Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories Read online

  The man placed the kwai on the counter.

  ‘And that’s what pilgrimages are for, really. To think about the places and people you leave behind.’

  Barisha made her way back slowly. Dusk hovered over the treetops; the sun had set without much fuss or fury. A group of schoolchildren overtook her, laughing and shouting. They were dressed in sports gear, flushed from exercise. Cars rushed past in a noisy hurry, and pedestrians swirled on the pavements like awkward dancers. She waited at the junction to cross, a water tank passed by, somewhere people were waiting for rain. We move, she thought, across the surface of the earth, steady as the pattern of the winds. She had a few more days in Shillong, and then she would head back, to her flat in the noisy South Delhi neighbourhood, cooking meals, reading, sleeping. Being grateful for reaching this season, she thought, remembering the words of a Jewish prayer he’d once taught her.

  When she walked in through the gate, her mother, waiting outside, asked her where she’d been. She smiled. ‘Here all the while.’

  Boats on Land

  Ican measure our days together by the number of times we went to the river. Ten in fourteen days. Which by most accounts is not long, yet a dragonfly, you told me, may live for only twenty-four hours, and if we were dragonflies we would have spent ten lifetimes together.

  When we went to the river that winter you said it wasn’t half as wide as during the monsoon, when the water stretched out vast and splendid as the sea. Instead we had miles of sandy banks to write on with our footprints, or to sit and watch the Kaziranga forest on the opposite side darken as the light faded. Those were sun-tempered, smoke-hazy days that lengthened with the evening shadows until the nights seemed endless and intimately ours. You smoked cigarettes in secret. The ones you rolled burned like slender torches, pinpricks of light in a dark and unknown universe. You conjured them quickly, like a magician.

  ‘Years of practice,’ you said.

  You were nineteen then; three years older than me.

  We met because my parents and I went on holiday to Chandbari, a tea estate in Assam, one of many sprawling plantations of neatly trimmed bushes that spread for miles like a dense green carpet. I’d only ever driven past them, on family trips to Potasali and Nameri, and they seemed far removed from the countryside’s lush wildness—ponds overflowing with hyacinth, thick clusters of swaying bamboo, and gulmohar that burst into a rage of orange and yellow blossoms. I’d always wondered what they were like inside, beyond the gated and guarded entrance. Our fathers, who had been in school together, friends, met at an Old Boys’ dinner, and yours invited us over for a fortnight in January. For my parents, it was tempting; Shillong, where we lived, was crippled by winter and cloaked in dull, monotonous grey.

  ‘Is it alright to stay that long?’ my mother asked, sounding a little doubtful.

  My father laughed. ‘They have a battalion of household help at the bungalow. I don’t think we’ll be much trouble…’

  While they looked forward to the break, I wasn’t keen to go. All my school friends were in Shillong, and during the winter vacation we had plans to visit each others’ houses and make trips to Police Bazaar to eat momos at Peking Restaurant and cream buns at Floury’s. More than the culinary delights, though, it was a chance to meet boys, walk past them as though we didn’t care they were watching, be approached and asked if we’d like to go to Ward’s Lake for a boat ride, or to Udipi Hotel for a coffee. There was a whole world waiting to be explored now that we weren’t confined mainly to the grounds of our all-girls’ convent school. One boy in particular filled my waking hours with lucid daydreams. His name I’d recently discovered was Jason; he had longish brown hair that fell over his eyes, and wore a striped flannel scarf with élan. This love affair, of secret smiles and glances, however, would have to wait.

  ‘If your brother were here, you could have stayed behind, but we’re not leaving you alone at home,’ my mother told me, and no amount of sulking would change her mind. My elder brother was studying law in Pune; my plans, also laid out clear and simple, were to do medicine at Lady Hardinge in Delhi. Our parents gently nudged us towards our choices: these were respectable, lucrative careers.

  ‘And you’ll have company there,’ she added. ‘The Hazarikas have a daughter your age…or maybe a little older.’

  So I packed my dresses, made my friends promise to fill me in when I returned on all that had happened, and said a silent, aching prayer that Jason wouldn’t find somebody else to love.

  Chandbari was eight hours away, and my father drove there in our trusty grey Ambassador. We soon left the pine-tree slopes and winding roads of Shillong behind, and from about halfway at Jorabad, the highway widened and flattened, flanked by vast stretches of paddy fields lying crisp and harvested in the sun. We passed dusty hamlets that my father described as ‘immigrant Bangladeshi towns’, and great sandy lengths of rivers that only came to life in the summer. I drifted in and out of sleep, sometimes catching snatches of conversation—something about my brother’s upcoming exams, an ailing distant relative, a neighbour’s new-born baby. Halfway we stopped by the roadside to eat packed sandwiches for lunch. It was warmer in the plains, and the sunshine, pleasant and welcoming. When we resumed our journey my father told us his friend Ranjit Hazarika came from an old, wealthy Assamese family who’d owned many successful businesses in Shillong, all of which folded during the trouble in the ’80s when the locals turned against the outsiders. The Hazarikas then bought plantations in the Bishwanath district and with the tea boom in the ’90s had done exceedingly well. ‘They’re one of those families marked by tragedy though,’ he added, dropping his voice. ‘First they had to leave their hometown, then his first wife Mamuni killed herself…’ The loud, dragging roar of the engine drowned out the rest of his words. At that age, though, the fear of death, my own or others’, hadn’t yet clutched me, and instead I found myself thinking about you and whether we’d get along, and become friends. Perhaps, I dreamed, we’d be like sisters.

  I awoke much later when we turned into a side road with a gate held open by a uniformed guard. It was late evening and somewhere the sun had set leaving behind orange gashes in the sky. We were on an avenue of tall birch whose silver-grey bark glinted in the twilight. The bungalow stood at the end of a long driveway; it was white, open and airy, and our entire house back in Shillong could have probably fit into the veranda.

  Your parents were there, having tea that had been brought out on a trolley. Your father was tall and well built, dressed in crisp khaki trousers and a spotless white shirt. His skin was evenly tanned, and his hair stylishly grey at the edges. He shook hands with my father, and gave my mother a quick, neat hug. Your mother was a tribal Mising lady, with chic shoulder-length hair and flawless skin. She was dressed in a floral-patterned kurti and dark green pyjamas. I wished my mother was in something more appealing than a crumpled jaiñsem. Our luggage was deftly handled by two silent liveried bearers and we were shown to our rooms to freshen up. My parents were given the main guest room, and I had a smaller place in an annex joined to the bungalow by an open corridor overhung with coils of flowering thunbergia. Your mother had apologized for my room—‘It’s small but we hope you’ll be comfortable’—yet I found it more than spacious and, with its light walls and large, creamy bed, utterly delightful. There was a table with magazines, and a wardrobe large enough for me to hide in. I slipped off my shoes and walked across the carpet, thick and spongy under my feet. There were no signs of you. I thought it extremely rude you hadn’t emerged to greet your guests.

  Instead, when I entered the bathroom, you were there, in the bathtub, fully clothed, smoking a cigarette. The window above your head was wide open.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  You laughed. ‘For what? I’m not taking a bath.’ It was true, the tub was dry. You hoisted yourself up—‘And technically this is your bathroom for now’—and taking a last drag, flung the cigarette out of the window. Your T-shirt barely touched the to
p of your jeans. You were taller than me, and thinner, and even though your clothes were crumpled and your hair uncombed, it was I who felt inelegant and scruffy. Your movements were slow and unstartled, as though I wasn’t there.

  You washed your hands at the basin and rinsed your mouth. ‘Don’t tell anyone about the smoking. Poor Shambu mali will get into trouble again.’

  Why would that happen, I asked.

  ‘Because he brings me the local stuff.’ When you saw my incomprehension, you added, ‘Tobacco. The stuff inside cigarettes.’

  Only after you left the room did I realize you hadn’t apologized for being in the bathtub. Or asked me my name. Or said hello.

  For the next two days you kept out of our way, emerging from your room only at mealtimes. And even then, you sat there, silent, eating small, finicky platefuls. Often, you disappeared for hours on end. Your parents seemed embarrassed by your behaviour but didn’t appear to know how to deal with you. In a way, I was relieved you weren’t around, to watch me clumsily adjust to a way of life I’d hardly been aware of—where morning tea was brought to us on trays, beds made and rooms cleaned by invisible hands while we were at breakfast, towels were changed twice a day, dirty laundry magically reappeared in a neatly folded, ironed pile, meals and fresh fruit juice ordered at the touch of a bell. During the day, the bungalow could be cool as a cave, its high ceiling soaring above us, its corridors deep and endless. I waited for the evenings in the veranda outside, and watched the countryside darkness close in over the trees and felt the sun-warmed air turn chilly and brittle. Later, we’d emerge from our rooms, showered and changed, and gather in the living room, where the fireplace was lit, the ice bucket filled, and bowls of roasted cashewnuts were placed on the side tables. Your father would bustle around the bar, mixing whiskies and opening bottles of homemade wine, of which I was given a small glass. Even though I’d usually sit alone in a corner, looking through picture books from the shelf, it was a life entirely new and enthralling.

  Your father and mine talked a lot about Shillong—their escapades at school, and where various classmates had ended up. They spoke of midnight shows at Kelvin Cinema and parties where they danced to The Beatles and The Monkees. The town, they agreed, had changed almost beyond recognition from what it was in the ’60s. Or what they referred to nostalgically as ‘the good old days’ when it was safer, less crowded, and the roads clean and empty. After a fair number of whiskies were downed, they’d speak of the trouble, and how it changed and took away everything they had known and cherished.

  ‘One evening,’ your father said, ‘Mamuni was coming back from the market, and this Khasi guy stopped her and slapped her, in the middle of the road… I remember when she got home and told me, I was so angry, but she only seemed surprised that he’d called her an outsider. She kept saying, “I’ve lived here all my life.” That was it though…I’d tried to put it off for as long as I could, but I knew we had to leave…’

  Then a long silence would settle, troubled only by the crackle of firewood and the faraway hoot of an owl.

  Your mother and mine would join in their conversation sometimes, or carry on with their own intimate talk. I overheard your mother say you were studying psychology at Loreto College, Calcutta, but there’d been some ‘trouble’ and you were sent home early. ‘We thought it would help to have someone close to her age around,’ she said, unaware that I was listening, ‘but she can be just like her father…headstrong and difficult.’ Mostly, though, they would exchange notes on recipes and gardening. Your mother called it a quiet life here, with not much to do or many people to meet, and said sometimes she’d fall into a restlessness that no amount of painting, cooking, or stitching could absolve. She tried to visit her family village often but it was difficult with you around. It was nice, she said, that my mother ran a bakery; she too had always wanted to do something on her own.

  There were traces of you littered all over the bungalow as though you were a visiting ghost. Occasionally, I’d catch the lingering smell of cigarette smoke even though you were nowhere around. Once, I found your slippers on the veranda, discarded under a chair. Your T-shirt slipped by mistake into my pile of washed and ironed laundry. At times, I had a feeling you watched us from afar, sullen and undecided.

  One afternoon, we all went to the planters’ club. Even you, though you sat by the window in the car, next to my mother who was in the middle, and stared out without saying a word. When we got there, we headed to the tennis courts, where matches were in progress. You, I noticed, were not with us any more. My parents were introduced to everyone by your father as ‘old friends’, visitors from his hometown, Shillong. The afternoon was filled with chatter, the monosyllabic thud of tennis balls, and shouts of support and laughter.

  At some point, a chubby girl in shorts, clutching a racquet, dropped herself into the white wicker chair next to mine.

  ‘Hi. I’m Radhika,’ she said. ‘You’re staying at Chandbari?’

  I introduced myself and said yes, I was.

  ‘How’s the depressed damsel?’

  I asked if she meant you.

  ‘Who else?’ she laughed. ‘She has a soul too tormented to play tennis.’

  I wanted to defend you but didn’t know how.

  Radhika looked about twenty-five, and had the friendly, bossy air of some of my seniors at school. Her black eyes were set within a round, plump-cheeked face that reminded me of an owl I’d seen outside my window the past few nights.

  ‘Be careful of that one,’ she said.

  Again, I asked if she meant you.

  She nodded. ‘People say she’s…’

  Someone beckoned from the courts. ‘Coming,’ she replied. ‘I’ll catch you later.’

  Yet that didn’t happen. I didn’t see Radhika again because, after a while, I wandered off for a walk.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ I whispered to my mother and made off in the direction of the golf course, the only open space I could find. I soon discovered why no one else was on the grounds—the place was littered with pats of dried and fresh cow dung—yet I trampled on, aiming for a distant hillock which had a trickling stream curled around its base. To my far left, bordering the course, stood a row of thatch shacks hazily covered in light rising mist. A few children, almost naked, ran after each other laughing and screaming. Further away, a boy was herding cows and their lowing, along with the chirrup of roosting birds, filled the air. On winter evenings, Assam dissolved into a careful watercolour of flat shimmering horizons and low, languorous clouds. So different from Shillong where the skyline loomed with pine-shielded hills.

  You were standing by the water, smoking, watching a pair of dragonflies dance on the surface. You’d rolled up your trouser ends and, despite the winter chill, you wore only a light half-sleeved T-shirt. You looked up in alarm.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’

  ‘Do you always begin every conversation with an apology?’ You laughed at the look on my face. ‘No one usually takes the trouble to walk across this golf course—immaculately maintained as it is.’

  I scraped off bits of dung from my shoe against a stone. You sat on a spot of dry grassy bank. When I finished, I stood awkward and unsure, undecided whether I should stay or leave. Perhaps you preferred to be alone.

  ‘Do you know,’ you said, ‘that dragonflies sometimes live only for a day?’ The ones you were watching now hovered over a clump of fluff-tipped reeds.

  ‘That’s sad.’

  ‘Why?’

  I flushed. You made me nervous. More nervous than even being around boys or Jason.

  ‘Why is that sad?’ you repeated.

  ‘B-because that’s such a short time…to be alive.’

  ‘But the dragonfly doesn’t know that.’

  I said that was probably a good thing. I remember how you looked at me then, sharp and searching.

  You stubbed out the cigarette. ‘Come.’

  We walked along the stream until it meandered into
a marshy pond choked with blooming water hyacinth; we’d left the golf course far behind.

  ‘Why aren’t you playing tennis?’ you asked suddenly.

  I too have a tormented soul, I wanted to joke, but instead admitted that I didn’t know how to; I mentioned my brother was the one fond of sports. That he’d wanted to be a football player.

  ‘What does he do?’

  I told you.

  ‘And you? What will you do after school?’ You stopped, and stood face to face with me. I could smell the cigarette on your breath, and something sweet like cloves.

  Again, I told you.

  ‘Is that your greatest dream? To be a nurse?’ You picked up a stone and tried to skim it on the water, but it hit a lavender blossom instead.

  I said I’d never really thought about it…that it seemed alright.

  ‘Alright.’ You turned the word over in your mouth slowly like something precious.

  Encouraged by your rare, sudden verbosity, I asked, ‘What do you want to do?’

  You dusted your hands and stood up. ‘I want to follow rivers.’

  That night you shook me awake.

  ‘Come with me,’ you whispered.

  ‘Where?’ In reply you took my hand and led me outside. The lawn was bathed in shadows from tall edging trees, and even the flower beds disappeared into inky darkness. It was chilly and I shivered in my nightdress; you didn’t give me time to grab a sweater. You were in the same clothes as earlier, but slippers, a few sizes too large, slapped against your feet. We headed to the far right of the garden, behind the annex, through a gated gap in the bamboo hedge, where the path opened onto a wide overgrown airfield. Years before, your father had explained, when the Chinese attacked in ’62, it was used to drop off food and weapons. Now it lay there benignly as a venue for evening walks, remarkable for its early morning views of the Himalayas. At night, the field could have been a shimmering body of water, the way the grass rippled silver in the pale moonlight. The countryside silence was pierced only by the steady chirrup of crickets. We lay in the field, undiscovered in our kingdom of weeds.