Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories Page 13

  The old man looked at him with pity. ‘It can only be done out of love.’

  When he left the room, Bah Hem was still seated by the fire, watching it glow resolutely, a dull core of heat undying at the centre, the wood releasing all its tender memories of the earth.

  Pilgrimage

  You who has kept us alive, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this season

  —Shehecheyanu blessing

  When he wasn’t looking, Barisha slipped rice into his bag. A small plastic container of red-husked uncooked grain that he probably wouldn’t notice on his travels. If there was nothing she could do to keep him from leaving, perhaps this would somehow bring him back. Every time she left Shillong, her mother would do the same—‘to always bring you home safely’. It was what the Khasis believed, that rice, commonplace and ordinary, carried the power of the earth where it was grown, and would lead you back to where you belonged.

  He, whom she had loved so deep and for so long, was leaving in search of something they both couldn’t quite put a finger on. He was an Ashkenazim Jew who’d grown up, like her, in Shillong, brought up by parents who’d long forsaken their quest for a distant promised homeland. Their ancestors had fled Germany with many others and reached Calcutta; from there a group of them made their way to the hills of Assam. His parents didn’t want to leave. ‘Not yet,’ they said, ‘perhaps some day.’ But they weren’t serious. Their life and friends were in Shillong, built from scratch. They were comfortable. For him, though, it was different. Barisha had known it all along, through their many years together. There had never been a departure so foretold. He was leaving—‘for a year or two, I’ll see what I can find’—and there was no question really of her going along. Wordlessly, she understood this was one of those things he needed to do alone, his own personal aisha. It was too heavy for him to disregard, the weight of the history of the world.

  After he left, she found herself standing on the balcony in the evenings, watching life move on. The South Delhi neighbourhood they lived in was peppered with outsiders like them who’d come to the city from states like Nagaland and Meghalaya. Perpetual pilgrims, she thought, always journeying elsewhere. When the silence in the flat grew too great to bear, Barisha decided to journey home.

  She arrived in Shillong after a four-hour drive from Guwahati, up a winding road clogged with smoke-belching trucks and crusty yellow Sumos overladen with passengers and luggage. It was mid-October, and a fine grey drizzle, the diminished end of a long monsoon, started falling as they drove into town. Shillong sprawled before her in all its unplanned ugliness. This was where she’d grown up; she knew the place intimately like one knows an old lover, its familiarity lay in its imperfections.

  ‘Look at you, Barisha!’ Her mother cupped her face in her hands, gently, as though it were a candle flame threatening to flicker out. ‘So pale, like garlic, your mei-iad would have said.’ She sat her down at the dining table in the kitchen, made her a cup of tea, pressed small rice cakes into her hand and talked about trivial things like the weather—how the evenings were beginning to grow chilly already, and the new neighbours from Nagaland—‘A few pet cats and dogs have disappeared from the colony…you know how they eat everything.’ Her father, she explained, was in the Bhoi district helping a friend set up a turmeric farm. ‘He likes all these odd jobs. Keeps him busy after retirement.’ She began to say something else, but looking at her daughter’s face, fell silent.

  Later, in her room, Barisha listened for the sounds of her childhood—the frogs in the abandoned water tank, the cicadas in the forest bordering the house—and for a long while she watched the lights flickering in the distant hills. Every time she returned home, they’d increase in number, filling up the blank, dark spaces in between. She lay awake within the familiar confines of her narrow single bed, and before she could cry, she fell asleep.

  The next day, she stayed in bed.

  On the second day, she ventured into the kitchen, where her mother had left syrwa—a stew of pork and potatoes—and rice on the counter. For the first time in months, she ate two helpings. On the third day, she followed her mother around the garden. The roses weren’t doing well this year after a virulent attack of aphids—particularly potent in these hills—but the azalea shrub, dotted with tiny white buds, promised to be spectacular.

  ‘We’ll use these for All Souls’ Day,’ her mother decided, and Barisha wished she hadn’t said so. She felt the flowers, like her, were now marked by melancholy.

  After the drizzle on the day she arrived, the showers petered out, and the days, though shorter—it was dark by five—were filled with clear autumn sunshine. The guava tree dropped plump, softened fruit to the ground and their bittersweet scent hung in the air, clinging to her hair and clothing. Slowly, she began to feel stronger. At the end of the week, her mother led her to the storage room next to the garage, where she said she had something very important for Barisha to do. She pointed to a stack of boxes.

  ‘I didn’t know what to keep and what to throw away. You said you needed to sort things out…well, you can start here.’

  Barisha knew what those boxes contained—the contents of her room, packed up by her mother when her visits from Delhi grew increasingly infrequent over the years. They’d finally whittled down to once, usually at Christmas. She folded her sleeves, squatted on the dusty floor and got started with a sense of gritty determination. If he was on a quest for the past, she must be ready to leave it behind.

  The first carton held an assortment of schoolgirl notes passed surreptitiously in class, old journals filled with the achings of adolescence, Christmas cards from names whose faces she couldn’t recall, and shiny sweet wrappers she’d carefully folded and stored for reasons she could no longer fathom. The second, smaller box contained cassettes, most of them without covers, some tangled in their own glittering, undone spools. In the third carton, however, she found among other things an empty chocolate tin, rusty around the edges. Inside, was a yellow envelope with a card flamboyantly signed, ‘Love you forever…Vivek.’ She turned it over in her hand, carefully as though it were a rare jewel, struck by its candid simplicity. Had things ever really been so uncomplicated? There were a pile of things she cleared out of the cartons, but she took the card upstairs to her room.

  She hadn’t thought of Vivek in a long time—over a decade, in fact. He’d been what they demurely called in her household a ‘special’ friend. Barisha laughed softly into the darkness of her room. They were fifteen or sixteen and their relationship had consisted of chance meetings on their way home after school, shy smiles as they crossed paths and vast amounts of daydreaming about each other—until he’d finally gathered enough courage to say hello on a wet June evening. She was struggling to hold up her umbrella against lashings of wind and rain, and when it fell he’d picked it up. It was momentous. After that, he’d wait at the red postbox next to the bus stand close to her school, where they’d exchange little snatches of conversation rehearsed through the day in their heads—‘How was your day?; I did so badly in my math test; When do your exams start?’ They spoke about music; he liked Elvis and golden oldies—songs like ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved By You)’. He said he’d make her a mixed tape. One day, he held out his hand and she wasn’t sure what to do, so she shook it. All the way home, her palm tingled at his touch.

  That night, with the card placed on her bedside table, for the first time in a while Barisha didn’t dream about the man who’d left her for Israel.

  The next day, she was back in the storage room, rummaging through more boxes. Among a batch of fungus-ridden videotapes, she found a plastic-bound address book, one of those that shops in town handed out free along with a calendar in the New Year. Into its lined pages—with no allotment for email or cellphone numbers—she’d painstakingly copied out the names and details of friends and family. Vivek’s entry was alphabetically last—Assam Cottage, Upper Lachumiere, Shillong, 793003—followed by a landline number. Barisha slipped
it into her pocket.

  The scrap of paper where he’d written out the same details was either lost or tucked away into one of her diaries. Even after all this time, she remembered that cold November evening particularly well. She was walking home from school and had almost given up on seeing him when he called out to her from across the road. He’d been stuck in an extra class at school, but he’d hurried out as fast as he could.

  ‘Can I call you?’ His usually neatly parted hair was tousled from his run.

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Will you give me your phone number?’

  She’d written it down on textbook paper and he’d done the same, and they’d exchanged the scraps as solemnly as wedding vows. Back home, she could barely concentrate on her homework. Later, she’d waited nervously near the telephone pretending to read a textbook, worried about what her parents might say—the instrument wasn’t used for social calls, it was too new and sacred for that. He rang just before eight while her family readied for dinner.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello…may I speak to Barisha, please.’

  ‘Speaking.’

  Since they weren’t face to face, and as they quickly ran out of pre-planned conversation, they’d improvised and talked of new things—what their plans were for the winter holidays, how much they both loved rivers, how, sometimes, they felt nobody understood them at all. They said goodbye only when mei-iad, Barisha’s grandmother, then still alive, complained about how the telephone was for emergencies only—and god only knows how anyone could call them if their line was engaged for twenty minutes.

  ‘Shillong could be burning and we wouldn’t know.’

  ‘Why would Shillong be burning?’ Barisha toyed sullenly with the vegetables on her plate.

  ‘Because of the rallies, child.’ Mei-iad was hushed by her father, who asked for another helping of rice.

  That night, after her mother had gone to bed, Barisha slipped downstairs to the foyer where the landline was kept in a corner like an old relic. Her Delhi cellphone lay in her bag, unused and out of battery. She stood in the dark, the floor cold under her bare feet, lifted the receiver and dialled. A sprightly automated voice told her to check the number. Then she realized she hadn’t added the extra 2s at the beginning. She dialled again. At the other end, the tone rang out loud, rich and full of promise. She waited until it cut off and tried again. This time, as well, nobody answered. Perhaps they were all asleep. Or out. The important thing was that the number still existed. She went to bed stringing together make-believe dialogue—‘What have you been doing all these years?; Me? I’m a copyeditor with a magazine in Delhi; No, I’m not married; Yes, it would be nice to meet up…’ Her laugh would be light, airy, unpractised.

  The following afternoon, her mother, on her way to attend a women’s organization meeting in the colony, asked anxiously whether Barisha was alright being left alone at home.

  ‘Unless you want to come with me?’

  ‘And listen to how our colony pets are being eaten by the new Naga neighbours? No, mei…’

  Her mother, relieved at Barisha’s attempt at a joke, was reassured.

  For a while, Barisha sat in the kitchen drinking a cup of tea; the radio was on. Names of people and places tripped off the newscaster’s tongue—a robbery in New Colony, water shortage in Polo, a school sports function later that week, electric cables stolen in Laban. It was oddly comforting, this sudden downsizing of the world. Later, she stood outside near the gate—toying with an idea in her mind, playing with it like the March winds tossed the leaves. She could go now. Lachumiere was a mere fifteen-minute walk away—nothing was too far in this town—and she’d probably be back even before her mother returned.

  She set off down the colony hill, passing a couple of boys with catapults aimed at a street light, and a group of workmen constructing a wall.

  This was going to be a casual enquiry, she told herself. Like most others in this town who never moved away, his family—and Vivek—might still be living there. She’d like to take a look; she needn’t go in, just a brisk walk past, a quick glance to check the name on the mailbox. The sun streamed through the pine trees and lay dappled on the road; above her the sky was a clear, breathless blue. Everything around her seemed tense—who knew what the afternoon held in store? This was the most amount of anticipation she’d felt in months. To anticipate was to feel alive.

  She tried to recall the last time she and Vivek had met, before he went off to Calcutta for—engineering? medicine? It was sometime in May, that crystal-clear month before the monsoon set in. He’d come to her house, and stood at the door while her grandmother, suspicious of all dkhars, interrogated him:

  Whose son are you?

  Where do you stay? What does your father do?

  He’d answered her patiently and politely, standing at attention with his hands behind his back. Mollified, mei-iad had allowed them to go for a walk. They strolled up to the border of the Risa Colony forest, down to the foot of the hill and finally to a deserted car park that overlooked orchards dotted with pale late-blossoming peach trees.

  ‘I have something for you.’ He unwrapped a plastic bag he’d been clutching all this while. His cheeks flushed as he handed the chocolates over. ‘And read this later.’ It was a card in a yellow envelope.

  They’d stayed out late that evening, sitting on a low cement wall that ran the length of the parking lot, holding hands, talking about the future. She had another year in school, perhaps she’d study in Calcutta after so they could be together. Barisha wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, what her parents had in mind. They watched the sky change colour, streaks of silvery-gold that magically turned blue and purple, darkening until the stars were out.

  ‘Do you see that light on the hill?’ he said pointing.

  Barisha nodded. There were several, but she presumed it was the one burning brightest on its own.

  ‘No matter what happens, and where we land up, just like that light, I will always be there, and I will always return.’

  It was the most romantic thing Barisha had ever heard; she hoped he would kiss her but since he didn’t she lay her head on his shoulder and thought she might burst with happiness. Before them, the world and all its possibilities stretched out far beyond the distant horizon.

  When she returned home, her left cheek burning with his chaste goodbye kiss, her grandmother and father were waiting at the door. She was too young to understand why they were worried and angry—after all, she and Vivek had been just down the road, not far from the house—but she heard mutterings of ‘dkhar boy’, ‘not safe’. She remembered that in the news a few days later, there was a report about a Bihari man burnt alive on his way home from the market.

  On this warm afternoon, though, it was difficult to picture that kind of violence taking place in Shillong. It lay sweetly dreaming in the sunshine like a passive, benevolent cat. Barisha passed the fruit canning centre belching out white smoke, and reached the main road, which bustled with traffic. Past Dhanketi junction where traffic lights, put up a year ago to great excitement, stood unblinking and unused, and a row of shops to which there’d been many recent additions. She made her way up the Lachumiere slope; on her right stood Loreto Convent, one of the town’s biggest schools, overhung with bare jacarandas. She hoped to meet someone she could ask for directions. The mailboxes, tied to the gate or hung by the front door, carried many names—Diengdoh, Swer, Richmond, Shadap, Goswami—but not the one she was looking for. The road then ended abruptly, at an Assam-style cottage with freshly painted white walls and highly polished wooden beams. A dog ran into the lawn and barked and wagged its tail. A woman, hanging out clothes, looked up.

  ‘Kong…where is Assam Cottage?’

  The woman apologized saying she didn’t know, that she’d started working here only a few weeks ago. Barisha walked back down the street, wondering whether she’d missed a turning or a nameplate. Eventually after two rounds of the area, she stopped at a small cigarette and kwai kiosk
. The shopkeeper, a gentleman well into his sixties, was splitting betel nut into quarters.

  ‘Bhaisaab…where is Assam Cottage?’

  He stopped, knife poised in mid-air. ‘There’s no house by that name around here.’

  ‘The Hazarikas…they live—they used to live there.’ The excitement had settled at the bottom of her stomach like a lump of lead.

  ‘Kong, this used to be Assam, many Hazarikas used to live here. After the…after ’87, they’re mostly gone. There is no Assam Cottage.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He put down the knife and took off his spectacles, squeezing the bridge of his nose. ‘Kong, I’ve been here thirty-two years and…’

  ‘Oi, kumno mama.’ It was a young man in jeans and a football jersey; he seemed unconcerned about the interruption.

  The shopkeeper greeted him politely.

  ‘Ai san kyntein kwai.’

  The packet of betel nut and paan were obligingly placed on the counter. The young man picked it up, fished out a crumpled five-rupee note and walked off, shouting out his thanks.

  In the silence that followed, Barisha could feel the man watching her before she spoke.

  ‘Bhaisaab, you were saying?’

  ‘I was saying that the past is sometimes better left alone. People move on. They must.’

  She was about to thank him and leave when he added, ‘But you? You are on a pilgrimage of the past.’

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ She laughed.

  His eyes betrayed interest rather than humour.

  ‘But yes, I suppose you could say that…’

  He resumed splicing betel nut. ‘I had a Muslim neighbour once who did the Hajj. He went to Mecca, did the whole route—Mina, Arafah, seven times around the Kaabah, of course, and prayers at the masjid. You know what he told me was the best part? Coming home.’