The Destined Path of Water Chapter 11: Chapter 11: At the Riverbank

Read chapter 11 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae & Rika | Age 17 Sae The sign was slightly crooked and I had known it was slightly crooked since I made it but I had run out of time to fix it and now I was carrying it through the lane toward the river and the crookedness was very visible in the morning light and there was nothing I could do about it. SAVE OUR RIVERS, it said, in letters that had started confident and gotten progressively smaller toward the right side because I had misjudged the spacing. The cardboard was from a box my mother had been using to store things and she had looked at it when I took it and then looked at me and said nothing, which was its own kind of permission. I had heard about the gathering from Arjun who had heard about it from someone else, the way things spread in small valleys, person to person, until enough people knew about something that it became a thing that was happening. It was not the first gathering about the dam. There had been two others in the past year, both at the village hall, both attended mostly by older people who had strong feelings and not much leverage. This one was different at the river itself, at the bend near where the survey team had set up their equipment two years ago, and whoever had organised it had done it properly, there was a time and a place and apparently signs were encouraged. Hence my sign. I came around the bend in the path and the river came into view and then the gathering came into view and it was larger than I had expected. Forty people at least, maybe more, spread along the bank in the loose organised way of people who had showed up with intention. There were signs everywhere, proper ones on wooden stakes, and a few people with a table set up with papers on it, and someone talking through a small speaker that kept cutting out. I found a place to stand near the bank and held up my sign. The river was behind us. I could hear it, that lower sound it had now, the altered rhythm I had been tracking for two years. Today with this many people beside it the sound of it felt important, present, like it was aware of being the subject of the conversation. I looked around at the crowd. Rika I had been there for an hour before most people arrived. Riya had come with me and had lasted forty minutes before remembering she had something she had not told me about, some prior thing, and had left with the particular guilty expression of someone who supports a cause in principle and is less committed to standing in the sun for it. I did not hold it against her. I had a better coat than her anyway. I had found out about the gathering the same way I found out about most things related to the dam project through the network of people I had been quietly paying attention to for two years, the ones who posted in local groups and forwarded documents and showed up to things. I had been to the two previous gatherings at the village hall and had felt, both times, the particular frustration of watching something important be discussed by people who were not sure yet how important it was. This one felt different. Being at the river changed something. You could not stand beside it and talk about it abstractly. It was right there, making its lower quieter sound, moving between the stones with that tiredness I had been feeling in it for months. It made the conversation real in a way the village hall had not. I had a sign. A proper one, on a wooden stake, the letters even. THESE RIVERS ARE ALIVE, it said. I had thought about it for a long time before deciding on that. Not save our rivers, not stop the dam, not any of the other phrasings that were accurate but felt like they were talking about the project rather than the thing the project was threatening. These rivers are alive felt closer to what I actually knew to be true, in the way I knew things that came from the necklace and the night underwater and six years of pressing my hand to the water and feeling it change. The gathering filled up around me. People arriving in ones and t