Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (21 page)

Tei drew back, a little uncomfortable, a little repulsed. He couldn’t believe this was the same person he’d looked up to as a kid. The one who taught him how to win at marbles, construct a sturdy kali het to joy-ride down the neighbourhood slopes, to fly kites with a quick, confident hand.

‘Still staying in Laban?’ Mama Lang peered at him over the rim of his glass. The golden liquid sparkled in the dim light.

Tei shook his head. ‘We moved…ten years ago. To Nongrim.’

To a better part of town, less rough, less poor. Away from the riff-raff as his mother used to say.

‘That’s why I don’t see you any more.’ Mama Lang chuckled good-naturedly. The drinks were going down particularly well this evening.

‘And you still fly kites?’ Mama Lang scrambled on the table for the matchbox. Tei pushed it across with a finger.

‘I work.’ In the agriculture department…as a special rural development officer. His parents were particularly proud. It was so difficult to get a government job these days. At least without a decent number of contacts in all the right places, and they’d only been in touch with a distant cousin who said he would help but it all depended on how Tei conducted himself at the interview.

‘Where?’

Tei told him.

Mama Lang tilted his head and howled like a wolf at the moon. Tei almost spilled his whisky in alarm. A few of the other drinkers turned around and told him to shut up or they’d have him thrown out. He stopped and said, ‘Good, good. That’s what we fought for. To give our Khasi youth employment and opportunity.’ He hiccuped and gulped his drink to subdue it.

Tei shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He didn’t want Mama Lang to bring up the KSU days. The days when Mama Lang and the others fought and rallied and lived as outlaws. He’d heard it all before. Over and over again. From friends and relatives and neighbours. He’d come here to think about Josephine and her brown eyes and her full pink lips that he’d never kiss again. He watched his companion struggle to light a match, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth like an embarrassing dribble. The murmur in the room was louder now, the air sticky and warm, the number of figures seemed to have grown silently like a damp patch on the wall.

‘What brings you here?’ asked Mama Lang again. Maybe he remembered Tei hadn’t answered the first time, maybe he forgot he’d already asked the question. With the alcohol snug in his throat, Tei began, ‘There’s this girl…’

‘The most beautiful girl in the world,’ finished Mama Lang. ‘And she left? Dumped you like a used condom?’

Tei felt a spray of spittle on his face. He wiped it off and nodded.

‘Was her name Angela?’ Mama Lang had managed to light the cigarette by now and dragged on it deeply.

Tei shook his head. He had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to tell his story. But what was there to tell? He loved her, and she’d said she loved him. But she didn’t really. And how could he compete with Ashley, with his slick Yamaha bike, his trendy haircut, the shiniest leather jacket in town, and a multitude of talents he was sure extended beyond playing the guitar like a rock star. Tei finished his drink and poured out another.

‘My girl’s name was Angela, you know. She was…,’ Mama Lang struggled to find the words.

‘Like an angel,’ finished a small, supremely intoxicated man from the next table.

‘Or the devil in disguise,’ added his equally inebriated companion.

‘Don’t make fun of her, Rit.’ Mama Lang lurched forward. His hands slammed the table. Tei steadied the whisky bottle before it toppled over.

‘Let me pour you a drink,’ he said hurriedly. ‘What happened to her?’

‘Kai khlaw,’ Mama Lang muttered as he settled back into his chair.

After he was suitably appeased, he began—it happened, he said, in the mid-’80s.

Those days, Mama Lang was in the KSU, running from the CRPF, the central government police force that was sent by the droves to this hill-station town in the middle of nowhere. He and his ‘brothers’ hid in the jungles (plenty at that time, not like now), ate wild animals, and camped wherever they could find a dry patch in the undergrowth. But he went to see her every day.

Mama Lang shook a finger at nothing in particular. ‘Every day,’ he repeated.

She lived in Malki and he’d tramp through the adjoining Risa Colony forest just for a glimpse of her long, black hair and her smooth, amber skin.

Just like my Josephine, thought Tei.

Angela was beautiful but poor. Her father, a modestly successful tailor, had died of tuberculosis when she was nine, and her mother was wilting under the same disease. She had five siblings to look after and bring up on her own.

‘I couldn’t help,’ said Mama Lang, clutching his glass so tight Tei thought it might break. ‘Running for my life, living in the wild. I didn’t have any money to call my own. How could I help?’

Angela tried to make ends meet by working as a tea lady in a bank and in as many households as she could manage after work hours. But it wasn’t enough. What with her mother’s medicines and her siblings’ school fees and food to feed so many hungry mouths. In desperation, she approached the manager of the bank for a loan.

‘He’ll give it to me,’ she told Mama Lang, her eyes shining like the fireflies he watched in the jungle at night. ‘He said he’ll give me the money.’

Try as he might, Mama Lang couldn’t believe a dkhar—‘and that too a lazy, filthy Akhomia’—would be willing to help. But she was happy and relieved and he kept his reservations to himself. Weeks passed, and every time he asked about the money, she’d clam up…he knew she was hiding something from him.

‘What? What was she hiding?’ asked Tei.

Mama Lang held up his little finger, said he needed to piss, and shuffled out to the loo.

‘Ei, ei.’ Rit was leaning back on his chair and miraculously not falling over. ‘Ask him if he’s sure she wasn’t a puri. Lots of them in Risa forest.’

‘They were so stoned most of the time they wouldn’t know a real woman from a ghost,’ added his companion.

Rit laughed and choked on his drink. His friend thumped him on the back.

‘They say if you sleep with a water spirit, you’re done for,’ he continued. ‘And look what’s happened to Lang—lost all the screws in his head, and taken to drink.’

Tei was tempted to ask if that was the reason why they’d hit the bottle as well, but decided against it. Who knew how far their alcohol-induced good humour would stretch.

‘But they say there was some girl…’ said Rit’s companion.

‘Bah,’ his friend spat, ‘there’s always some girl. There’s always some girl and there’s always some money, and there’s always love that wasn’t enough or true.’

At that moment, a waiter brought a bottle of whisky to Tei’s table.

‘Bah Lang ordered,’ he said.

‘To Angela,’ chanted the two drunks behind him, lifting their glasses.

‘Or whatever he’s calling her today,’ Rit added.

When Mama Lang returned he asked, ‘What happened?’

Tei hesitated. ‘Nothing. The waiter brought another bottle of whisky. Why don’t you continue your story?’

One afternoon, Mama Lang began, he and his friend Bantei (killed in a police shoot-out during that year’s monsoon) went to the Risa stream to bathe and wash clothes. It was a pretty spot where lovers usually lingered, but with all the trouble in town, nobody visited any more. When they reached, they noticed that two people were sitting by the stream just before it tumbled and vanished deep into the forest.

‘Can you imagine my surprise when I saw Angela? Sitting there in her best Sunday dress with a ribbon and all in her hair. And next to her, this dkhar man with a thick moustache and lecherous eyes. My mother is unwell, Angela was trying to say, we really need the money…please…

‘I will give you the money,’ he said, ‘but what can you give me? The bank calls it collateral…’ He laughed and put his hand on her knee. Then he tried to force himself on her, his black moustache scratching her skin.

‘What did you do?’ asked Tei.

‘I–I was paralysed.’ Mama Lang’s head drooped, the grip on his glass loosened.

Only when the man took out a pair of scissors to threaten Angela did something snap inside him and Mama Lang charged at them…but it was too late.

‘Too late for what?’ Tei leaned forward. The whisky buzzed in his head, he clenched his fists.

She jumped.

Mama Lang tipped his glass over. The liquor flowed over the table and splashed to the floor.

‘Like nohkalikai. She became a waterfall.’

When Tei left the table later that evening, Mama Lang lay slumped on his side. Maybe he was asleep. Tei didn’t try to find out. He staggered out between the empty chairs and tables as though on a boat at sea. When he reached the counter, he fished into his pocket for money and, with some difficulty, counted out the notes. Bisesh, who was tallying figures on a long sheet of paper, glanced up at him; his eyes were sharp and shrewd like a bird.

‘You been sitting with Lang over there?’

Tei nodded. Bisesh crossed his arms and rested them on the counter.

‘What’s he been telling you? About his girl. What was her name? Mabel. Or Angel.’

‘Angela…yes, how did you know…?’

Bisesh laughed. ‘He tells that story to any dumb fuck who’ll listen.’

‘But it’s true…’ Tei protested.

‘Oh, it’s true alright. Lang was part of the KSU and all, but there’s another version of the story. Where the girl fell in love and ran away with an Akhomia bloke. Hurt Lang’s pride, it did. And his…’ Bisesh tapped his temple, and laughed again.

When Tei emerged onto the empty street, he realized it had been raining. In Embassy, things like seasons, and Christmas, and changes in weather passed by unnoticed. It was bitterly cold. Tei stamped his feet and blew into his hands, his breath turning white as though he were exhaling ghosts. As he walked, scanning the road for a taxi he was sure wouldn’t pass, rainwater gushed around his ankles. It was dark and murky, it could be blood for all he knew. Wounds ran deep in this hill-station town in the middle of nowhere.

The Discovery of Flight

A
s always, there was no dearth of premonitions after the incident. Someone had heard the rooster crow five times that morning. The moon on the evening before, conjectured another, was ringed twice. And the symbols in everyone’s dreams—from dead cats and dismembered limbs to fallen trees and a flock of birds taking flight—became sure signs that Ezra would walk out of his uncle’s house and disappear.

The grandest, most obvious omen of all, however, was the rain. It was raining like the apocalypse had revisited Sohra. The first time was the Great Earthquake of 1897, when entire mountains were whipped and swallowed by faithless tremors and rivers transformed within minutes into magnificent waterfalls. This could easily be the second. The locals were used to rain—every year the monsoon beat relentlessly upon their tin roofs from June to September—but that morning it was the rain of the old days, slap bam briew they called it, rain that wouldn’t stop until it had taken lives. It was a living, breathing monster that howled piteously through the hills for blood.

‘Why he would go for a walk in such weather, god only knows,’ said Kong Syntiew, a housekeeper who’d been in Ezra’s uncle’s service for over thirty years. She hadn’t met him before he left that morning, but she’d been the one to discover the kitchen door unlatched, the kettle that had cooled by the stove, and a teacup washed and placed to dry by the sink. ‘He’s always been a neat boy,’ she added, ‘right from when he was a child.’

When Ezra didn’t return that afternoon, a mild confusion settled into the household. His aunt and uncle were gentle folk, accustomed to a quiet life of careful, impeccable routine. Mama Kes was an averagely important government officer, and Kong Milly ran a small primary school near the Sohra market. When they got back home, at about three o’clock, the maid would serve Mama Kes tea in his study where he’d be reading the newspaper, while Kong Milly drank her cup in the kitchen with Kong Syntiew. That afternoon, Mama Kes appeared at the doorway and stood there awkwardly, unsure whether to come in or stay out.

‘Where’s that boy Ezra?’ he asked.

The women shook their heads. Behind them, rows of streaky smoked meat swayed gently above the large wood fires.

‘He may have gone to see Ailad,’ said his wife.

Ailad was a car mechanic who ran a workshop nearby, and though he was almost forty, older than Ezra by a decade, he got along well with their nephew. He did most of the talking, while Ezra sat on an upturned pail or a discarded tyre, sipping tea, smiling and nodding.

Mama Kes was reassured by that explanation and trundled back to his study. Later, in between dozing and watching a Doordarshan programme on rural farming, he was shaken awake by his wife who said she wanted him to check Ezra’s room.

‘What?’ He blinked at her, his eyes adjusting to the bright tube light she’d just switched on.

‘See if there’s anything there that might explain where he’s gone.’ It was also a man’s room and more fitting for her husband to check it, but she didn’t need to say that out loud.

‘Have you tried his mobile phone?’ asked Mama Kes.