Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (6 page)

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 stop 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.

‘Kumno,’ said Mama Jos; he was the only one who dared address her.

She nodded in acknowledgement. He asked after her health and then about Malcolm.

‘He’s gone to Garo Hills,’ she replied quietly. ‘The memsahib needs a translator for her work there.’

When she left, the room drooped in disappointment, but soon Kong Lee declared that if Kong Banri believed that unlikely story she deserved to be cuckolded. What sort of a stupid wife was she? The vegetable seller whispered that old mantras worked even from great distances; as long as Kong Banri was in possession of something that belonged to the lovers, she could still do them harm.

‘What do you mean?’ Bah Lyngdoh was now mincing tobacco on his palm.

The lady told us about a family in Laban, the oldest neighbourhood in Shillong, who were originally from Sohra. Very rich, very proud. They probably weren’t thlen keepers but they knew mantras which could cause great harm.

‘It could be a slow disease,’ she elaborated. ‘The kind that doctors can’t diagnose. Or’—and this she swore she’d seen with her own eyes—‘like what happened to poor Bah Passah.’

‘What happened to poor Bah Passah?’ we asked.

She wrapped her jaiñkyrshah, a checkered cotton apron, closer. ‘He’d had an argument with the head of the family, about some property somewhere…and one day, when he walked out of their house, he dropped dead on the road. A healthy man of fifty.’

‘That’s crazy,’ said Bah Lyngdoh.

Bah Jos nodded gravely. ‘I’d heard about this…’

‘Let’s wait and see,’ I said feebly, ‘I’m sure they’ll return soon.’

No one, not even me, I must admit, was convinced.

A fortnight passed by, and then a whole month. There was still no news of the French lady and her translator. The hotel staff had apparently resorted to stowing the memsahib’s things in a godown, as they needed the room for other guests. Our small town was inflamed with stories, and people began to take sides in a quiet civil war—those who were convinced that Kong Banri and her family were behind the disappearance of the lovers and those of us who still believed they were travelling through Garo Hills. The latter were fast dwindling in numbers.

Everywhere crept whispers of the Rynjahs being thlen keepers, old stories were dug up of how, in the past, their business rivals left their home with a moora stuck to their backsides, that their greater enemies would suddenly drop dead on the streets.

‘I thought that was the family in Laban,’ I said.

‘The Rynjahs too,’ snapped Kong Lee, annoyed at the interruption.

The vegetable seller was telling us that strange drumbeats could be heard on the Rynjahs’ roof every night—feverishly playing until dawn. They lived in a large double-storyed bungalow near the racecourse and the busy Polo market.

‘Speak to anyone there, they’ll tell you’ she concluded.

When we asked Kong Banri about her husband, she’d say he was still away, working as a translator for the memsahib. I don’t think it would be wrong to say that her words sounded hollow. People started keeping away from her and her family, and soon she moved out of the house on Quinton Road and went to live in Polo Grounds with her parents.

‘It’s the guilt,’ said Kong Lee, ‘it’s probably driving her mad.’

‘Even if she did something,’ I interrupted, ‘what on earth did she do with the bodies?’

Unfortunately, that set up another hundred rounds of breathless speculation—perhaps they’d been thrown into Ward’s Lake, or further away into some river outside Shillong. Maybe they’d been burnt in the Khasi crematorium in Wahingdoh, where bones of the deceased were placed in small stone urns dotted around the hillside. They could have also been buried in the vast barren land behind the Rynjahs’ house in Polo Grounds. The last was dismissed unceremoniously until Kong Lee, walking past there one evening, on her way home, came across a dog carrying a bone that looked like a human femur.

The next morning, the police swarmed the place, as did a crowd of onlookers. Everyone willing and able were given shovels. I held mine tight but couldn’t bring myself to dig the marshy ground; a great wave of nausea washed over me, I felt betrayed by the earth beneath my feet. A group of feral dogs sniffed and snuffled around us, probably looking for more meat. Some people beat them away with shovels until they yelped. It was impossible, I thought, yet perhaps it was precisely because nothing ever happened in this town that we were willing to believe anything. Rumours had given shape to something tangible. The winds here were trapped by the mountains; our words weren’t blown away. Instead, they returned to us in strange, distorted echoes, ferocious reflections of ourselves. On that crisp February day, the cold clawing at our fingers, we dug with mighty fervour, some working harder than they had all their lives. We brought up stone and roots and mud that would turn into thick, endless sludge during the monsoon. We realized that the burial ground, for lack of a better name, was about half a mile further when a young police officer there struck something with his shovel. The crowd moved up like sheep who’d found a greener pasture to graze. Soon, more cries and the sound of ringing metal filled the air. Slowly, we unearthed skeletons, not of humans, but horses, and rusty frames of entire vehicles.

It was a war cemetery, the livestock, ammunition and jeeps that the American and British army buried before leaving Shillong. They were given orders to do so rather than hand over their equipment and other paraphernalia to the locals. Before us spread an absurd assortment of military goods, abandoned and forgotten. The metal curled and twisted, the place stank of mould and old rot. I had a fleeting thought that this was where our words died and decayed. Soon, the dogs went crazy over the animal bones, barking and fighting with each other until they were kicked and chased away with sticks and stones. Scavengers started picking at the vehicles for scrap metal. We left only when evening fell, after we’d finished resurrecting our past.

A few weeks later, just before the schools reopened, Malcolm returned. Banri moved back to their house on Quinton Road. We never saw the French lady again. Once, I asked Malcolm about her, and he gave me a vague answer saying that on their travels she’d fallen mysteriously ill with a fever that seemed to slowly suck away her strength and colour. Instead of coming back to Shillong, she went to Guwahati from where she’d make her way home, and hopefully recover.

People say the night Malcolm came back the drumbeats stopped, but even now I still hear them sometimes, throbbing in the darkness, steady as a heartbeat, old as time.

Dream of the Golden Mahseer