funny? No-one knows. We have mislaid 50 million people. Like losing all the people in Britain. The government says they were displaced and compensated.’ Meera underlined the words with heavy irony.

‘They weren’t?’

‘They paid huge sums – bribes – to local officials and landowners who then drove the Adivasi off the land. Fifty million people were swept like dirt under our national carpet. To end up begging in the cities. The women becoming prostitutes, the men just dying of drink and shame. And the children. Oh, the children. India has nearly 60 million child labourers – slaves in all but name. In just one sector – cottonseed production – 400,000 children, aged between 7 and 14 are working 16 hour days. Mainly girls of course, because their parents can’t afford dowries.’

The jeep was quiet for a time
as the facts tore home. Erin’s nausea shifted from the physical to the mental.

‘But
. . .’ Erin pointed out the window. ‘The dams – did they at least improve the water situation? Drinking, crop irrigation?’

Meera had been waiting for this. ‘When we meddle with nature, we get it completely wrong. The earth has always depended on the monsoon. It happens once a year and gives the land time to recover.
The dams make it worse. No-one thought to look out the window and ask if the earth could take a continual deluge from irrigation. We are drowning the land. All the water is forcing the salt that lies deep down in the earth to come to the top. Then it kills the land. It is so funny. Only a madman would have dreamed of such an idea.’

‘Is this throughout India, or just around here?’
Erin asked desperately.

‘
India has 55 billionaires, the nuclear bomb and sends rockets into space. But around 150 million people – twelve per cent of our country – still have no access to clean drinking water. UNICEF says
more than 500 children die every day in India from diarrhoea  – that’s like a full jumbo-jet crashing to the ground. Each day.’

Erin
winced.
‘Why won’t the government stop? They must know what’s going on?’

‘And admit they were wrong? Would yours? Loans are a drug, don’t you see? We have become dependent on loans from the West, from your World Bank.
We just took another $360 million loan for more waterworks in Uttar Pradesh. How much of that will end up in the pockets of the politicians? They are wined and dined and taken on foreign trips and they use the loans to keep them in power. It is the most vicious of vicious circles.’

Erin
looked at Ted and shared the shame. They were relieved as their vehicle trundled into the outskirts of the village of Chandapur. They drove past a lone tree that looked like an oak but wasn’t, in some indefinable way. Then Ted noticed the olive-like fruits hanging in the branches. He placed it. It was the bank’s logo. A neem tree.

The Land Rover jolted in and out of the ruts scored in the bare earth by trucks and carts. Curious faces came to the doors of dilapidated huts and scrutinised the travellers unashamedly. To the Western eyes the villagers seemed poorer even than the poorest they’d seen in Delhi. Their skins were darker and their features coarser. Two dogs chased them all the way in to the centre
, marked by the round wall of a well. The jeep drew up under the spreading shade of five neem trees, and quickly gathered a crowd.

They stepped out of the Land Rover into a minefield.

R
amesh Banerjee was staring ruin in the face and trying not to let it show in front of his two colleagues. He was sitting in the courtyard of the office in Delhi reviewing the trial papers. His lawyer, Medha Sardar, had just taken him though the written evidence to be presented by the prosecution team. There were depositions from twenty six key witnesses that were particularly damning. Ramesh stabbed the document.

‘I’ve never even met these men!’

‘I know, Ramesh. I know. It is all innuendo and exaggeration. But the difficulty is disproving it.’

‘
Why? These are lies! There is not one iota of truth in any of this. And that is your job, is it not? To expose the lies.’

‘Of course. And we will attack them good and hard. But these men,’ he swept his hand contemptuously over the pile of typed pages, ‘have been well paid I think. And maybe they are terrified too.’

‘Tell me again why we can’t have a jury trial? I wanted this to come in front of the people. They would have defended me.’   

Medha Sardar shifted his broad bottom on his seat and tugged at his tunic, smoothing the front
down over his prosperous belly.

‘You have answered your own question. That is exactly why the Government has set it up this way. The last thing they want is a populist movement starting in their courtroom. Their excuse is that the case is too complex for a lay jury, and that the three trial judges will be able to make better sense of the arguments and deliver a safer verdict.’ He shrugged.

CJ Kapoor, who made up the third member of  the little group sitting in the early morning light, leaned forward.

‘What do we know about the three judges? Are they fair men? Will we get a good hearing?’

Sardar shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘It is hard to say. But I do not think we could say any one of them sits in the liberal camp. The senior judicial magistrate – Justice Nayak - is a pompous man. He is very full of himself and lectures his courts to show his great learning. He is more likely to side with the government, just because he is an establishment figure. He will not go against the mood of the ruling class. He would find it too difficult at cocktail parties and receptions.’

Ramesh
and CJ looked at each other with resignation. ‘What about the other two?’ asked Ramesh.

‘Judicial Magistrate Jhaveri is known to take bribes. All the judges take bribes of course, but Jhaveri is especially susceptible. And yet at the same time he is very hot on offenders. It is
how he allays his conscience.’

‘It sounds like his pocket wins out over his scruples. What about the last man? Is there any hope there?’

‘Judicial Magistrate Sharma is something of an unknown quantity. A dark horse. He is new to the bench this year and we know little about him. But all we can say is that he is the most junior, and will tend – if precedents are anything to go by – to follow the line taken by the senior justice. We do not think he will step out of line. And remember, he was appointed by this government and will not want to bite the hand that is feeding him.’

‘So we should give up now and admit our guilt, and beg for a lenient sentence? Is that your recommendation?’
Ramesh looked crushed. His eyes were tired and unseeing.

‘No, no,
Ramesh. There is still hope. We have good witnesses of our own who will testify to your honesty and probity. And we will go all out to pick holes in the prosecution witnesses. Some of these testimonies are so patently contrived that even the trial judges will have difficulty not being embarrassed by them.’ He lifted a pile. ‘Look, even the words are the same in each of the testimonies. I am sure they were all concocted by the same hand.’

‘But can we prove it?’ asked CJ.

‘We can draw the court’s attention to it. And then we will question the witnesses to shake them. We will also take each instance of supposed bribery and ask you and your officers what they were doing at the time. If we can find alibis for every occasion when some supposed bribe was offered or money was passed to make something happen, then it is just their word against ours.’

‘That sounds flimsy. What else?’

Sardar looked hard at Ramesh.

‘The hardest charge to beat will be the political one. That you have worked to undermine the freely elected government of India. That through an insidious process of gaining control over the lives and minds of the poor you have incited them to rise up against the State. I am only quoting, you know!’ He saw how angrily
Ramesh was reacting. 

‘This is monstrous, you know! It is unbelievable! What possible proof have they?’

The lawyer flicked through a second pile of papers.

‘They are citing five separate riots across the country by Dalits and Adivasi.

‘Riots! There were no riots! There were marches and demonstrations!’

Sardar smiled over his glasses at him. ‘Do you think the Government sees any difference? These
riots took place this year and the rioters were waving banners demanding positive discrimination for the Dalits, an end to dam building and a return to traditional irrigation techniques… and so on and so on.’

‘But why would they blame us for that? It is common sense.’

‘It is not State policy. Therefore it cannot be common sense. And they blame you – or your bank – as you are on the record for espousing this cause. They say that many of the rioters were account holders in the People’s Bank and that you coerced them to their riotous acts through threatening to increase the loan rates.’

Ramesh
and CJ were speechless with indignation and incredulity.

‘Moreover,’ went on Sardar, ‘they have photographs of crowds waving banners calling for foreign consultants to keep out and to get rid of the World Bank. Some banners read…’ he checked his notes, ‘… follow the way of the People’s Bank’ and ‘Small loans to the poor = democracy’. They are saying in their prosecution case that you are aiming to
overthrow the government by ‘fomenting sedition and insurrection’.

‘But what is a few photographs?’ CJ tried to be dismissive.

‘They have so-called witnesses again. People who will swear that they were forced by the Bank to march against the Government. That they were threatened with ruin and told to break the law and to move against the State. It will be a hard one to fight against, I’m afraid, Ramesh.’

‘It seems we have no friends,’ said CJ.

‘Only our customers. It is a pity we cannot get them into the witness box.’

A
nila sat in the dark of her hut, her legs folded under her, rocking gently as if in a trance. She was exhausted. The fight was lost. The dark rings round her big eyes testified to a night without sleep. Her mother had been gentle with her instead of railing at her. Which was of course worse. Her mother had taken Aastha to visit a cousin on the other side of the village to give Anila some quiet time on her own.

She’d spent it obsessively rehearsing the options, such as they were. She could wait for the police to arrive and hope they would find the thief. But she knew – as everyone did – that the police were at best useless, at worst as corrupt as the criminals themselves. She could bring the cooperative together again and see what money they could find between them. But she knew they had so little, and they would not trust her again. It was impossible.
Divya and Leena especially could never forgive her. Why should they? She had lost all honour among her friends.

She was left with two choices. She could take her own life, but that would leave her daughter defenceless and destitute. Or she could flee with her daughter to Bhopal and join the beggars on the street. But it would be fierce competition among the blinded and the maimed survivors and deformed children
of the Union Carbide disaster.

Maybe her mother could find sanctuary with one of her cousins or more distant relatives. Maybe she could take her daughter with her. Anila could then vanish into the city and no longer be a burden on anyone. Yes, that was the way. She wasn’t sure how to kill herself anyway, not now the river had gone. She shuddered at the thought of throwing herself down the old well. Maybe she could lower herself down on a rope and just starve to death?