Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories Read online

  ‘What does rice beer taste like, Mama Kyn?’

  My grand-uncle shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Never touched a drop.’

  Brave enough now, I asked ‘Why?’

  He restuffed his pipe, bits of tobacco dropping to the floor like dark snowflakes.

  ‘I was with supplies in Africa…’

  I held my breath. Mama Kyn hardly ever spoke of his war days.

  ‘We were in Tripoli, and had faced three days of non-stop shelling. They always went after supplies…the bastards. My friend Bolen and I were taking a walk; it was August, hot, dry, sand everywhere—in our food, our eyes, our socks, it even coated us like a second skin. So much sand. But we walked because we’d had enough of squatting in the trenches. Hipster…this bilati chap…and his gang were sitting on a tank, drinking. “Hey, Bobo…that’s what they called Bolen… come join us,” they said. We were going to, and any other day we would have, but that afternoon, I said no. I don’t know why. They made fun of us, of course, called us women and all sorts of names, but when we were about a hundred metres away, a stray aircraft flew past and dropped more bombs. One hit the tank. They were gone before the dust cleared.’

  His pipe had gone out, but Mama Kyn didn’t seem to notice. There was a strange look in his eyes. He never spoke to me about the war again.

  I spent less time with Mama Kyn when our winter holidays began, and since everyone was busy preparing for Christmas and the annual locality fête, they didn’t seem to notice his longer-than-usual disappearances from the house. Whenever I peered into his room, in between playing football and kali het, it was empty—his clothes neatly folded at the foot of his bed. It was only later I realized that his fishing equipment was where it always was, neatly stowed away in the corner near a small tin trunk.

  ‘Mei, where is Mama Kyn?’

  My mother was plucking chicken feathers. It looked like a tiny white storm.

  ‘Where he always is kein…at Wah Dieng Doh or Um Ïam.’

  ‘But he’s left behind his fishing things.’

  ‘So maybe he’s using nets now.’ It was a tone that implied I should run along unless I too wanted to suffer a fate similar to the fowl.

  I searched everywhere—in the main house, in the rooms where he sometimes liked to read or play carrom, in the garden where he often polished his fishing equipment, and for no good reason, even the vegetable patch where my grandmother was tending to a row of large-hearted cauliflowers. After some deliberation, I looked in Mama Heh’s room. It had lain empty since his death and a thin film of dust coated the surface of everything. To disturb it, I felt, would be sacrilege. In the afternoon, I ventured further, to my grandfather’s car workshop where a mechanic showed me how to test spark plugs; Mama Kyn, though, he said, hadn’t set foot in there for months. Later, I walked down to Wah Dieng Doh, just in case my mother was right and he’d found an alternative to fishing rods. But there was no one by the river, and the water, cold and calm, flowed silently past. That night, unable to sleep, I crept out in the wintry darkness to check whether Mama Kyn had returned.

  A light burned at his window, and the door was slightly ajar. Low voices wafted out of his room, but the only pair of shoes near the steps belonged to him. This was strange, I thought. As far as I could remember, apart from me, Mama Kyn never had anyone visiting him in his room. I stood shivering in the cold trying to catch the murmured sounds—were they speaking in Khasi? I couldn’t pick up any familiar words. Were they speaking at all? At times, I thought I heard soft moans. As I crept closer I tripped over an upturned flowerpot. The voices stopped. The door flew open and Mama Kyn stepped out. ‘You!’ he shouted, and we stared at each other in silence, until he turned away.

  ‘Mama Kyn,’ I called. ‘Mama Kyn.’ But he didn’t turn back.

  Bewildered, I returned to bed where I fell into a restless sleep. I dreamt I was standing outside Mama Kyn’s door, and when I pushed it open, I found the floor had turned into a pool of deep, swirling water.

  The next morning, I ran to his shack, and was relieved to find the place intact. Yet Mama Kyn, once again, was nowhere to be found.

  No one paid me any heed until he didn’t show up for his meals two days in a row.

  ‘Where could he have gone?’ said my mother at dinner. She sounded cross; this was inconvenient. ‘How can a grown man just disappear?’

  At times like these, a pyrta shnong was set up, a town crier who passed the message around the neighbourhood—that help was needed to look for my grandfather’s brother-in-law who had vanished without a trace. In those days, the entire locality got involved, dropping their chores and meals, and hurrying outdoors, combing the streets like a small, diligent army.

  The next day, Mama Kyn was found seated on a rock perched precariously by the Wah Dieng Doh waterfall. He didn’t seem to notice us beckon to him, his arms drawn around his bent knees, his eyes staring into nothingness.

  ‘Lah kem puri,’ I heard people whisper around me, but I didn’t know what that meant. ‘It’ll never stop now,’ someone added, and they all shook their heads sadly.

  Finally, my father, Bah Lam and a group of men from the locality managed to climb up to the rock and bring Mama Kyn down. He was weak, and didn’t put up a fight. When they reached home, he fell into an exhausted asleep.

  Later that evening, when the commotion had died down, I was in Uncle Gordon’s room watching him smoke a joint.

  ‘What is puri?’ I asked.

  ‘Hmmm…supposed to be a water fairy.’

  ‘That’s what happened to Mama Kyn? He was taken by a puri?’

  I got a face full of foul-smelling smoke.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I heard from the others mynneh…’

  ‘Puris trap men and take them away to their dwelling places underwater…old people believe in all that…’ Holding up the joint, he grinned and added, ‘And you will too if you smoke enough of this.’

  I learnt more by eavesdropping in the kitchen. ‘She must have followed him home from the river. Once that happens, he’ll always be under her spell,’ said Mena. She was frying kha bah in a large pan; the pieces spluttered in the mustard oil, one was a head with a black, blind eye. ‘They’re beautiful creatures, these puri. People say they have waist-long hair and skin the colour of moonlight.’

  My mother snorted; she had no patience for stories of any kind, especially those that involved lissome fairies. But the old woman continued unperturbed.

  ‘The mischievous ones are alright, they don’t do much harm, they tempt and tease and only visit the men at night, you know, to…’

  ‘Yes, we know,’ interrupted my mother.

  ‘But the malicious ones, they’re very dangerous,’ Mena continued. ‘They lead men to dangerous places, to cliffs and waterfalls, to whirlpools and deep lakes. I’ve heard they’re persistent, and will do anything to lure them into the water.’

  She flipped the pieces of fish over; one side was crisp and shrivelled. The eye, I noticed, had turned white.

  ‘There’s only one way to stop the puri,’ she continued. ‘He must leave a broom upside down outside his door every day. That’s the only way she’ll leave him alone.’

  ‘Mena, get back to work,’ said my mother. ‘This is all nonsense.’

  A broom was placed by Mama Kyn’s door after the fourth time he disappeared. This time for almost a week. I remember the odd stillness in the house. The constant waiting, the careful pretence of normality. With death there is grief, and pain and closure. A disappearance, though, fosters only deep, profound unknowing. Stef, Keith, and I made a game out of it—‘Mama Kyn is playing hide-and-seek,’ we declared, and searched in all our favourite secret places—the neighbourhood, with its sprawl of low-roofed houses and narrow sloping lanes, was our playground. Yet it became clearer as the days passed by that he wasn’t anywhere in the locality.

  He was found by a boy hunting birds near Bishop Falls, more than ten miles away from our side of town. Mama Kyn was l
ying on the ground, facing the stream, too weak to move. He had to be carried on a stretcher that my father brought from the hospital. Back at home, he fell into a fever, and muttered strange names, calling many times for Bolen and Hipster.

  ‘Who are these people?’ asked Aunt Ruth.

  I held my silence.

  While he was convalescing, Mama Kyn would sit outside his shack, sipping tea, and often I would keep him company. The broom was always stationed by his door like a sentry on duty. As usual, we didn’t talk much, this time not even about fishing, but I thought if I were with him, perhaps he wouldn’t disappear so often.

  One clear afternoon in early spring, we were alone in the backyard; there were no football matches in progress and the air filled only with the fragrance of sweet peas.

  ‘Mama, when you—go away, do you remember anything?’ I asked.

  A small smile spread over his face. ‘I am catching Golden Mahseer. They’re all around me, flying through the air, leaping into water. I reach out, one after another…they lie in my hand like pieces of the sun.’

  When Mama Kyn vanished for the last time, people in the household spent days blaming each other for removing the broom. ‘It must have been Gordon, coming back late at night and thinking it’d be funny.’ Aunt Ruth disapproved of her younger brother’s lifestyle. ‘Maybe Bah Lam,’ suggested my mother, ‘he’s getting a little forgetful these days.’ ‘One of those neighbourhood kids playing a prank,’ said my grandmother, ‘they’re always jumping in and out of our garden.’ Suspicion even fell on us, but Keith, Stef, and I solemnly denied it. For days, accusations flew around like sharp poisoned arrows. Nobody thought of the possibility that he’d done so himself. No one saw how the broom probably didn’t keep anything away.

  Many years have passed and the rooms at the great old house have gradually emptied. Each generation passing on—Mena, my grandparents, Bah Lam, my mother and father, succumbing to the slow, crushing wheel of time. Others, like me and Keith, moved away to our wives’ homes in other parts of town. Only Stef and her family remain. At times, I visit and notice all the changes that have taken place. The shacks at the edge of the garden are now smart cement houses rented out to strangers; the kitchen has lost its open wood fires and soot-blackened walls to gas stoves, melamine and fresh coats of weather-proof paint. Kamra rim, the original room, has been bolstered by hardy new planks. Outside, though, some things remain the same—football is still played in the backyard, albeit with better equipment, and my grandmother’s vegetable garden is still tended by someone with careful, loving hands. One afternoon, I landed up to find a stash of things being emptied from the storage room—school books and notepads, a rusty typewriter, a small tin trunk. I picked up a fishing rod with a broken line, it lay cold and heavy in my hands.

  ‘Is that yours?’ It was Stef’s younger son. He watched me, curious and alert.

  ‘No, not mine.’ I told him about Mama Kyn.

  ‘Where did he go?’ he asked.

  I tried to explain about the spirits that lived in the waters, who followed us home and beckoned us back, the ones that made us fall in love.

  The ten-year-old looked incredulous. ‘Only old people believe in all that.’

  Occasionally, when I go fishing, I sit on the bank, or wade into the water, hoping to catch a glimpse of something wondrous. What does it take, I think, to have faith in things beyond the ordinary? Age? Childlike wonder? Is it right to cling so fiercely to the world? As they absorb my solitude, the silence of the distant hills and the drifting indifference of the clouds, I think of disappearances, the ones that surprise us and those that don’t. At first, I am steeped in sadness. Then I notice how the air fills with cicadas, the trees cast their trembling shadows on the water, the reeds bow in steady reverence. I realize that no one is truly ever gone. All voices are heard in a river’s murmuring.

  If I get lucky, I manage to reel in a kha bah and hold it in my hand, its scales smooth and brittle, glistening like broken rainbows in the sun. I am yet to catch a Golden Mahseer. If I do, I will set it free and hope Mama Kyn will find it.

  Secret Corridors

  That morning the world had shrunk to the size of a mole. A small, chestnut-coloured spot to the left of a cupid’s bow that dropped elegantly away from a soft and full middle. It was a mouth that made Natalie think of forbidden things, like the forest behind her house, which she wasn’t allowed to explore, or the pink roadside ice sticks she’d been expressly instructed not to taste. That morning, the intricacies of chemistry didn’t interest her as much as Iba’s mouth; and the face to which it belonged, she thought, was just as attractive. Boyish, some said, but not for Natalie. She liked Iba’s slanting eyes and the smooth plane of her cheeks. It was a face infinitely more interesting than anything Mrs Chatterjee had to say about centrifugation.

  ‘This machine will rotate rapidly. And then what will happen? The milk and cream will separate. Why this will happen?’

  It was the first lesson of the day, and the room, filled with forty-five girls, bristled with restlessness. Sister Josephine, the headmistress, had announced at morning assembly that the school fête would be held next month, and the girls were distracted, silently planning what they would wear, which stalls they would visit. When Iba bent over her textbook, Natalie shifted her attention to the view outside the window. The school was built on a terraced hillside, and their classroom overlooked the playground, which in turn offered a sprawling view of the town swelling across the hills in rambling disarray. Below, rows of eight-year-olds in cloudy grey pinafores moved in aerobic tandem to the PE teacher’s drumbeat. The basketball court nearby was overrun by class ten students, two years senior to Natalie. She watched Amanda, a tall girl with cropped hair, execute a perfect lay-up. One, two, three, and shoot. The ball dropped gracefully through the hoop. Amanda sprinted back to her friends, laughing. She had the largest number of ‘fans’ in school—junior girls who blushed at the sight of her, aching for a glance or a smile, and dropped love notes into her lunch bag or had them sent through a giggling messenger. Beyond the court, a row of jacarandas were on the threshold of bursting into violet blossoms. Spring was in the air, with March winds tugging at their school skirts in a blustery frenzy. For the students at L—Convent, Shillong, it meant three months of winter vacation had come to an end. Natalie’s daydreams were interrupted by a nudge in the ribs. Her benchmate Manisha was staring straight ahead at Mrs Chatterjee, who’d asked Natalie a question. The class had dissolved into giggles. Natalie flushed.

  ‘Sorry, miss.’

  ‘Come, sit here.’ The teacher rapped the desk in front of her. From there, she wouldn’t be able to see Iba; worse, she’d be next to Carmel.

  ‘Sorry, miss, I…’

  ‘Nothing doing. You want to be sent to Sister Josephine?’

  Natalie dragged herself over—a few faces flashed small sympathetic smiles—while Carmel ignored the proceedings and filled her pen with ink. Within this classroom, like every other, there were invisible lines of demarcation as strict as in any church or temple. Who it was acceptable to eat lunch with, who you could partner for arts and crafts, who to include in your team for Danish Rounders, and, rising singularly above the rest, who you sat next to in class. Nobody, for instance, would willingly occupy a seat beside Rini, the Mizo with body odour; Paromita, the Bengali whose hair oil smelled peculiar; or Erica, the Jaintia girl who threw up on her desk every other day. Carmel, however, was the worst of them all. She’d joined the previous year—appearing out of nowhere like an odd April shower—and had never quite fit in. Perhaps it had something to do with the rumours that followed her into school. The stories varied, changing shape with every retelling. Parents waiting outside the school gates discussed Carmel’s mother. A string of affairs with some naval officers in Bombay… No, an Israeli, and now he’s returned to Jerusalem. That’s why she’s come back to Shillong. Within the century-old walls of the school building, teachers in the staff room debated over the possibility of Carmel and
her siblings all having different fathers. Rapidly, and as pervasive as pine dust, the rumours filtered to the schoolgirls in strange, contorted forms—Carmel meets boys after school… She takes them home… She goes with them to the Risa Colony forest to drink alcohol…who knows what they do there. Here, where the family name was passed down through the mother, the children also had to bear the weight of her weaknesses. It was ‘wantonness’, that temerarious trait of lust and shame that marked Carmel for its own. She is sure to turn out just like her mother, the senior girls hissed. Amanda, sitting amid a cluster of delighted girls, declared Carmel a kynthei dakaid. A bad girl. It was that easy. Her fate was as tightly sealed as Sister Josephine’s pursed, disapproving lips.

  The other reason the girls disliked Carmel was one they didn’t talk about. She was exceedingly pretty. Whoever her parents might have been, that was something no one could deny. They merely punished her for it. For looking like the girls in the British Woman magazines that Natalie’s grandmother so assiduously collected from second-hand bookshops. Exotic as the things they advertised—Kit Kat chocolates and Yorkshire pudding. Natalie sat at the edge of the chair, as far as possible from her new benchmate.

  ‘Now, who can tell me about the process of distillation? Anyone apart from Swapna.’ Mrs Chatterjee beamed at her favourite student—a Marwari girl with a red hairband and enormous kohl-lined eyes.

  Natalie sighed. It was going to be a long morning.

  During lunch break, a band of girls took over the only sunny corner of the summer house in the playground. It was a rambling wooden structure, coated with a thick, bubbly layer of blue-grey paint. Iba occupied the seat near the window, while the rest arranged themselves around her—Amesha, petite and fairy-like with a pale, heart-shaped face; Doreen, whose dusky skin reddened with every tempestuous outburst; Eve, Iba’s cousin, who had thick, dark hair reaching her waist; and Miranda, a skinny teenager who was unusually tall for a Khasi girl. Sitting slightly outside the sacred circle was Natalie, unsure yet whether she was fully part of the gang. She tried joining in the conversation but found it was dominated by Doreen and Miranda jostling like skilled duellers for Iba’s attention. At the opposite end of the room, a group of dkhar girls animatedly conversing in Hindi, occasionally erupted into raucous laughter.