Free Three Views of Crystal Water by Katherine Govier

could stay down for ever. He wished he could do it. The rest of it he hated.
    It was six years after his first visit, and the British had again announced that there would be a great harvest. His father got bidding for the rights to the oysters, and up went the price and down went the sun and suddenly it was his. He bought it all. The boats returned with hundreds of thousands of oysters, one in a thousand of which might have apearl. The overseers slung the bags out of the boats and onto the sand.
    Now, what to do? Papa Lowinger could hire the natives to open the shells. But then he still needed men to search for pearls. The larger pearls would be hidden in the hinge of the oyster. To remove such a pearl you’ve got to use bare hands and a special prising, cutting tool. So he had to trust some workers. And there were none he trusted. He could chain them and forbid them to chew their blasted betel nut because they would hide any pearls they found in their teeth, and punish them if they did. But he didn’t want the bother, or the brutality of it.
    Happily some pearls came loose by themselves and turned up in the silt that built up at the bottom of the tubs. The pearls he found he bottled and sent back to London. But he still had hundreds upon thousands of oysters. He found a place outside Condatchey Bay, where the natives lived. He dumped his oysters in open tubs and they did their part like the docile creatures that they were and began to rot.
    There was just one problem. The stench. It grew. In the heat, the dead molluscs smelled absolutely vile. And the smell clung; it did not blow away or dissipate after dark. Day after day, a week, two weeks, there was still the stink of it and more oysters coming in on the boats every day. The village rose up in protest and demanded that the English take the oysters away. But they were poor people and the natives needed the pearling fleets, and the traders persuaded them to let them stay on until they finished.
    To keep an eye on the locals, James and his father stayed in a hastily built hut on the beach. James walked on the sand at night, looking at the stars, but it was impossible to escape the smell. He was ashamed. Of the filth. Of the big English brutes with their whips. Of the smell of death. He sometimes wondered if he himself were rotting.
    When the rotting was done, and the oysters nearly water,they hired the women and children. They were the poorest of the poor – no one else would do it. Mostly naked they waded in to the mass of decomposing oyster flesh, and felt around on the bottom for pearls. They were up to their armpits in it, and kneeling, gagging at having their faces so close. His father’s men patrolled the edges of the pit with whips. James’s father himself was on a horse. From the height of his seat he saw an old crone slip a pearl into her mouth. He caught her before she swallowed and took her away and bound her to the mast in the hot sun and whipped her until she was nearly crippled.
    At nights in their ramshackle house on the beach his papa swore about the greedy government that opened the fishery every year so that the pearls were getting smaller. James went out again to walk on the beach and saw the sun set over India. This is the family business, he thought to himself. This is how Mother got her fine hats and many schoolbooks.
    The next day at dawn they woke to find a squad of local officials on the beach.
    ‘Move on,’ the men were shouting, ‘Go! Away with you!’
    They waved their arms. The workers scrambled out of their tents half awake. The officials kicked in their direction, and began to fling sticks at them. The workers began to collect their few small possessions.
    Papa came out of the little house to remonstrate. He put on his best manners.
    ‘Friends! Colleagues! What can I help you with?’
    But he was confronted by a short, fat man, who had no small-talk. The Englishman had bought the right to hire the divers and bring up the oysters, he