Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (22 page)

‘Many times, but no answer.’

They walked to the other end of the sprawling old house, that had grown more vast and echoey after their three children had all grown up and moved away—two daughters in Shillong and a son in Calcutta. They’d given him their son’s room, which was farthest from theirs. As Kong Syntiew said, ‘Boys like to have their own space.’

Ezra was meant to stay two weeks—that’s what Mama Kes’s sister had told him when she called to say her son wanted to spend some time in Sohra. ‘Before he leaves for Indonesia,’ she explained, where he’d been offered a job as a pilot for Garuda Airlines.

Perhaps if someone else had searched Ezra’s room in Sohra they might have found a pencil sketch of a bird tucked into a book on the table. But Mama Kes and Kong Milly barely glanced at it, examining his suitcase instead, layered with neatly folded clothes, a pair of fresh socks and underwear placed on top. Everything else was also in place, his shoes under the bed, all in a polished row, the fishing equipment he kept scrupulously clean arranged in a corner. There were no clues to where their nephew had gone—but he definitely hadn’t packed up and left for home. According to his aunt Millie he was a quiet boy. ‘Polite, well-mannered, though most of the time you hardly knew what he was thinking. He kept to himself, but this is not like him, to just disappear without telling us where he was going or when he’d be back.’

At dinner, a sharp edge of tension knifed the cool August evening. It had stopped raining but the earth was heavily drenched and in the air hung the smell of damp mud, and the sting of a distant winter. The household ate in nervous silence. ‘There’s still a chance he’ll come back now,’ said Kong Syntiew, passing around the kwai basket, but everyone knew that could hardly be true. It was difficult enough to travel during the day with all the rain, at night the roads were treacherously unlit, flanked on either side by barren, windswept countryside that suddenly slipped into sheer cliffs and deep valleys. Nobody had said it yet, but it was on their minds—Ezra lying somewhere hurt and helpless.

‘It’s difficult to decide when something could have gone wrong,’ said Mama Kes, puffing at his pipe (it was his only small vice). ‘Because you see, you can never truly
know.
It’s a question of deciding.’

They decided something was wrong early the next morning, when they discovered Ezra’s bed hadn’t been slept in and he wasn’t in the kitchen, as they were hoping, making a cup of tea. The worse part had been calling his mother.

‘What do you mean he’s gone?’ said Kong Catherine, Mama Kes’s sister.

‘He left the house yesterday morning, and we don’t know where he is.’ Her elder brother couldn’t have sounded more miserable.

‘Have you called the police? Have you arranged for search parties?’ She wasn’t hysterical, but he could hear fear clutching at her throat.

‘We are doing that now.’

‘Oh god, Kes…hurry up. Gill and I are coming immediately.’

She hung up. Mama Kes sighed. He hardly got along with Gill, his brother-in-law, and his presence here would only add to Mama Kes’s troubles. According to everyone his sister Catherine had done extremely well by marrying into a tremendously wealthy family. Mama Kes had long suspected that this accumulation of riches had something to do with Gill’s father being the state home minister for many years in the ’80s. Even now, Gill’s elder brother was comfortably ensconced as some high-ranking minister or other, and Gill was well on his way to becoming director general of police.

‘Oh, why did Ezra come to stay,’ he silently lamented. But he had to admit his nephew, who visited as often as he could, was deeply attached to Sohra unlike all the other youngsters in the family who scorned its quietness and old-fashioned ways. He couldn’t understand why. Ezra was well travelled, he’d studied in Delhi and then trained at some fancy flying school in Brussels. In fact, at times, he made Mama Kes a little nervous; he was so young and had seen more of the world than his uncle could ever dream of. Why did he keep coming back here? It wasn’t something Mama Kes could have asked him; his nephew was a quiet boy, reserved even with his own family. Perhaps, he thought, that’s why Ezra liked Sohra’s desolation. Mama Kes looked out of the window into a landscape quilted by hills and clouds, the place he’d lived in all his life, and thought about how silence shapes a character. How it forces retreat, and reflection. He wondered what it had done to Ezra.

When news of the disappearance reached Shillong, where Ezra’s family lived, it spread through living rooms and tea stalls across town, a place small enough for everyone to be acquainted with almost everybody else.

‘Don’t know how Ez ended up doing corporate work,’ said Chris, who was in school with him at St Edmund’s. ‘He liked to sketch and paint and all that.’ He sniggered. ‘I think he even wrote poetry. I sat next to him in class and saw the back of his notebooks…I’m sure he wrote all that stuff.’

He paused. ‘Ez was one of those all-rounders, you know, good at everything…football, math, English. He was class prefect and school head boy and won at the science fair and whatnot. We teased him sometimes…harmless kid stuff… ‘go put oil in your hair, you Bengali’ or we’d throw his gym clothes into the dustbin.’ He added, ‘I guess we guys always knew Ez would make it big, you know…unlike us.’ He laughed. ‘He went abroad and all. He got out of this place.’ Ezra, Chris said, had few friends, but he’d been close to a boy named Vincent. ‘He was from north India somewhere, tall, dark chap.’ After they finished school, Ezra left for Delhi and Chris went to Guwahati to attend dentistry school—they ran into each other a few times on the road in Laitumkhrah or Police Bazaar when Ezra was in town. ‘I don’t know what happened to Vincent—a lot of people thought he was quite sarong, you know, proud.’ said Chris. ‘I heard he went to Bombay to become an actor or something.’ He laughed. ‘Never seen him in any movies though.’

After Mama Kes informed the rangbah of the locality, a pyrta shnong was set up, from Nohsithiang to the Sohra market and beyond. Search parties were organized into groups of six to ten but the problem they faced was where to begin looking. Sohra was vast and there were many roads Ezra could have taken. Finally, they each picked a path and walked in hope. One group set off towards Thangkarang, all the way to Khoh Ramhah, the gigantic boulder shaped like a conical basket said to have belonged to an evil giant. It stood beside a waterfall cascading into the shimmering plains of Bangladesh. Another headed to Daiñ Thlen, and returned with stories of how the place, with a wide expanse of shallow water that curled and dipped into limestone riverbed caves, had seemed even more eerie and surreal than usual. The third search party looked closer, the area around the market, near the cliff from where three boulders stuck out of a sheer rock face, one balanced miraculously on top of the other. It was believed that when these boulders fell, Sohra would cease to exist, struck by an earthquake so mighty that nothing would remain but dust and rubble. The last group made the long trek to Nohkalikai, the waterfall that echoed during the monsoon with the cries of a village woman named Likai who’d jumped to her death off the cliff.

Most of the locals had their own theories—that he’d wandered into Lawkyntang, sacred forest groves untouched for thousands of years, and been whisked away by ‘suidtynjang—mischievous spirits that troubled travellers and led them astray. ‘Remember last time that dkhar army truck driver went inside the forest? Disappeared for days and then he came out raving mad. Naked as the day he was born.’ That story didn’t inspire fear so much as hilarity, but the message was clear—you never disturbed the spirits of the forests and if you must pass through their leaf-lined paths, you did so during the day and with the utmost reverence. In the jadoh stalls in Sohra market, where people huddled to take shelter from rain, the story of a certain Bah Bremley was told and retold over cups of sha saw and plates of steaming white putharo cakes. A few years ago, the gentleman had come with his friends, a group of city dwellers from Shillong, to see the root bridges in the valley at Pynursla. The six-hour trail started in Laitkynsiew and wound its way down the mountainside through mildly thick jungle. Much like Ezra, Bah Bremley too vanished without a trace during their walk, lost for almost a week despite frantic sweeping searches by his friends and family. He was found, weak and helpless, on a boulder by a river, and he told a strange story of being in a place he couldn’t recognize, guarded on four sides by tigers.

‘He wandered into the spirit world,’ people conjectured. ‘The tigers were his guardians and saved him from death.’

Back in the house Kong Syntiew also remembered that story and hoped that wherever Ezra was he, too, was being protected.

Slowly it was pieced together, Ezra’s wandering trail that morning. He’d headed out in the direction of the market, and this was confirmed by Bah Dohling who owned a small roadside kwai kiosk where Ezra stopped to buy cigarettes. It was early and the shopkeeper was surprised to find someone at the counter, especially in that weather. Ezra had asked for a pack of Gold Flake, and they’d made small talk about the weather. ‘He said he was thinking of going fishing,’ said Bah Dohling. ‘But I noticed he didn’t have any equipment with him. And who goes fishing during the monsoon anyway?’ It was exactly what everyone was hoping he hadn’t done. The chances of a body being recovered on its watery descent to Bangladesh were slim.

After that, Ezra joined a group of boys playing football on the road. They’d splashed around in the puddles, fighting for the half-deflated ball, tearing wickedly at each other’s shirts. ‘He didn’t say anything,’ reported Thao, a freckle-faced ten-year-old with untidy hair and a snotty nose. ‘He kicked the ball back to us and played for a while. He said he was out of practice, but he wasn’t bad. He almost scored a goal.’ When asked which way Ezra had headed, the boy and his friends pointed down the road that led out of Old Sohra, towards the cliffs.

‘We don’t know where he went,’ Thao added. ‘We asked him to keep playing with us but he said he had somewhere to go.’

‘The question,’ said Mama Kes, ‘is where?’

The last person to have seen and spoken to Ezra that day was an elderly Bengali gentleman from the Ramakrishna Mission, who was out taking a morning walk.

‘In the rain?’ he was asked incredulously.

‘Yes,’ he said, stiffening up, ‘what harm can a little rain do to a man?’

There were stories the locals could have told him that would have turned the remaining hairs on his head white, but this was not the appropriate time.

Through the fog that rolled in dense swathes across the valley, like a giant formless ghost, Mr Dutta had glimpsed a figure walking on the road perilously close to the edge. ‘I told him to be careful,’ he said. ‘That the light could be deceiving and he may lose his footing.’ Ezra had stopped for a moment to thank him. ‘He was most polite,’ the gentleman added. ‘A very well-mannered boy.’

Beyond that were a number of paths Ezra could have taken. Down the main road that led to Shillong but that seemed unlikely. To the left up the windswept slopes that dropped to a valley, or to the right where narrow trails wound down to the villages at the foot of the mountains. There was another option that no one wanted to mention—over the sheer cliffs, either by unlucky chance or free will.

Over the next three days, search parties led by nimble-footed men swarmed the mountain trails. ‘Nobody just disappears,’ Gill was overheard saying, ‘not any more. People don’t vanish into thin air. My men will find him. And if anyone’s hurt him, by God they will pay.’

While most people would have taken this as a sign of a desperately anxious father, Mama Kes knew his brother-in-law had a vicious streak in him regardless of whether it concerned his family or not. He didn’t know for sure, but he’d heard rumours that Gill ill-treated truck drivers at toll gates waiting to enter Shillong, had ‘illegal outsiders’ beaten up periodically, and was generally known to be a man of little patience and small mercy. No wonder then that five days after Ezra’s disappearance, people began to mutter about how perhaps the police officer has been visited by retribution—that someone travelling on the road, driver or passenger, had recognized Ezra to be Gill’s son and had spared him as little clemency as his father did other people.

Although there were others who disregarded the theory. ‘What, you mean someone pushed him off the cliff?’ Chris laughed, incredulous. ‘In that weather, you probably couldn’t make out a man from a dog.’

In the meantime, Ezra’s younger sister Liz who lived with her husband and children in Sikkim, informed her parents that she’d received a call from Ezra the morning he’d disappeared, but that the line was disconnected before she could answer it.

‘I was busy getting Tanya and Nia ready for school,’ she explained. ‘I thought I’d call him back later but I forgot.’

It was no secret that the siblings didn’t really get along, although nobody knew whether something in particular had happened between them or if, as it so often happens, they were just very different people. Or perhaps, as Chris said, ‘She was tired of being overshadowed by her brother. Liz was popular and all, but not what you’d call, you know, outstanding in any way.’ Liz and Ezra probably hadn’t met or spoken in months. In fact, she was reluctant to make the trip from Gangtok to Shillong—‘Knowing Ez he’s gone to stay in some godforsaken village somewhere… you remember how he used to keep saying he wanted to renounce the world or something silly like that.’ On hearing this, many heads shook sadly in jadoh stalls across Sohra. ‘If everyone doesn’t truly want him back…especially someone from his own family…he’ll never be found.’ While a few amid them muttered that perhaps he didn’t want to be found in the first place.

After a week, people were beginning to give up hope. ‘Even if they find the boy,’ whispered Kong Syntiew, ‘will he be alive?’ The search parties dwindled as people drifted back to the routine of their own lives. ‘He’s been washed away,’ was the most common conjecture, ‘a flash flood carried him off.’ Yet Gill pushed his men relentlessly while his wife divided her time between pacing her brother’s house and sitting in a room clutching at a rosary and praying. ‘Until we find his body,’ said Kong Catherine, her voice cool and calm as a winter sky, ‘there is hope. I’m his mother. I refuse to give up on finding my son. I don’t care what people are saying, he didn’t harm himself…why, he just got a new job, he was excited about it, h-he…’ Her voice trailed off as she tried to stop herself from crying.