Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (7 page)

T
he elder brother was taken by drink. The younger one by fairies.
The rational explanation for his disappearance was that he suffered diabetic hallucinations and walked off a cliff or into a forest, never to return. But I think that’s ridiculous. Mama Kyn was the fittest man I knew. He survived the African Front during the Second World War. Not many people managed to do that.

In those days, when Mama Kyn and his brother were alive, we lived in a large, rambling house in the far west of town, near Iew Duh—the local market that spread like an ancient labyrinth beyond the Mot Phran war monument. It was a house that began life as a room my great-grandparents built. It survived the earthquake of 1897, the one, the old people said, that flattened the landscape as though it were butter and opened up valleys to the core of the earth. Although the room forever carried cracks and lopsided floorboards, it stood resolutely, the strong, steadfast heart of the house. As the family grew so did the building—wings and corridors added on like meandering afterthoughts, resulting in uneven floors and crooked doors and windows. The wooden shutters barely closed, but in those days there was little fear of burglars. Neighbours walked in and out as though it were their own home, friends dropped in at odd hours yet never left without a meal, and stray cats and dogs were welcome to stay long after the rain that had driven them to shelter had stopped.

Around the house, at the edges of its vast and untamed garden, were a tilting row of tin and wood shacks occupied by a motley assortment of people—an old woman called Mena who helped with the cooking and cleaning; Bah Lam, the dwarfish household handyman; and, at the end of the line in two separate yet identical containers, the brothers Mama Heh and Mama Kyn. Within the main house were my grandparents, their eldest daughter Ruth and my young uncle Gordon whose room was closest to the main door so he didn’t have to stagger far after a raucously late night. My parents occupied a bedroom towards the back of the house, next to which I slept with my older brother Keith and my sister Stephanie. I was eleven, small for my age, and mostly bullied by everyone. On particularly windy nights, when chestnuts dropped from the tree overhanging our roof, pattering on the tin like rain, Keith would shove me with his foot. ‘Ei, go get the soh ot.’ If I pretended to be asleep, Stef would join in from the other end of the room. ‘Aaron, go, otherwise I’ll tell everyone you wet your bed.’

‘I do not,’ I’d protest.

‘But who will believe you?’

I could see the whites of her teeth as she grinned in the darkness. My sister was stocky and strong, and most of the neighbourhood boys were afraid of her. Inevitably, I’d climb down from the bed and tiptoe outside through the bathroom. I met Mama Heh on many nights as I scrambled around trying to collect chestnuts in the cold. The fact that I was outdoors never seemed to surprise him; usually he’d be tottering towards the general direction of his shack, belting out a war song or peeing long and hard against the garden wall.

Or both.

‘Mei, why does Mama Heh drink so much?’ I once asked my mother.

‘Because he’s seen two wars.’

Africa in the first and Burma in the second, I found out later.

‘So?’ I persisted.

She paused at chopping the onions. ‘He has many memories to forget.’

‘And Mama Kyn? Why doesn’t he drink? He was in one war.’

‘You ask him that,’ she replied and told me to stop bothering her with silly questions.

Uncle Gordon, who spent his few waking hours strumming a guitar in his room, told me Mama Heh had many more reasons to be unhappy.

‘He survived the prison camp, you know, but his only son didn’t.’

‘Did he have a wife?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, but she ran off with a Scottish soldier or something. He was in the military hospital here in Shillong, and she was a nurse.’

‘What about Mama Kyn? Was he married?’

‘No. The only love in his life is kha bah.’ A type of local fish. Mama Kyn was a keen fisherman.

Our curious patchwork of lives lapped on peacefully—my grandfather left for his car workshop every morning at eleven; my father to the government health department where he was a medical officer; Uncle Gordon made occasional perfunctory stabs at attending college where he was supposedly studying zoology; Aunt Ruth diligently attended to her duties as English teacher at the Montessori school; my grandmother, a devoted gardener, spent her time coaxing vegetables and flowers out of warm, red earth; and my mother, once she’d packed Keith, Stef, and me off to school, would retire to the kitchen, to her knitting, or walk to Iew Duh to bargain for the day’s freshest culinary offerings. This steady routine was interrupted occasionally by childhood illness and local drama—a neighbourhood wedding or funeral—and at other instances by Mama Heh’s flamboyant drunken outbursts.

Once, my grandparents threw a birthday party for Uncle Gordon, and while everyone sang love songs around the piano, his voice rose above the clamour, brash, slurred, and angry—‘You have never known war,’ he shouted to a slightly embarrassed-looking young man next to him. He was the friend of a neighbour’s son who was the same age as Uncle Gordon. The music came to an abrupt halt.

‘I didn’t…’ he began but was interrupted by a string of expletives that outlined in rich detail what Mama Heh thought of the young man and his ancestry. ‘May you all never know war,’ he said, and his words rang through the living room, twining around the cigarette smoke, settling in between the piano keys, turning the alcohol in everyone’s mouth a little flat and sour. When the glass slipped from Mama Heh’s hand and shattered on the floor, he started openly weeping and my grandmother and Aunt Ruth had to lead him away.

‘What did you say?’ asked Uncle Gordon later.

The young man, flushed to the tips of his ears, said he’d asked if Mama Heh had any war wounds.

Occasionally, though, when Mama Heh was sober and lucid, he would join in our backyard football games, played between the kids in our house and our neighbours’ brood, who’d jump across the wall any chance they got. Two tall bamboo sticks made for a pair of unsteady goalposts, and the ball, regularly flattened by an enthusiastic forward, was usually wrapped in rags. Mama Kyn, who often left for his fishing trips to Um Ïam at dawn, was hardly ever around. So far, Mama Heh was my favourite of the two—especially since we always won whenever he was in our team.

Mama Heh’s wish for us all to never know war didn’t strictly come true—although our brush with conflict was restricted to wrestling each other for the radio tuner to listen to the evening news. I have hazy memories of the India–Pakistan war of ’65. We spent hours pasting newspaper on our windowpanes, blackening our Hillman’s headlights, and digging trenches in the garden. All this only to run outside to catch a glimpse of the East Pakistan bombers as they roared across our skies, drowning the wail of the town’s warning siren. What’s more clear in my mind is that it was the year Mama Heh died. It wasn’t long after the war that he took to his bed and refused to leave his room. Within the depths of those pillows and blankets, he aged more than he had in the past fifty years, as though the weight of life had suddenly fallen on him all at once. He became delirious, mixing up his memories, calling out for his runaway wife and long-dead son.

‘We ran away together, Jacob and me, from the war camp. In Burma it was very wet and cold. We walked for days and days. He was so tired, my poor boy,’ he’d say.

Nobody had the heart to remind him that Jacob had succumbed to his wounds a day after being taken prisoner. Before Mama Heh died, at about four in the morning when the rooster crowed, he smiled. Aunt Ruth, who was watching by his bedside, said he muttered ‘He is here’.

I only started spending time with Mama Kyn later that year when my mother discovered I was failing almost every subject in school. This was not, as my teacher pointed out, because I was stupid but because I wasn’t even trying. ‘Aaron is distracted,’ said Mrs Nongrum, peering at us over her spectacles. ‘Sometimes he’s also very sleepy in class. Your son should go to bed earlier, Kong Jasmine.’ I didn’t think it worth explaining to them how I spent many nights collecting chestnuts.

On the walk back home, my mother decided our house was filled with too many diversions, that there was always somebody dropping by, and that Uncle Gordon or even my own siblings hardly set me a good example to follow. ‘Keith only wants to go to Kelvin Cinema, Stef is better at football than every boy in the locality…you’re the only one with brains, Aaron. For studies.’ I was dismayed at my mother’s ambitions and the hopes she’d pinned on my academic abilities. It was better for her to expect nothing, allowing me to get away with little or no effort at schoolwork. ‘You study in Mama Kyn’s room,’ she declared as we neared our gate, and my heart deflated, much like our football when Stef stepped on it.

For two hours every evening, I was sent across the backyard with textbooks and pencils in hand. It was October and the Shillong air was soft and mild. Perfect for playing outdoors—seven stones, dodge ball, hide-and-seek, or when we felt particularly imaginative, smugglers and pirates. We’d tie an old pillowcase to a stick and sit atop the Hillman, waving it in the breeze, pretending we were far out at sea. We wouldn’t be sailing long before an argument would break out between Keith and Stef over who’d be appointed captain, but it was tremendous fun while it lasted. Those evenings I’d gaze longingly at the others, with only the fear of my mother’s anger keeping me glued to my seat. She had a sharp, impatient tongue that we were all used to, but her temper was fiery as sohmynken khnai, tiny ‘rat’ chillies that could send even my grandfather reeling.

It wouldn’t have been as hard if the company I kept was a little more entertaining. Mama Kyn didn’t talk much and it was up to me to initiate conversation when the drudgery of math and grammar became unbearable. This wasn’t easy. Unlike Mama Heh, who was usually tipsy and voluble, his younger brother cleaned his fishing equipment in silence, rarely taking his eyes off the reel or the fine tangle of angling bait. Finally, despite the fact that I wasn’t the least bit interested in the sport, I hazarded a question.

‘What was the biggest fish you ever caught, mama?’

He didn’t stop polishing the rod. I thought he hadn’t heard me and was about to give up and turn back to my books when he replied, ‘Bhoroli, 23rd December 1958.’

‘Where is Bhoroli, mama?’

‘It’s a river in Assam, in the Bhalukpung district.’

‘Is it bigger than Wah Dieng Doh?’ I was referring to the river that hemmed our neighbourhood, where Keith, Stef, and I would sometimes go swimming in the spring.

Mama Kyn snorted, puffing at his pipe furiously. ‘Bigger? In the monsoons you cannot see the other side. It’s as wide as the sea.’

After that, none of our evenings were spent in silence.

He knew the rivers of the region intimately—both in the plains and the hills—and listed their characteristics like old, familiar lovers. Lai Lad, he said, was unpredictable, always in danger of swelling with swift and brutal flash floods, while Subansiri was complacently calm, perfect to visit for long, unhurried excursions. Ranikor was the wild child, difficult to navigate and tame, yet her waters were home to the golden mahseer, rare as drops of solid sunshine. On the Brahmaputra, mighty and vast, he had travelled and hunted with pirate boatmen, floating on makeshift bamboo melengs in jungle darkness when they’d sing folk songs and drink rice beer.

‘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.