—
Her fists never unclenched. Her resolve never wavered. She never stopped believing that Kosawa would one day be whole. She took her people to Gardens, to Mr. Fish’s front yard. They demanded reparations. They demanded to be treated with respect. When guards lifted their guns, Mr. Fish asked that they lower them, chanting never hurt anyone. This land is our land, they sang. Some days they sat at the center of Gardens. Mothers with babies on laps. Grandparents on stools. Many who had fled returned to fight. They shared stories about Kosawa’s lost days of splendor. They sang: Sons of the leopard, daughters of the leopard, beware all who dare wrong us, never will our roar be silenced. The oil was their inheritance, they said—they had the right to occupy Gardens. One week they occupied it nonstop, taking shifts. They wouldn’t relent. Even if Pexton continued to ignore them, they said, an American court would one day grant them victory.
I was with my sister the first time she spoke to Kosawa’s new lawyer. She had written to a former professor asking for advice after her talks with Mr. Fish stalled. The professor told her about a nephew of his, a man named Carlos, who was a partner at a prestigious New York law firm. Carlos’s firm represented the likes of Pexton, the professor had said, not the likes of Kosawa. But it would be of no harm for Thula to talk to him.
Half an hour before Carlos was to call her at her office, she was already settled behind her desk, going through her list of prepared questions and consulting notebooks in which she had jotted down thoughts and ideas over the years. The container of food I’d brought to her for lunch was unopened. It was possible she hadn’t eaten all day.
“Have a few bites, at least,” I said.
“I’m not hungry,” she replied without looking up.
“There are other lawyers in America,” I said. “If he says no, you’ll find—”
“I don’t want another lawyer. There’s no way we can put up a real fight against them unless we bring one of the big New York guys. Carlos is our best chance.”
The phone was in her hand even before it finished its first ring. For most of the conversation, she listened. When she hung up, the look on her face was of neither relief nor excitement. Carlos had merely given her more to worry about.
Kosawa’s case against Pexton was weak, the lawyer had told her; based on his preliminary research, Pexton’s agreement with our government was that Pexton would extract the crude and our government would be responsible for all negative externalities. What this meant, he explained, was that if the case ended up in a trial, Pexton wasn’t going to deny that its practices led to spills that famished Kosawa’s soil. Its lawyers wouldn’t try to dispute that the waste on the big river was from their oil field. They wouldn’t even need to argue that the children’s deaths had nothing to do with them. All they would need to show was evidence that our government had relieved them of any responsibility to the land and people in exchange for splitting the oil profits.
“Does that mean he won’t take the case?” I asked her.
“He needs time to think about it.”
“What about his fees?”
“That’s another thing. He doesn’t do contingency fees, and he knows we can’t afford him. He’s going to talk to his partners and see whether someone can do it pro bono. We’ll have to find a way to pay whatever expenses come up.”
A few weeks later, she received a phone call from Carlos saying that he had decided to take the case on a contingency-fee basis. First, though, Kosawa would have to drop the case brought on by the Restoration Movement; Thula would need to talk to the Restoration Movement and inform them of the village’s decision to hire Carlos and start a new lawsuit. Once the old suit was dropped, Carlos would file a new one, accusing Pexton of conspiracy under something called the Alien Tort Statute. His argument would be that Pexton knew, going into a partnership with His Excellency’s government, that it was a government that cared nothing for the welfare of its people. Pexton took advantage of this and violated international laws, causing untold damages to property and lives in Kosawa.
Pexton was certainly going to ask the judge to dismiss a case they’d label frivolous, Carlos said, but he would request that the judge subpoena their internal documents related to Kosawa as far back as when its workers first appeared in the valley. At trial, Carlos would ask the court to impose substantial compensatory and punitive damages. None of this was to suggest that the battle was going to be easy or pretty, the lawyer cautioned—it’d likely take years, suits against powerful corporations were nearly impossible, Kosawa’s chance of victory in an American court was infinitesimal. He didn’t want the village to rest all their hope on it, though he was going to fight hard for them.
—
My sister had never been someone who jumped for joy at many things, but as she updated me in my living room, she couldn’t stop skipping around and saying, I can’t believe it’s happening, it’s finally happening. She’d lived in America, she knew what its courts were like, yet she put Kosawa’s fate entirely in its hands, because where else could she put it?
When she gathered the village in the square to tell them about their new lawyer, they cheered, and hugged each other, some even shedding jubilant tears, amazed
