Part Four — The Ground · Chapter 35 of 40

The Dispute

He went on the twenty-ninth of September, which was the last serious rain of that year, and he went at four in the afternoon on his own, and he parked on the approach road and walked the last two hundred metres.

Seventeen years is not a long time for a piece of ground.

The plot had been mown at some point by somebody and had grown back. There was a survey stone at the north-east that he remembered and a compound wall on the far side that had not been there. The creek was where it had been. The bend was where it had been.

He walked the boundary once, which took eleven minutes, and then he went to the low corner and stood in it.

The water was where it was in 1991.

It stood in a shallow sheet across perhaps eleven hundred square feet at the south-west, four inches at the deepest, with the grass showing through in patches, and it had a defined edge that he could walk along, and the edge was — he was not able to be scientific about this, and never claimed to be — within a few feet of the edge he remembered from a Thursday afternoon in September 1991 when he was thirty-three years old and had come out to look at a plot his father had put in front of him.

He stood there for about forty minutes.

He worked it out again from first principles, because that is what he was for. Where the water came from: the plot fell about a metre and a half from the road boundary to the south-west corner, which is nothing, which is the sort of fall that does not appear on a contour plan prepared by a man in an office. Where it went: nowhere. It stood, and then over about two days it went into the ground, and the ground here was what the ground here was.

And then the part that had made him say no in 1991: if you build on that plot, you do not build on the water. You build up. You raise the plinth, you put your levels a metre above the road, you take your runoff into a drain — and the water that used to stand in your low corner for two days now has nowhere to stand, and it goes over the boundary, and in 1991 the other side of the boundary was the far bank.

Eleven households. No paper. A bhangar godown. The kind of people who could not have stopped him with a stick, as a man called Chitnis had said with relish at a dinner table in Thane in September 2003, in a story that also contained fishermen.

Now here is the thing, and the whole of Part Four turns on it.

In 2008 the far bank has a warehouse on it. Four sheds and a compound wall and eleven men who do not live there. The godown purchaser took the land in 1999 and resettled eleven households at Diva, properly, with receipts, and Ghaisas has the paper and it is the best paper he has ever carried.

So if the objection was my water will go onto those people, the objection is finished. There are no those people. Kelkar the tailor said so on a step in Kopar on the ninth day and he was right, and Ghaisas had been saying it since 2005 and he was right, and Jagdish had been unable to say why it was not right, and standing in four inches of water on the twenty-ninth of September he finally could.

The objection was never those people.

The objection was the water.

Those people were what made it urgent in 1991. They were the reason it mattered that year, to him, standing there at thirty-three. But the fact underneath — that this plot sheds its water sideways and there is nowhere in the drainage of that quarter for it to go — has not been resolved by anything that has happened in seventeen years. It has been resolved in the story, because the story was about people, and the people were moved.

Everybody in that district had spent seventeen years asking what Wagh saw and answering it with fishermen, and then with a legal case, and then with drainage on an old alignment, and then with a resettlement scheme off the Shil road. Ghaisas had answered it. Chitnis had answered it. The Federation half-knew a version. And every one of those answers was an answer to why did it matter, and not one of them was an answer to what is wrong with the ground.

The corporation had moved the drainage to a new alignment in about 2003. That is true and Ghaisas was right about it and it is on the plan. It moved the pipe. It did not move the water. Water does not go into a pipe on a plan; it goes downhill, and the plot still falls to the south-west, and the south-west is still the boundary, and the boundary now has a warehouse behind it instead of eleven households.

A warehouse has an owner and the owner has a lawyer and the owner will not be flooded quietly for eight years the way eleven households with no paper would have been. That is the entire difference between 1991 and 2008 as a matter of engineering: the consequence has changed from a moral one into a commercial one.

It is soluble. He knew that standing in it. It wanted a proper contour survey, an infiltration test, a retention tank under the podium, and probably an agreement with the warehouse for a discharge easement, and it would cost — he did the number in his head in the rain, the way he had done a number in his head in a compound in October 2003 — somewhere between forty and sixty lakh, on a plot that was cheap by more than that.

It was not an impossible plot. It never had been. At thirty-three he had stood in this water and concluded that it could not be done honestly with the money available in 1991, which was true in 1991.

At fifty he stood in the same water with a firm that had twenty-two people, one job finishing in November, an uncomplicated bank balance, and a district that had believed something admirable about him for seventeen years on the strength of a thing he had never explained to anybody.

He came off the plot at about ten to five with his trousers wet to the knee.

There was a boy of about fourteen on the approach road with a bicycle, sheltering under a tree, and the boy watched him come out of a field in the rain in a good shirt and looked at him the way you look at something you will mention at home.

Jagdish stopped.

“Does that corner always fill?”

The boy considered the question and found it unremarkable, which is what he had been standing there for.

“In the rain,” he said.

“How long does it stay?”

“Two days. Three.” He shrugged. “It’s always been like that.”

Then he got on his bicycle and went, and Jagdish Wagh stood on the approach road with the answer he had spent seventeen years being famous for, given to him in nine words by a boy who had not been born when he first stood in it.

He drove home. Meera asked him if he had gone and he said he had gone.

She did not ask what he found. She had said she would say nothing else about it ever, and she never did.