Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories Read online

  The embers in the chula were dying; I knew we wouldn’t be sitting around it for long.

  ‘But can it also be used to bring harm?’

  My mother nodded.

  ‘Is that what Nong Kñia and Mama Saiñ will use on the bilati men? All of them?’

  She pushed herself away from the chula. ‘Who can say what mantras the Nong Kñia knows…’

  For days after, I moved around distracted and restless. The hours passed by glistening with sunshine and sudden autumn showers, yet they’d shifted, a little askew and out of line. I was nervous, constantly waiting for something to happen. The other villagers seemed to feel the same as they left to work in the fields or opened their makeshift shops for business. They talked about it endlessly in hushed whispers over smoking pipes and cups of tea, but no one knew exactly what the elders had planned. I tried to keep the soldiers, especially Sahib Sam, within my sight as much as possible—following them around, an unobtrusive shadow. One afternoon, the bilati men were exercising and training their horses in the field at the bottom of the hill; soon they would take them back to the stables and it would be time for lunch. I was helping my mother with the washing, hanging it out to dry. I glanced at them repeatedly; when would they all drop dead? Or would they fall ill and languish slowly? Whatever it was going to be, I had to do something, I decided. I had to warn Sahib Sam. When I finished wringing the bedsheets, I hovered as inconspicuously as I could by the gate leading to the field, trying to spot him. After a while, I realized he wasn’t there. Had something already happened? I could feel my heart thump heavily against my chest. Perhaps I was too late. Then I remembered that at this time, he usually met with Sahib Jones and retired to the barracks until lunch. I raced up the hill, scattering a hen and her family of chicks, and headed to the long rectangular stone building that housed the soldiers. To my relief, I could see Sahib Sam sitting on the veranda, smoking, reading a book. I crept up to him and waited to be acknowledged.

  ‘Hello, boy.’ His eyes were the colour of our April skies.

  Suddenly everything I wanted to say sounded silly to my ears. What would I tell him? That a couple of old men were plotting to murder the entire regiment? And how? Through a mantra? But he was looking at me expectantly, and I had to say something to explain my reason for being there.

  ‘Is everything alright?’

  ‘The people in the village…they are angry about Bah Jymmang,’ I said, hoping his Khasi was good enough for him to understand me. He frowned, but I could see comprehension dawn on his face.

  ‘Yes, I heard about what happened. It was terrible…’

  ‘They plan to harm you,’ I interrupted. ‘Be careful.’

  And then I fled, leaving him staring after me, the book open on his lap.

  Yet I suppose no amount of warning could have prepared Sahib Sam and the other soldiers for what happened. Or saved them. It took everyone by surprise, including the people from the village. As the Nong Kñia had promised, his mantra didn’t harm the bilati men; it was much worse. It happened a fortnight after our village meeting, when everyone had almost given up on the elders taking their revenge, when dark murmurs spread of the younger men wanting to sneak into the barracks to slit the soldiers’ throats while they were sleeping. That afternoon, they say it started with Trotter’s horse who refused to be led into the stable; he whipped and yelled at the creature until it obeyed. Inside, while the animals were being rubbed down, they appeared unusually restless, swishing their tails, flaring their nostrils, and pricking their ears, as though listening to a sound no one else could hear. Then they began shifting fretfully in their stalls, stamping on the hay, kicking against the walls. I could hear the bilati men shout out orders to the animals—‘Stay, boy, stay’—and to each other. Soon, the horses grew impossible to control or contain—they reared and neighed, baring their teeth, knocking over their masters, trampling on bodies fallen to the floor. A fierce madness overtook them, their eyes turned white and wild, and, full of a great and invisible terror, they dashed blindly out of the door with men trailing behind them. I saw them charge down the hill, a herd of savage horses, their bodies steaming, their manes flying out behind them. People tried to move aside but some were slow and got crushed beneath their hooves. They barely had time to scream. Once the horses were outside the village, they galloped down the road by the river, the one which Sahib Sam and Haphida had walked down so many evenings. They made straight for the waterfall, and leaped, soaring over the emptiness and falling into the mist. The pool at the bottom was the colour of blood for almost a week.

  ‘It was like they were possessed by the devil himself,’ the soldiers told Sahib Jones later, while he was tending to their wounds. I followed behind him, carrying a tray of clean rags and medication. ‘They were out of control.’ Most of them said they’d never seen anything like this before, even though they’d worked with horses for most of their lives. ‘It doesn’t bode well,’ I thought I heard Sahib Jones mutter.

  That night the fires in the camp burned brighter and longer as though to keep away the forces of darkness. The air was pungent with fear. No one slept. The soldiers huddled together, if not for warmth, then comfort, drinking, speaking of England, of their homes across the sea. The Nong Kñia had been right; there were other ways to render them powerless.

  After that began the gradual disintegration of the camp. Some men fled the barracks, convinced the place was cursed, and that they’d be next to go insane and fling themselves over the waterfall. A few others drank themselves to death on local kiad. Sahib Jones buried them in the corner of the field where once they’d exercised their horses, their graves marked by wooden crosses painted with their names. A few months later, news spread that the goons hired by the rascal businessman in Sohra had traced Sahib Jones’s whereabouts and were on their way to Pomreng to find him. He left in haste one morning before dawn for Guwahati and some say he made it to freedom, while others believed he died of malaria on a steamer on his way to Calcutta. When his wife followed a fortnight later, my mother was dismissed from service and so were the remaining men. There was no one left for them to guard and protect. Sahib Sam was the last to leave even though he had no reason to linger. On the day of the horses’ madness, amid the carnage along the road, we’d found Haphida. She must have been bringing back water from the river. Her face was trampled beyond recognition, but we knew her from her hair, tangled in the dust. Before his departure, Sahib Sam took a walk to the waterfall, and I followed him, fearing the worst. He stood there a long while, and I waited anxiously, hidden in the shrubbery. Did I have a right to encroach upon his grief? When he took a step closer to the edge, I stepped out of my hiding place onto the road. I tried to make it seem casual, as though I too had decided to take a stroll and happened to be in the same place. I was sure he’d heard me, for I shuffled my feet on the gravel, but he didn’t turn. I stood by him, at a safe, respectful distance. The view before me is etched in my mind so clearly I can close my eyes and remember it all—the waterfall sweeping over a rocky cliff patched with damp moss and long, feathery ferns, falling like liquid mist into a pool and winding unseen into a forest. Beyond this, trees covering the expanse of valley and hills, until they appeared in the distance not as single entities but a smooth carpet of green.

  ‘What happened that day?’ asked Sahib Sam.

  I didn’t know whether he was referring to the horses or Haphida, so I remained silent.

  His eyes were shiny; his hair and moustache, I noticed, looked untidy and unkept.

  ‘They went over. Just like that…why?’ He laughed. ‘Perhaps it was a relief.’

  I tried to disprove politely, to speak of the sheer drop, the seemingly endless fall…

  ‘There must have been something…’ he interrupted, shaking his head. ‘Do you have a name for it, boy? In your language.’

  ‘For what, sir?’ Did he know about ktien and the mantras?

  ‘This.’ He gestured in front of him. ‘It’s difficult to explain… th
ey say it’s the call of the void, you know…the pull you feel when you stand looking down from a great height. The urge to jump…’

  ‘No—I don’t think so. Do you?’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s strange, all the things that language cannot say.’ He stood there a while longer and then turned and walked away.

  Nobody lives in Pomreng any more. One by one, people packed up and left the village. They say dark magic always leaves a trace, and our harvests failed year after year, despite the usual turn of seasons. The water hardly rose halfway up in the thlong. Bah Lumen, grieving for Haphida, was one of the first to leave, along with others who’d lost family that day. He said he could never forgive the village elders for what they’d done, that nothing was worth losing his daughter. My mother and I eventually pooled our money and resources together and left for Shillong, where she found a job in a memsahib’s household and I worked in a jadoh stall in the Laban market. Mama Saiñ, I heard, passed away in a relative’s house in Sohra. I don’t know what became of the Nong Kñia; as the world changes and its mysteries diminish, there are fewer people like him to be found. Pomreng is an abandoned village now with barely any recognizable markers of its past. Only a few stones stand atop a barren hill, a cluster of tea bushes grow wild; while the wooden barracks and stables have crumbled into dust. The wind and the wilderness have had their way with the roads and fields, making them indistinguishable from each other. The one thing that remains is the waterfall, throwing up a sound, a word that is ungraspable and constant.

  At Kut Madan

  Today, nobody had come to the doctor possessed by a ghost. Kem ksuid it was called. Caught by a spirit, forced to languish and waste away. No one had blamed their illness on thlen either, the evil eye, cast ruthlessly on unsuspecting souls.

  Often, he was more shaman than doctor, but today, it had been simple—a child’s hollow, persistent cough, a pregnant lady’s erratic bleeding, a spade wound on a farmer’s ankle, arthritis in an old woman’s fingers.

  Doctor Wallang stepped out onto the veranda and lit a cigarette. The wooden bench outside his room was finally empty. In ten years of clinical service, no matter how late, he’d never turned away anyone who’d sat there. Sometimes his patients travelled for days from their villages deep in the folded valleys of Sohra; he knew for he’d visit occasionally to distribute medicine and clothing donated by the Welsh missionaries. He hadn’t been there recently though—with the outbreak of the second great war four years ago, these rations were hard to come by. Yet Father Bevan, the church elder, did his best, as he said, ‘for God and his people’.

  Usually Doctor Wallang would head indoors to his study, but this evening, with the last of the fine autumn weather, he decided to stroll down the garden path towards the main road. He passed the vegetable patch tended by his wife, and, to his left, a stone wall overhung with ‘knupmawiang. He liked these large creeper orchids with their flat, ribbed leaves and pale yellow flowers that opened during the rains and blossomed all through winter. It was October now, and they would be the sole floral survivors of the next few cold, crippling months. He leaned on the gate and watched the evening settle around him—in the fading light, the lime-washed missionary building opposite glowed an iridescent silver, smoke drifted from a cluster of small stone houses on a nearby hill, and the smell of wood fire rose in the air. Across the valley, the faint drone of an airplane broke the primitive silence. It was carrying passengers and rations from the American base camp in Dhaka to Shillong. The war had placed even this part of the world on the map.

  Further down the road, Flynn, the manager of a tea plantation over the next hill, was walking his dog, a large, scruffy-haired Bhutia from Sikkim.

  ‘Good evening, Sahib Flynn.’

  ‘Nothing good about it, doctor.’

  The Irishman’s gruffness stemmed not from impudence but worry. Almost a decade ago, during his first Sohra monsoon, it had crept into his voice, a raspy insidious shadow, and outlined his rough, thickset features. It had deepened over the years, when every summer, his life savings were washed away by rain, eroding like mud into a river. It wasn’t as though the locals hadn’t warned him—‘It doesn’t stop for weeks, Sahib Flynn,’ they’d said, ‘and nothing grows. See, the topsoil is all gone, nothing grows.’ Tea bushes, they tried to tell him, no matter how resilient, probably wouldn’t survive either.

  The doctor knew better than to ask how things were at the plantation, so he made small talk instead—the bishop’s impending visit to the village church, the fast approaching winter, the price of coal. Whilst they discussed rumbling rumours of plans to construct an industrial factory near Mawmluh village, the hound at Flynn’s feet looked up and growled.

  ‘What’s up, Sonny?’ Sahib Flynn placed a hand on the dog’s collar. Apart from them, the road was empty, disappearing on either end into rising mist. The garden in front of the missionary building was also vacant; Father Bevan and the other priests were probably at evening prayer. Sonny growled again, and barked.

  The sound of hooves echoed in the distance.

  ‘Don’t know why,’ Flynn muttered, ‘but this dog hates horses.’

  Soon, the rider was close enough to be recognized—it was Jonah, son of Mr and Mrs Smithson who lived in a bungalow at Kut Madan. Doctor Wallang expected him to stop at his gate—somebody had probably taken ill—but instead Jonah dismounted at the missionary building. He tied his horse to the gate, his walk marked by a limp, the remaining trace of a childhood illness.

  Flynn still had his hand on Sonny’s collar. ‘Last rites?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said the doctor, and stubbed out his cigarette on the gate.

  That evening Doctor Wallang’s family sat down to dinner in the kitchen as usual. In one corner, a fire spluttered, drying out ragged strips of fish and meat hung above the flames. At the table, the children wrestled for attention, while their mother dished out pork stew and steaming rice. Everyone fell quiet for grace. Their father could be strict about these things.

  For a few moments, only his voice echoed in the room—‘Bless us, O Lord, for these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty. Help us to be mindful of all our blessings, and the needs of those who have less.’

  In chorus, the family murmured ‘Amen’.

  Halfway through the meal, when chatter and gentle teasing had resumed, an urgent knocking sounded on the door. It was a helper from the Smithson household.

  ‘Please,’ he uttered, out of breath, ‘could the doctor come at once to Kut Madan?’

  As Doctor Wallang washed his hands, his children fetched his bag and his wife brought him a shawl. ‘Who knows how late you’ll be there,’ she said. He rushed out of the house with a familiar tug in his stomach. No matter how long he’d been doing this, it always made him nervous—the sudden summon of illness or death. As they hurried down the road, he asked the helper what had happened. The torch in the doctor’s hand threw a feeble jaundiced light on rough mud and stone. Around them the wind blew over the barren hills like a restless spirit.

  ‘The memsahib, she has taken ill. The young one.’

  It would have been difficult to imagine Mrs Smithson—a tall, thin woman with a steely tongue and constitution—being anything apart from ruthlessly fit. The ‘young one’, he presumed, was Miss Lucy, Mrs Smithson’s orphaned niece from England. She’d arrived earlier that year with the monsoon. The doctor had seen her a few times out riding alone, and occasionally with Jonah.

  The bungalow at Kut Madan lay ensconced in a thick forest of pine, brooding in the darkness like a mournful ruin. To the back, the trees spilled over a sudden sharp cliff that gave the place its name—‘the end of land’. There were dim lantern lights flickering at several windows, the household was up and waiting. Jonah opened the door.

  ‘Thank you for coming, doctor.’ He was twenty-two, yet carried the formal, sombre manners of a much older man. As he was ushered in, the doctor noticed that Jonah’s limp had worsened—he’d advised him to ride le
ss often; clearly the boy hadn’t listened.

  In the living room, Mr Smithson’s expansive frame stood in front of the fire, while the lady of the house sat still and silent by the window.

  ‘We’re sorry to have disturbed your evening, doctor. I know you close the clinic at five.’ Mr Smithson’s usually genial manner was subdued, despite the trace of whisky on his breath.

  ‘It’s no trouble, Sahib Smith, how can I help?’

  ‘It’s Lucy…’ he began, and faltered.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘What is the matter with her?’ Mr Smithson glanced at his son.

  ‘That’s the problem, we’re not quite sure…’ answered Jonah. ‘She is—’

  He was interrupted by his mother. ‘The girl has been complaining of headaches and dizzy spells.’

  The doctor turned. ‘For how long now?’

  ‘About a week.’

  The doctor didn’t ask why he hadn’t been summoned earlier; despite his profession, in a white household, it wasn’t his place to do so.

  The family lapsed into silence. Jonah spoke first, ‘Perhaps you ought to see her.’

  Mrs Smithson said she’d check on the girl and left the room. A burning log crackled and spat in the fireplace. Jonah and his father stood quiet as ghosts.

  ‘Sahib Smith, was there anything that happened today, that made you send for me?’

  Mr Smithson moved to a side table and poured himself another drink.

  ‘Lucy’s been a little under the weather lately…I put it down to pining for something or other, you know young people these days. You see, there was a small matter concerning the stable lad—’

  ‘Father, it isn’t necessary to bring that up.’ Jonah’s tone was sharp, and his face, the doctor noticed, had reddened.

  But the elder gentleman continued, unmindful. He was a little drunk.

  ‘Don’t know what they were up to…probably nothing more than long walks, really, but I noticed she seemed rather dispirited after…well, after her aunt had a word with her about him.’