Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (5 page)

‘Will you tell him at least, doctor? What I said…’

Doctor Wallang hesitated.

‘Please.’

‘If I see him.’

The embroidery hoop slipped to the floor; the doctor picked it up and placed it on the table. She was stitching a wreath of white lilies.

‘Are these your favourite flowers?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she replied quietly. ‘Somebody else’s. I couldn’t find any to place on their grave.’

One evening in late December, Doctor Wallang was summoned to a house close to where Kyntang lived, to perform an exorcism. The woman had lost her child, but the dead baby, the villagers said, refused to leave her. Since the stillbirth three days ago she’d been lying in bed muttering incoherently and weeping.

‘She might be in shock,’ he said, ‘and grieving.’

‘But, doctor,’ they insisted, ‘we’ve heard it crying at night, hungry for her milk.’

So he sprinkled holy water around the room, chanted a mantra, and spoke into the air, commanding the child’s spirit to leave its mother in peace. Finally, he asked to be left alone with her, and spoke to her gently, telling her that she was young and had many more years to give birth to healthy children. He then gave her something to make her sleep and instructed the household to allow her to rest. The doctor walked back, exhausted, wishing he hadn’t missed the last bus home. Along the way he passed people from the village returning from Sohra market, carrying khohs, conical cane baskets, filled with vegetables, grain and fruit. Trailing behind them was Kyntang, doubled over with a gunnysack on his back.

The young man didn’t see the doctor. He looked weary, and his face more lean than usual.

‘Kyntang…’

The boy stopped and slung the sack to the ground.

Once, Doctor Wallang had taken his children to see the Mawsmai caves, an hour away from home; they were cold and hollow, running for miles into the earth. Standing in front of Kyntang, he felt a similar sense of emptiness.

‘How is your father keeping?’ the doctor asked.

‘Not too good over the winter.’

‘And you? Where are you working now?’

‘There’s a bilati man who’s building a house near Mawmluh…I look after his horses.’

The doctor hesitated. ‘I saw Miss Lucy about a month ago. She is…’

‘Better, I’m sure.’

Dusk had fallen heavily around them and he found it hard to decipher the look on Kyntang’s face.

‘She said to tell you…’

For a moment, the young man’s eyes were set alight.

‘That she was sorry you were dismissed from Kut Madan. That you were very good with the horses—’

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

O
ften, 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.