The Destined Path of Water Chapter 9: Chapter 9: The Dam Comes Closer

Read chapter 9 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae | Age 15 The men came with equipment in September. I saw them from the road on my way back from school, three of them in government shirts with orange vests over the top, setting up something on a tripod near the bend in the river where the water ran fastest. One of them had a clipboard. One of them was taking photographs. The third was looking at a map and pointing at things and the other two were nodding. I stopped my bicycle and watched them for a while. They did not look like people who were there to admire the river. They looked like people who were there to measure it. I went home and found my father in the courtyard and told him what I had seen. He listened with the particular quality of attention he used when something was not a surprise to him but he had hoped it would be longer before it arrived. "They were always going to do a survey," he said. "What does that mean," I said. "What happens after a survey." He looked at me. Then he looked at the hills visible over the rooftop, green and enormous and completely unbothered by everything happening beneath them. "It means they look at the river and the land and decide if the dam is practical," he said. "It does not mean the dam is decided." "But it could be." "It could be," he said. Quietly. I waited for him to say something else. He did not say something else. He went inside and I stood in the courtyard looking at the hills and thought about the waterfall at the temple, how much thinner it had been at the last festival, how the sound of it had reached us later than it used to on the drive up. That evening I looked up the dam project on the computer. It was not hard to find. There were government documents, a proposal, some news articles from the city papers that had picked it up briefly before moving on to other things. The project had been in discussion for years apparently, longer than I had known about it, sitting in some government file accumulating dust and occasional momentum. The idea was a reservoir. Water management. Electricity for the region. Development, the documents said, several times, in the particular way that word gets used when it is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I read about what dams did to rivers downstream. I read about silt and flow and the ecosystems that built themselves around a river's particular rhythms over hundreds of years. I read about other valleys in other places where similar things had happened and what those valleys looked like afterward. I sat with that for a long time. The next village meeting I went uninvited. These meetings happened in the hall near the main road, not formally scheduled, just whenever enough people had enough to say. My father went sometimes. I had never gone because they were for adults and I was fifteen and nobody had asked me. But I walked in and sat at the back and nobody threw me out, which I took as permission. The dam was most of what people talked about. There was a man named Dhanraj who was loudly against it, who spoke with the energy of someone who had been against it for long enough to have refined his arguments into weapons. There were two or three others who nodded along with everything he said. And then there was a more complicated middle section of the room, people who looked worried without looking certain about what they were worried about, who asked questions about compensation and relocation and what exactly the project would and would not affect. My father was in that middle section. I watched him. He listened more than he spoke and when he spoke he was careful, the way he was always careful with things he had not fully decided about. He said the project would bring electricity to parts of the valley that had been waiting for it for twenty years. He said this was not nothing. He said he understood the concern about the rivers. He said he understood both things at once and was not sure yet what that meant for how he felt about it. Dhanraj said that understanding both things at once was a ve