It is a long time since I last wrote here: a month at least. I’ve scarcely seen most of my friends. The last time I talked to Yuri was ten days ago. We shared a quick glass of bubble tea, and when I stood up to go home he complained that he never sees me any more. I told him I was too busy reading and he made a face and said that I had better finish soon.
For weeks I’ve been spending my evenings struggling with Jane Watson’s book. It wasn’t just that it was hard to read because I don’t know the language very well; it also made me feel things I didn’t expect.
Before I read any of the text, I looked at all the photographs. Only a few were of my village. Jane Watson had taken pictures of people all along the River. Some of them made me smile: Mizan, leaning on the rails of his boat, grinning into the camera; and Mei, the innkeeper in the mountains who was kind to Yuri and me, standing in the doorway of her house, her worn hands on her broad hips. Some of the photographs were very beautiful, and some of them were very sad; but they all seemed long ago and far away.
I don’t know what to say about Jane Watson’s book. I have found out things I didn’t know: she describes the foreign companies that are financing the cotton fields, and names the insecticides that are poisoning the river water, and there are tables of figures that show how much water is being taken from the River. She writes about how the government has sent troops to protect the cotton fields from angry locals, and the corruption that has made it possible for land to be stolen from people who had farmed it for generations.
She talks about the violence that Kular described to us, long, long ago in our kitchen. Jane Watson tells it as if she is standing at a distance, looking from above like an eagle, so she can observe patterns and connections that can’t be seen at ground level. She writes about rivers that have died in other parts of the world, and warns that the same thing will happen to our River, which feeds the whole country from the Plains of Pembar to the city. She quotes scientists and sociologists and ecologists and politicians. She talks about the suffering of the village people, of how they are driven from their homes by violence and famine, to end up in the shantytowns that cluster around the city.
It is much more interesting than what she said on the television, and, despite everything, I reluctantly admire what she has done. When I got to the end of the book, I turned it over and looked at the cover: my face gazed back at me under the title, but somehow it wasn’t my face any more, just as the story Jane Watson tells isn’t my story. It belongs to so many people, but somehow it seems to me to belong most of all to Jane Watson. I heard her hard, cool voice in my head, putting together her facts and her arguments. She was very convincing. She said she is fighting for justice. She is telling the world about what is happening to my people, just as she said she would all those long months ago when first I met her. All the same, something important is missing among all those facts and figures and quotations, although I can’t put my finger on what it is.
I remember what Mely said when she objected to me writing about her. I’m not a story, Mely told me. I’m your friend. What if you say things that aren’t true? Won’t you be changing how things are? Has Jane Watson changed things by writing her book? Maybe things had already changed before I realized, and she was just what followed.
There is one missing thing that is easy to spot. In all the hundreds of pages of The River People of the Pembar Plains, Jane Watson doesn’t mention the Book. Not once. I read it through twice to be sure. She writes about the temple and the harvest and the weaving and the river traffic, noticing all sorts of details, but in her story the Keepers don’t exist. For a terrible moment I wondered whether I had imagined everything: perhaps the Book was just a story my mother and grandmother had told me and that I had childishly believed was real. Maybe it had never existed at all. But I remembered my name. I said it out loud: Simbala Da Kulafir Atan Mucarek Abaral Effenda Nuum. It tells who I am, and who my mother and her mother were, right back to my great-great-grandmother.
Even if the Book is lost for ever, even if no one but me remembers it, we are the Keepers.