Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories Read online

  Kyntang laughed, it reverberated across the empty hills. He wished the doctor a good evening, heaved the sack up on his back and walked away.

  The doctor stood on the road with the wind whipping his face. The light in the west, a knife-stroke of silvery white, was fading slowly, while the sky throbbed with slow and fiery darkness.

  It wasn’t until six months later, when monsoon clouds gathered murderously over Sohra, that Doctor Wallang was reminded of Lucy. He’d wondered about her, of course—news filtered through to him from Sahib Flynn that in March, with the first flourish of spring, she’d left Sohra for Shillong, then Calcutta, and onward to England. There she would stay with Mrs Smithson’s friend and her family, and study to become a nurse like her mother. That summer Sahib Flynn was also leaving, abandoning the failed plantation to go work in the plains where the weather conditions were far more suitable for growing tea. His departure, however, had been delayed by a spell of thunderstorms that broke out in clamorous bursts over the valley. One night, during a particularly heavy downpour, Doctor Wallang thought he heard the drone of an airplane.

  ‘Not in this weather,’ he murmured before turning back to his book.

  The next morning, a helper from the Smithson household called at the clinic.

  ‘Please, doctor,’ he said, out of breath, ‘could you come immediately—there has been an accident behind the bungalow.’

  ‘What happened?’ he asked as they hurried down the road.

  ‘Last night, something fell out of the sky.’

  There was already a large gathering when he got there—people from the village, a cluster of priests in their black habits, and, some distance away, Jonah and his mother. They were all standing at the edge of the forest, pointing and looking over the cliff. Doctor Wallang made his way to the front of the crowd, and found himself next to Flynn.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, although he’d already guessed.

  The cliff face was gashed by trails of black scorch marks, which ended in the shrubbery.

  ‘A Dakota,’ replied Flynn, ‘carrying passengers…bless their souls.’

  The aircraft could barely be seen—it had crashed and tumbled further down to a ledge—though metallic fragments were scattered across the rocks like shiny rain. A group of nimble-footed valley men had clambered to the airplane but found no survivors—only burnt, mangled limbs. Now they were carrying back machine parts to sell as scrap.

  ‘Tragic,’ said the doctor. ‘But to travel in such weather…’

  Flynn nodded. ‘Insanity. But war forces people to do stupid things.’

  ‘How many were there?’

  ‘Three …two men and a woman. We think.’

  The doctor shuddered. He’d seen death in many guises, but this seemed strange and violent and lingered uncleanly in the air. He had a sudden urge to leave Kut Madan. Flynn seemed to feel the same—‘Need to head back,’ he said abruptly, ‘Sonny’s on his own.’

  The doctor tried to keep it out of his mind, how it must have felt to fall helplessly through the air. Suddenly, he heard a familiar voice: ‘I wonder who they were.’

  It was Kyntang, who’d appeared as though from nowhere.

  ‘I don’t think we’ll ever know,’ the doctor replied.

  There were others around them voicing similar thoughts; exclamations continued to fill the air—‘It happened around midnight’, ‘How much can I sell this for?’, ‘Any identification?’, ‘Were they all bilati?’, ‘Mad to fly in the storm’, ‘Did anyone see it?’

  ‘I did, I did,’ shouted a boy no older than ten. ‘From the window…flying across the sky. It looked like…like…’

  ‘A fire bird,’ the doctor thought he heard Kyntang say, but when he turned the young man was gone. Behind him were a crowd of unknown faces, while in front, the valley opened up, a hollow green casket cradling a disconsolate wind. Stray strands of fog, exhaled from the earth, would soon envelop Sohra and conceal it from the world.

  He walked home slowly, and when he reached, he stopped to look at the ‘knupmawiang, whose yellow flowers were just beginning to bloom.

  Echo Words

  Often, when I stand at the door of my grocery store, watching the buses offload their passengers, I remember the French lady, and how she arrived in Shillong out of nowhere on an afternoon like any other. She wore a high-waisted navy skirt, a well-cut blazer of the same colour over a crisp white blouse, and a floral-patterned scarf that kept her hair in place. I remember how, after she alighted, she stood for a moment in the sunshine, taking in her surroundings—Kelvin Cinema, the Secretariat building and its sloping, manicured lawns, Mr Biswas’s Time House watch shop. Even from that distance I could tell she was exhilarated to be here.

  I remember wondering why. I couldn’t understand it. Apart from pernicious local drama, nothing of much excitement ever happened in our small, sleepy town. At the time, the British had been gone five years, but Shillong still slumped in post-colonial depression. We missed them; some wouldn’t even mind having them back. As Mama Jos would say when he came in to buy tobacco, ‘Better the white man than these dkhars.’

  ‘Which ones?’ I’d ask.

  ‘All of them.’

  It was a useful word, dkhar, clubbing together anyone who came from beyond the hills.

  Everyone had watched curiously as she walked briskly towards my shop—Mr Biswas, the market women with their baskets of seasonal vegetables and fruit, Kong Lee who manned a makeshift kwai and cigarette kiosk, Bah Lyngdoh from his jadoh stall nearby. I knew the questions later would be deft and numerous.

  The bell tinkled when she entered. She couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, on the fringes of youthful beauty. Fair, freckled skin stretched over high cheekbones, and hazel eyes, the colour of our winter trees, were framed by a pair of light spectacles. Beneath the scarf, her hair was pulled back and coiled into a bun. I conjectured silently that she must be here on business of the church; it was the most likely explanation. If that were so, she’d probably be the most attractive sister of mercy we’d seen yet. She greeted me, and said she wished to buy a few things—candles, matches, barley water, a bottle of ink. Her accent was soft, slightly nasal and breathless; I couldn’t recognize it even though I was familiar with many others—pukka British that had been around so many years, Italian from the Salesian priests at Don Bosco, the lilting Irish of the Catholic nuns and monks who ran the town’s missionary schools, and even German, before the first great war rendered the Salvatorian fathers our enemies.

  ‘Shall I call a taxi for you, madam?’ I offered, curious to know where she was going.

  ‘Thank you, I have one waiting already.’ She gestured to a blue Chevrolet parked outside my shop.

  When she left, I noticed the car headed in the direction of Ward’s Lake and assumed she must be lodging at Pine Wood, the grandest hotel in Shillong.

  After that, the French lady was sighted regularly on our streets, walking around with a notebook and sheaf of papers. ‘Memsahib beit’, was the common refrain; most people thought she was clearly crazy, a young woman travelling alone in this remote part of the world. A few others conjectured she was a nurse, a nun, a foreign government official, until Mama Jos in his infinite wisdom and uncanny ability to pick up gossip, told us she was an anthropologist.

  The people gathered in my shop remained silent—they furrowed their brows, stared blankly, and blinked. They’d never heard the word before. I busied myself with tidying the canned fruit shelf.

  ‘What in Jesu’s name is that?’ asked Kong Lee.

  Bah Lyngdoh, smoking a beedi at the door, said it sounded like a disease.

  ‘Ni, all of you are such villagers,’ pronounced Mama Jos, thoroughly enjoying the bewilderment he’d created.

  ‘Yes, we’re all from Jowai.’

  That was Mama Jos’s hometown.

  It took a great deal of cajoling after that to get him to continue.

  ‘Well,’ he said finally, ‘I heard from Kong Shai’—who was a
friend of a cousin of a lady who worked as a cleaner at Pine Wood—‘that the memsahib is here to write a book on the Khasis.’

  ‘Why?’ said Bah Lyngdoh at once. ‘Are we some rare, exotic animal species?’

  Kong Lee remarked that he might be but the rest of them were pretty normal.

  Mama Jos shrugged. ‘Now, why and for what she’s doing this, I don’t know. The sahibs have strange ideas…but no good will come of this, I can feel it in my bones.’

  I suppose you could say I played, however unknowingly, an important part in the drama yet to unfold. The French lady came to the shop one morning to buy ink and mentioned she needed a translator, someone who could speak both English and Khasi. I suggested she meet Malcolm, who lived a few doors away from me on Quinton Road, and taught at one of the convent schools. I’d known him since he was a boy and he’d grown into a good-natured if slightly ineffectual lad with more than a little evidence of Anglo ancestry in his features. I offered to go across to his house that evening and ask him, if he was keen, to get in touch with her at the hotel. Sooner than I expected, it was all fixed up, and the French lady and Malcolm travelled around town together—the fair princess and her knight—swiftly meeting and interviewing people.

  Try as we might, there was not much information to be gleaned about her. Some said before this she’d travelled around Cambodia, trekking through jungles and living in remote villages. Others were convinced she’d lost her mind after her husband was killed in the war. ‘That’s why she wanders the world pulled by some ‘suidtynjang.’ Mischievous spirits that led travellers astray. Yet as far as I could see, she was quite sane and dedicated to her work. One evening, Kong Lee told us the French lady had stopped at her kwai kiosk, and questioned her about her children (five, all of whom worked in the paddy fields), her husband (a drunken lout), and her livelihood. ‘She wrote it all down in a notebook,’ she said, trying, and failing, to not sound excited. At Bah Lyngdoh’s jadoh stall, the lady was interested in the food being cooked over the big wood fires in the kitchen.

  ‘Asked me about all the damn ingredients,’ the owner told us, a trace of gruff pride in his voice. ‘What’s in the doh jem? How is this called? How do you make doh shiang, doh khleh…she even tried some of the stuff.’

  ‘Did she like it?’ I asked.

  ‘Must be. She finished everything on her plate.’

  More often than not, she attracted the unwanted attention of our young men, loitering on the roadside.

  ‘Come home with me, I’ll give you lots to write about’, ‘Why don’t you write a book on Khasi birds, I’ll show you my sim.’ And they’d point, unabashedly, to their crotch.

  If Malcolm was there, he’d fend them off, describing, in the choicest Khasi words, whose sons they were and which parts of their anatomy should fall off. Else the French lady ignored them, walking past with her skirts bristling.

  The stories about the French lady and Malcolm started about a fortnight later, when the schools closed for three-month-long vacations and people spent a large part of their day sunning themselves in short-lived winter sunshine.

  ‘Is she writing about the Khasis or Malcolm?’ sniggered Bah Lyngdoh.

  ‘He has a Khasi mother,’ replied Kong Lee, ‘that’s probably enough.’

  Bah Jos, however, provided us with more gossip, filched most faithfully from his friend and neighbour Kong Shai. The hotel cleaners had heard them, he said, doing unmentionable things in the middle of the afternoon. It had been unmistakable, the sound of skin slapping against skin, the moans, the murmurs. Afterwards, they’d sat out in the veranda, smoking cigarettes, drinking tea, cool as cucumbers, in front of everyone in the clear light of day. That’s what was so surprising, the utter candidness of their affair, with no regard whatsoever for Malcolm’s wife.

  ‘Didn’t he marry her only for the money?’ someone conjectured.

  ‘What else? Have you seen her face?’ The people in the shop dissolved into laughter.

  It was true Kong Banri couldn’t be called a town beauty—she had sweet enough features but was far from being as striking as the French lady. When she and Malcolm got married a year ago, everyone said she was lucky to have snagged herself a good-looking half-sahib.

  As the days passed, the stories grew wilder and more extravagant. He’d spent the night with her, leaving for his house rumpled and sleepy in the early hours of the morning. They were at it like dogs, the people in the next room had complained to the receptionist about the noise. Someone said they’d seen them sneaking off like teenagers into the Risa Colony forest, where all sorts of wanton debaucheries were rumoured to take place near the abandoned water tank. Soon, there was talk of Malcolm leaving his wife.

  All this while Kong Banri remained impassive—venturing out into the market in the evenings to buy fruit and vegetables, walking to her family home in Polo Grounds, stopping to pick up tailored material from Roopkala. When she dropped into the shop, everyone said her smile, never usually generous, seem more forced than usual.

  One afternoon, I was alone when she entered, saying she’d like to buy some flour. I bustled around nervously, but she stood there patiently, looking out of the window, her eyes taking in the pine-forested hills in the distance. I felt sorry for her, but there was little I could do apart from make small talk—the weather, the price of tomatoes, the rumours about the nongshohnoh sightings in town.

  ‘Mostly around Iew Duh,’ I prattled, ‘but that’s not too far from here.’

  Stories of the nongshohnoh, or hired kidnappers, sprang up every once in a while—someone went missing or somebody saw a figure skulking around in darkened areas, or worse, dragging away a gunnysack big enough to hold a body.

  Kong Banri murmured something suitably perfunctory—‘It’s terrible the things one hears about’—and left.

  In a small town such as this, word of the nongshohnoh even reached the French lady. She came in one morning, fresh and radiant—her eyes a deeper hazel, her face framed by hair worn long and loose. Her pale russet dress was most becoming, bringing out the warmth of her skin and the slim shape of her figure. As Kong Lee said later, she looked like a woman who’d been getting it good and often.

  She asked me what it was all about, the thlen and nongshohnoh, and I explained as best I could.

  ‘A nongshohnoh is paid by thlen keepers to kill people for blood, or he marks his victims by cutting off a bit of their hair or their clothing.’

  ‘Do they drink the blood?’

  ‘No, it’s for the thlen…the person who is marked falls ill and dies slowly.’

  ‘Ah! And, of course, the keepers are wealthy families, because the thlen, in return, makes them rich beyond their dreams?’

  I nodded.

  She played with the plastic plate on the counter, the one on which I kept kwai for my customers. ‘You know, they say you never need to put a lid on a basket of crabs.’

  I was confused. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if one tries to climb up, the others pull it down.’

  I didn’t know what to make of it; I felt as though she was mocking me and suddenly I didn’t want to answer any more of her questions.

  ‘Will that be all?’ I asked, referring to her purchases. She looked up, her face oddly serious. ‘And what does it look like, this thlen?’

  ‘Supposedly a snake, a small serpent.’

  I hoped she wouldn’t ask me anything more, and she didn’t. She paid and stepped outside, her hair glinting in the sunlight.

  That evening, I shut shop early; for some reason I was weary, and felt a strange sense of foreboding. In the distance, the hills gleamed a darker green, and despite a full radiant moon, it seemed as though there were forces at work that bathed the whole world in shadow. In my dreams, restless as my slumber, I thought I heard the faint beating of drums played on some distant rooftop like a steady heartbeat.

  The next day the lovers disappeared.

  I mean they weren’t seen on the streets together any more. He didn’t s
top by to place a bet at the thoh teem shops in the morning, and didn’t drop in at Bah Lyngdoh’s food stall for a quick ja bowl. She wasn’t sighted near Ward’s Lake where she liked to go for long walks or in the veranda near her room where she read and wrote for hours. The first thing we assumed, of course, was that they’d run away together.

  ‘She’s gathered more than enough material for her book.’ Kong Lee giggled as she quartered betel nut on her palm.

  There was a deliciously thrilling ring to the story; perhaps they’d manage to make their way to Guwahati, or even as far as Calcutta to live in the big city—an unknown, mysterious couple, far from the cloistered confines of Shillong. Some people even said that they admired the pair for their courage and the unbridled surety of their love.

  A week passed before Mama Jos wondered aloud whether anything worse had happened.

  ‘Worse? What do you mean worse?’ asked Bah Lyngdoh, standing at the door, smoking a beedi as usual.

  Mama Jos tapped the tobacco out of his pipe.

  ‘Kong Shai said that the memsahib hardly took any of her things from the hotel room. Isn’t that strange?’ The word hung heavy in the air, like a coil of thick, dark smoke.

  Someone said they should inform the rangbah shnong, the neighbourhood chief, he would know what to do, or even the police. Mama Jos said we should keep an eye on Kong Banri.

  I tried to cut short the madness, saying that surely she wasn’t that kind of woman, besides she was so small and slight, there was no way she could overpower her husband as well as his lover.

  ‘There are other ways to harm somebody…’ said Kong Lee from the corner. We knew she was referring to ancient charms and mantras. Kong Banri came from an old Khasi family, the Rynjahs, still unconverted to the light of Christianity.

  ‘I’ve heard that’s how her mother owns so much property in town, all thlen money,’ added a woman who sold vegetables around the corner.

  We were still discussing the issue when Kong Banri walked into the shop. Her dark eyes flittered over everyone, and a deep flush crept up her cheeks. Since we all fell silent, looking away in embarrassment, she must have realized that we were talking about her. Yet she forced on a smile and asked for a variety of grocery items.