Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories Read online

  ‘What’s this place?’ my sister asked.

  ‘You’ll see,’ Chris replied.

  We walked to the top of the slope and when we reached, my sister and I gasped.

  ‘Welcome to Laitlum,’ said Chris and gestured melodramatically to the view.

  We were standing on a field at the head of a valley, flanked by rows of jagged mountains that seemed to multiply themselves, growing higher and more distant, layering each other in shades of deep blue and green. The sight stretched far and endless, as though beyond lay mountains and nothing more of the world. It was quiet here too but, I noticed, this was different. The air was light and filled with late afternoon sunshine; it carried no heaviness nor remorse.

  Grace laughed out loud. I hadn’t seen my sister this happy in a long time.

  We walked to the edge of the field, which dropped sharply into the valley. A wind swirled up, tugging at us with invisible hands. Around us were scattered large boulders the colour of wet sand, and a small track wound between them down the slope to the village below, on a ledge halfway to the valley. A small voice in my mind reminded me that our parents might be back home by now…I imagined them walking in and finding our note saying we were going for a walk to Laitumkhrah. They’d worry, and pace the floor waiting for us to get back. Suddenly, the wind stung my skin in little pangs of guilt.

  ‘Shall we…’ I began.

  ‘Sit here?’ completed my sister, pointing to a large, flat stone nearby.

  They made themselves comfortable and I had no choice but to join them. I wondered how long we’d stay out… Melvin lit a cigarette and pulled out a bottle of rum from his jacket pocket. He twisted off the cap and took a swig before passing it to me; I could smell the alcohol, strong and sweet. I hesitated.

  ‘Go on, take a sip, it gets pretty cold here,’ said Chris.

  I looked at my sister but she was lighting a cigarette.

  ‘And,’ Chris added, ‘we’re celebrating.’

  The rum burned my throat and, though I tried my hardest not to, I spluttered. Soon, a silver prickle travelled down my chest, and I was enveloped by warmth. I took a few more small quick gulps before passing on the bottle. I felt a growing tingle, a delicious exhilaration. I suddenly wanted to stand up and shout, ‘This is our right. To be happy.’ Around me, conversation was a distant murmur. They spoke of the album, I think, the artwork on the cover, the sequence of songs, and how it would be quite unlike anything anyone in Shillong had ever created before. As the shadows stretched long across the slopes, everyone fell quiet. From behind us came the sound of quick footsteps; it was an elderly man, carrying a khoh on his back.

  ‘Kumno, mama,’ called out Melvin. The old man nodded in acknowledgement, his face, though elderly, was smooth and unlined, his eyes sharp and bright like small river stones. We watched him walk carefully down the path to the village in the valley. He rounded a bend and then vanished behind a boulder.

  ‘Why is this place called Laitlum?’ asked Melvin suddenly.

  ‘It means where the hills are set free,’ answered Grace.

  ‘Yes, but why? Don’t you Khasis have a story for everything?’

  ‘I’m sure there is, something about a cruel giant, or evil serpent, or some person caught by spirits and water fairies. But who cares?’ she said, ‘Folk stories are rubbish.’

  Chris sipped the rum. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because they have nothing to do with the world we live in, they’re not real.’

  ‘They might not be real to you, but…’

  ‘Look at what’s going on,’ she interrupted. ‘Is there time for folk tales when people are shooting each other across their own town roads?’

  ‘Perhaps that’s when they need them most.’

  My sister shook her head. ‘Maybe once they taught people something about life, and how to live it but not any more. Now you figure things out for yourself, you can’t depend on anyone else to get you out of shit.’

  We sat a long while in silence, listening to the wind, watching the way rising mist changed shape through the trees. It looked like faces, the ones you pass every day on the street, that turn their eyes away because everyone is a stranger in a town of careless bullets. At times, the mist fragmented like light on water, opening trails and doors and windows, settling into the bulky shapes of houses. It swirled like our feathered dancers holding swords and lamenting about an ancient tribal war; it tiptoed like women on the fringes, moving in slow, graceful lines. The mist was our history.

  On the other side of the valley, the sun had shredded the sky and fallen behind the mountains. We watched the clouds bleed.

  ‘When you’re sitting here,’ said Chris finally, ‘all the shit in life seems far away.’

  Melvin said he’d build a hut here, a stone cabin to keep out the wind and rain, where he could set up his drum kit… ‘And we’ll come live with you.’ My sister laughed. ‘We can play music all day…’

  ‘And drink,’ added Chris, holding up the near-empty bottle.

  ‘No one would bother us,’ Grace concluded. ‘It would be our own place.’

  We stayed until light had almost completely faded, and deep shadows lengthened into the valley. The wind had turned cold and we rode back subdued, the bike lights barely dispersing the darkness.

  The next year was a time of many changes. Anku came to see me once, when his father travelled to Shillong to take care of some unfinished business. They lived in Dibrugarh now, in the southern part of Assam. When I asked him what it was like, he said it was alright, that the good thing was he had many more people with whom he could play cricket. Since this was years before the Internet, and despite the exchange of a few letters, I never saw my friend again. We also got cable television—and I realized, while blearily watching MTV until the wee hours of the morning, that the song Chris had made Anku and I listen to on that faraway afternoon was Nirvana’s ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’. It felt like the beginning and the end of an era.

  Chris and my sister never broke up. But neither were they together. A few months after our drive to Laitlum, Chris and Melvin’s grandmother died. True to Khasi tradition, one they’d adopted as part of having lived in Shillong for many generations, the family gathered to ‘said jain’, to wash household clothes at Dwar Ksuid. As it usually happens in cases like these, accounts of the accident vary, but it was likely that Chris lost his balance on wet, mossy rock and slipped into the river. Despite being a good swimmer, he was caught in a strong current that pulled him under. His brother jumped in to try and save him, and for a moment it looked like he might succeed. He dragged Chris while trying to make for the bank, but it proved too far. They were both drowned. At midday, the time at which, they say, the water fairies call from the water. My sister didn’t emerge from her room for weeks, listening over and over to the album the band had released merely a week earlier. I’d sit outside my sister’s door, clutching a book, unable to understand how they could be gone.

  The album received a small, enthusiastic response, but mostly people didn’t understand why their music didn’t revolve around love. Instead it sounded angry, speaking out against the world, and condemning it for its failures.

  Such a stupid life.

  Chris sang.

  Such a stupid life.

  My sister took the music to heart. After the accident, she refused to attend church, saying she’d been confused before, but now she was sure there wasn’t a god. My parents were at a loss, this time not knowing how to argue with her. Her friends, though sympathetic at the beginning, stopped dropping by. The parade diminished to a trickle. Mike made an appearance once or twice, but was desultorily sent away. Things did not improve for Chris and Melvin’s family. One by one, their businesses packed up and closed—the extortion demands from militant groups in the state were getting larger and bolder. It was unsustainable to keep their shops and restaurants open. Finally, my mother told me, they all left Shillong, probably for Calcutta, or Canada, nobody really knew. Laitlum, I heard, was event
ually closed to the public—people drank there and got into fights despite the ‘Commit No Nuisance Here’ signboard nailed to the gate. Unlike the hills and mist, for us freedom doesn’t last a lifetime; it comes and goes on unexpected afternoons.

  Sky Graves

  It was mostly at funerals that people told stories. On the three night-long watches kept by the ieng iap briew—the household of the dead—when windows and doors stayed open for the spirit of the deceased. Sometimes a stool would tip over, a wooden shutter suddenly rattle or a tumbler fall to the floor. These were indications of a ghostly visit, some believed, mysterious signs that the one who’d passed away was making peace with the world they were leaving behind. On these nights, people whiled away the hours playing cards or carrom; in the kitchen women would splice betel nut and fold tobacco leaves for the next day’s visitors, they would talk quietly of the bereaved and the inconsolable. In a separate room, in a musty corner, a group of men would huddle around the chula, giving off warmth and light like a familiar, benevolent mistress. There were funny stories of drunks who wandered into empty churches and talked to stoic ceramic saints, of animal hunts that went heroically right, and sometimes tragically wrong, tales of journeys through jungles and wilderness involving characters they’d never met but who’d become real and intimate through years of retelling. Stories are told at festive, joyful gatherings, but the ones narrated at funerals are special because they reaffirm existence, of the listeners and the narrators. They are times of remembrance that haul the past into the present, and keep people alive even when they’re gone.

  It wasn’t often that Bah Hem told stories. He would sit in silence, listening to the others, his eyes fixed on the glowing coal. On nights that were a trifle colder and quieter, though, he could be persuaded. If he’d had a drink—smoky rice beer or a sharp stinging glass of clear kiad—someone would ask for a story about love, and he’d speak of the man who came from the place where birds go to die. And like at the beginning of so many stories, the room would transform, assembled anew with words.

  ‘He showed up one late September morning,’ he’d begin, ‘when memories of monsoon rain were fading with the mild autumn sunshine. He walked into my workshop, silent as a hunter.’

  The stranger was greeted with no small surprise—this was the rough ‘wild west’ part of town, an area of strict local laws and devout churchgoers. Not a place for outsiders.

  ‘I’m from Jatinga.’ His tone was soft, foreign, not of these hills.

  ‘You came all this way?’ Bah Khraw, assistant at the workshop, sounded as rough as the sandpaper in his hand. He’d worked there thirteen years, almost as long as the place had been open, and felt he’d earned the right to choose the people he wanted to be agreeable to. The young man, tall, thin, with the dusky complexion of the people from the plains, remained silent. He was no more than twenty, but his eyes, quietly pensive, looked much older. The weapon in his hand was a solid 10 gauge double-barrel shotgun, much used and badly in need of polish.

  ‘That’s because Bah Hem is the best. Number one gunman.’ This came from a gentleman in the corner; a group of them huddled like crows around a bottle of Royal Tusk whisky and pinched tobacco into dust between their fingers.

  ‘And marksman also,’ somebody added. ‘Four in one hole.’ He was referring to a recent shooting competition held in town where Bah Hem had shot four bullets through the same hole on a target. The trophy stood on a shelf in the workshop, next to many others, which could be dated by the layers of grime they’d gathered. The older ones were of darkest black.

  ‘Four in one hole.’ The bottle was raised to a slurry chorus of approval.

  Bah Hem was seated at a table, writing. He paid them no attention. A cigarette smouldered between his fingers. Eventually, he looked up at the stranger.

  ‘Where did you get that?’

  ‘My father bought it from Haflong.’

  Bah Hem examined the weapon in silence. He ran a finger over the barrel, unloaded it in a few brisk movements and aimed outside the only window in the room. ‘There’s a problem with the viewfinder…’

  ‘That’s what my father said,’ interrupted the young man.

  ‘Oh, and who is he? The gun specialist in Jatinga?’ Bah Khraw bent over the vise machine, tightening it around a small metal plate; the men in the corner sniggered.

  The young stranger flushed but didn’t retort; in his eyes a small anger glowed like embers in a winter chula.

  ‘Ignore him; Khraw has the manners of a pig.’ Bah Hem stubbed the cigarette out on the desk.

  His assistant scowled.

  ‘And sometimes the face of one too.’

  The men exploded into laughter. They found everything he said funny out of courtesy for permitting them to carouse freely in his workshop. Bah Hem stepped outside with the gun and the stranger followed. From next door, the sound of the dentist’s drill shattered the quiet mid-morning air. In front of them, the main road lay pale and empty.

  ‘So where did you get the gun from?’

  The boy looked down and stayed silent for a long while. ‘My grandfather used to work as a chowkidar in a dak bangla in the Cachar district. Once, this bilati officer came to stay, he was very ill with kala-azar…he didn’t last the week. My grandfather didn’t take anything else, only this.’ He placed a hand on the rifle.

  The drill whined to a stop. Bah Hem lit a cigarette.

  The young man asked, ‘How did you know?’

  ‘There’s never been much of an arms market in Haflong. Everything comes from Bangladesh.’ Bah Hem didn’t add that a person’s initials (G.D. Bradbury) were carved on the handle; it was likely the boy and his family couldn’t read.

  ‘My grandfather never took anything else.’

  ‘I know people who have taken more, and you still can’t call them thieves.’ Bah Hem added that the gun would be ready in four or five days.

  The boy took his leave. He said he needed to start on his journey immediately, otherwise, with all the army checks along the way, he wouldn’t make it home before midnight.

  A week later he was back. This time, Bah Khraw ignored him as did the group in the corner, today diminished to a trio resolutely playing cards.

  ‘Have something,’ Bah Hem offered when the tea lady appeared at the door with a basket of jing bam—soft, sticky ‘putharo, golden brown ‘pukhlien and sticks of hard, honeyed ‘pusyep. The boy ate and drank quickly like a watchful animal.

  ‘Your gun is ready.’ Bah Hem waved to a row of gleaming weapons lining the wall behind his desk.

  ‘How much?’

  Bah Hem told him. The boy drew out a cloth pouch tied around his waist, and carefully counted out the notes as though it were some sacred, ancient ritual.

  ‘We’ll be here all day,’ muttered Bah Khraw, picking at a metal spring.

  The boy handed over the money and walked out.

  ‘That’s the last we’ll see of him, I hope,’ said Bah Khraw.

  A shout from the corner caught their attention.

  ‘Lah bowww…’

  Someone had a particularly good hand; there was a hundred and fifty rupees at stake. The boy was forgotten.

  That night, though, while lying in bed in a silently dreaming house, Bah Hem thought of Nathaniel, his eldest son who’d died two summers ago. He was nineteen then, and consumed by a disease they couldn’t understand.

  It had started with him feeling nauseous and fatigued, his brow burning with a low, steady fever, his throat sore and painful. What they’d written off as a seasonal flu didn’t improve over the next few months. He lost an alarming amount of weight. His wife and him took Nathaniel to a hospital in south India, where they placed their trust in a man with a kindly manner and an accent they found difficult to decipher. He told them the name of the disease, it sounded long and terrifying, unfurling like a snake on their tongue. ‘The white blood cells multiply at an abnormally rapid rate,’ the doctor tried explaining, ‘his body can’t produce enough healthy blood ce
lls…’ They understood him well enough though when he said the condition was acute and that they needed to start treatment immediately. The young man who’d walked into his workshop today reminded Bah Hem of Nathaniel before the radiotherapy. Before the machines, those large metallic monsters, slowly blasted out all life from his son. What was it about him? His eyes? The shape of his jawline perhaps; the same shadows filled the contours of his face. His careful silence? Bah Hem wasn’t sure. If he could only find some way, he thought, to see him again.

  It was late; the dentist’s clinic had shut, and the neighbourhood emptied as the cold settled into its nooks and crannies. In the quiet of the evening, Bah Hem sat alone in the workshop, cleaning a flintlock pistol. He liked to do these himself. They were beautiful weapons; he liked the way the light glinted off the intricate metalwork, the way the barrel lay slim and smooth against his palm. Around him the workshop was left in casual, greasy disarray. Opposite his desk stood a large table he’d salvaged from the town jail when it was being relocated. Many years worth of equipment and spare parts had built on it a jagged landscape of metal, grime, and dust. The smell of machine oil hung in the air. Just as he was giving the flintlock one last careful buff, there came a hurried knocking at the door. On the steps outside, he found the young stranger, shivering in the cool evening air.

  ‘Please, we need help.’

  Bah Hem stepped aside to allow him in.

  ‘There’s no time…’

  ‘You’re cold,’ said Bah Hem calmly. ‘Come inside…there’s no point in falling ill and making things worse.’

  The boy’s shoulders drooped and he consented. Bah Hem rummaged under the bench and drew out a half-bottle of Old Monk. He poured a large shot and handed it to him. Then he threw more coal into the chula and pulled it closer.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I–we need you to shoot some…an animal for us.’

  ‘What animal?’