Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories

by Janice Pariat

  You asked me to look at the sky. The stars were numberless.

  ‘Don’t ask me about constellations,’ you added. ‘I only know that’s Orion’s Belt.’

  I said I had Orion’s Belt on my neck.

  You pushed yourself up on your elbow; for the first time since we’d arrived there was a look on your face I hadn’t seen before—interest.

  ‘Show me.’

  I turned my face away from you, and pointed to a mole just below my left earlobe. ‘That’s one.’

  Another lower, near the centre of my throat.

  ‘That’s two.’

  I undid the buttons of my nightdress. The last one was far below the hollow of my neck. ‘That’s three.’

  You traced a line over them all. You were smiling.

  The next day, you were thoroughly charming. Not just to me, but even to my parents whom until now you’d largely ignored. You accompanied my mother and yours on their walk around the large backyard vegetable garden; offered to show my father, since he was a professor of history, a collection of old journals your grandfather had written, and at lunch, which we ate at a table laid out in the lawn under a garden umbrella, you were an impeccable little hostess. You talked about where the cook acquired the freshest fish; how the nearest town Bishwanath Chariali was merely a small cluster of shops—‘Blink and you’ll miss it’; you queried my mother about the bakery and asked if she could make us some lemon tarts. Your parents, I noticed, looked delighted.

  ‘What are you girls up to today?’ your father asked.

  You looked at me and smiled. ‘I was thinking we could go for a walk…’

  Everyone said it was a good idea…the plantation was dotted with historical landmarks from the days of the Ahom kings. We could go see the Vishnu temple, your father added, or the water tank that apparently dated back to the fourteenth century.

  I waited, impatient and excited, as everyone retired for their customary afternoon nap—even my parents had given in to this rare indulgence. When you emerged from your room, sulky with sleep, I was sitting on the wooden swing on the veranda, swaying over the cool sea-green floor. I jumped off it quickly feeling as though you’d caught me doing something childish.

  A little while later we set off. By then though, your energy had waned, and you’d retreated back into your brooding, reclusive self. As we walked, rather than making conversation, you rolled cigarettes. On both sides of the dirt road were miles of low-lying tea bushes, interspersed by tall silver oak, grown for protective shade.

  I asked where we were going.

  ‘Nearby.’

  We didn’t go far; in fact we didn’t even leave the borders of Chandbari. You took me to a pukhuri, a large pond bordered on all sides by raised red-soil ground and rows of birch. In one corner stood a gnarled old banyan under which we sat, brushing away stinging red ants and fat black beetles. You lit a cigarette and let it smoulder between your fingers. Your hair clung to your neck in dark, sweaty streaks. Again, I wasn’t sure whether you’d prefer to be alone.

  ‘Are you alright?’

  You looked at me as though no one had asked you that in a long time.

  ‘Someone I know,’ you said, ‘tried to kill herself.’

  ‘Oh.’ I wasn’t sure whether to ask if she’d succeeded. ‘It was one in a long line of unfinished projects. The end of life.’

  In the stillness of the evening, your words skimmed over the water and sank without a trace. You told me how she didn’t want a decisive relinquishment—a once-and-for-all hanging, or fatal leap or bullet through the brain. She only had an inexplicable urge to extinguish herself and flicker back like a trick candle. She wanted, for instance, to throw herself in the path of oncoming buses, or fall down a steep flight of stairs, or constantly push the number of sleeping tablets she could take. Just enough to sink into a deep and dreamless sleep, where she didn’t have to be rushed to hospital and stomach-pumped and forced to open her eyes in a nasty little room blindingly white and sanitized.

  ‘That’s what it was,’ you finished, ‘this duality she wrestled with for months.’

  ‘And how is she now?’

  ‘Still gathering courage.’

  ‘To live or die?’

  ‘Both.’

  You stubbed out your cigarette and stood up, extending your hand. ‘Let’s go for a swim.’ Then you pulled me down the slope, rough and strong, running faster and faster. I could see the edge of the lake, oozing mulch, and the water deep and dark, littered with leaves.

  ‘Stop,’ I shouted. ‘Stop.’

  You gripped my hand tighter, and carried on, your shoes crunching grass and stone.

  ‘Let me go,’ I screamed and yanked myself away. ‘I don’t know how to swim. If you push me in, I’ll drown.’

  The water lapped at our feet. It seeped into the edges of my sandals. I didn’t realize it then but my eyes were wet with tears. Of fright mainly, and anger. We walked back to the bungalow in silence.

  That night you offered a wordless apology.

  I was in bed when you walked in and went straight through to the bathroom. I could hear the sound of running water. I thought you’d come to smoke. I didn’t ask because I was still angry with you. Then you called me over.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Please.’

  The bathtub was almost full, and steam rose thickly clouding the mirror, the windows. You stood behind me and started unbuttoning my nightdress. I began to protest but caught a glimpse of our image in the mirror, and in there I was someone else. Held by a stare, by your hands, quick and cold through the fabric. When it dropped to the ground you asked me to step into the tub.

  I did. The water was scathing. In a moment you were out of your T-shirt and jeans. We fit snugly, like twins. Then you soaped my back, my shoulders, my hair.

  I did the same for you.

  And despite the steam I saw how you looked nothing like the woman I thought was your mother. That you came from elsewhere, a life cut unnaturally short, and that even though you were only nineteen you were filled with an old sadness. I noticed the delicate slope of your shoulders, the plane of your back like a smooth river stone, the tiny red beauty spots speckled on your skin, your neck thin and long, swerving up in a tense line, your fingers pale and white. When you turned around and faced me, your eyes were closed, and drops of water glistened on your cheeks, hollow like emptied lakes. We lay there, perfectly still, until the water cooled.

  The next day, the world was washed anew.

  The flick of a page, a sip from a glass, one leg crossing over the other. Sometimes your hand trailed over mine, your shoulder grazed my arm, or you’d stand close behind me, your breath on my neck. Every gesture, I thought, was significant, and added something unforgettable to our lives.

  You never took me back to the pukhuri; instead we walked to the river that bordered Chandbari, that lay beyond a line of railroad tracks, at the end of a dusty, lonely road. We strolled down to the water, which spilled endlessly before us mirroring a vast, empty sky. All along the bank burned small lanterns, and in their golden glow fishermen sat and untangled their nets. Their boats were moored on land, long, narrow vessels that looked like elegant paper cut-outs.

  ‘During the monsoon,’ you said, ‘the river is as wide as the sea.’

  Before I left, we walked there every afternoon; sitting on the bank for hours, doodling on the sand. You told me your mother used to write in journals, filling them out year after year, and that after she died you looked for them. They became the most important thing in the world, except you couldn’t find them and you thought perhaps she had walked here one day and drowned them in the river. Sometimes, we clambered around the bank like lost children, climbing large, rough boulders and dipping our feet into the pools that formed between them, crystal-clear mirrors that reflected our faces and the sky. Once, we went much further than usual and came across a temple on a cliff, filling up for the evening puja. The worshippers were mostly women from the nearby villages, with solemn,
earnest faces framed by their cotton saris. We stayed a while and listened to the chanting, watched the offering of lights. Nearby stood a large slab of rock, marked with strange lines, squares and squiggles. A woman from the village, who happened to pass by, told us, ‘It’s the place where the gods play dice.’ Another time, we found a stretch of stones that looked like pale, bleached bones. We tread on them gently; it could have been the graveyard of a herd of prehistoric animals. Close to where the fishermen sat, we climbed a hill from where we could see the dry sandy stretch of an old river.

  ‘Don’t you feel,’ you asked, ‘as though you are elsewhere?’

  I knew what you meant; in the midst of Assam’s lush landscape it was a sudden desert hollowed by dips and dunes. When we were close to the dry river, you threw off your slippers and walked in, I followed. The sand was warm and slippery, shaping itself fluidly under our feet. It was hard to imagine that once where we were standing, a river flowed, swift and spirited. We found perfectly smooth stones that fit the palm of our hands, and strange, contorted driftwood, some large enough to cradle us like boats.

  On some evenings, when the light seemed to last longer, we’d hire a boat and a fisherman would row us out on the Brahmaputra. Mostly you’d ask him to go upstream and then allow us to drift, stopping before the current swept us too far out. We’d sit on the plank in the middle; it smelled of fish, and a certain wet wood dampness, like a forest, I thought, that grew in caves. You looked happiest then, when we floated past the world, gently rocked by lapping water. On some evenings, dusk fell around us, and we were guided only by lanterns and the fisherman’s song.

  Every night we’d curl around each other in the bathtub, like river reeds, the water deep and warm around us. Sometimes, down my neck, you traced the stars. Sometimes you spoke about your mother.

  ‘Why did she do it?’

  You shrugged, the water rippling over your shoulders, the steam quivering off your skin. ‘I know why even though I can’t explain it.’

  Sometimes you tried; you sat up, smoking, feverishly talking. ‘Don’t you feel that way? This awkwardness, with your place in the world. You know, when I put my head under water I hear nothing, I see much clearer…’ And you’d plunge into the tub, grazing against my stomach, my thighs.

  The morning we left, you were nowhere to be found.

  ‘I do apologize,’ your father said. ‘Ever since her mother… you know, ever since it happened, she’s been like this, a bit difficult.’

  My parents, ever gracious, said they understood, that there was no need for him to be sorry, that they’d had a wonderful time. In turn, they invited your parents to Shillong, and although they promised to come, you and your family have not made a visit.

  On our way back I was mostly silent, watching the landscape outside the window flash past. Everything seemed unreal—the low-roofed houses, the swathes of paddy land, the endless stretch of bridges—changing, I felt, on a screen at a distance. Soon, we were climbing, the engine moaned, and the valleys deepened. We passed the sweeping blue waters of Barapani, shimmering coldly in the sunlight, and I felt a great sense of emptiness—as though it had been drained and all the world lay hollow like the lake.

  The Shillong we drove into was as cold and dispirited as we’d left it. I found it hard to believe we’d been away. Nothing, and everything, had changed. That evening, Sarah, one of my close friends, called, as she’d promised, to fill me in on events I’d missed. She had a crush on twin boys, but couldn’t tell one from the other; someone else had been kissed behind the shelter of an umbrella at Ward’s Lake. Jason, she giggled, was eagerly awaiting my return.

  ‘And you?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘How was your holiday?’

  I thought of you, your hands, your face. And folded them up, our secret lives.

  I went to a lake and drowned.

  ‘Nothing special.’

  When I think of you now, it’s the feel of wet sand and long grass that comes to me, the smell of cigarettes, and cloves and creatures that live close to water. The stench of your old sadness. I imagine you waiting, like when I first found you, for someone to lead you out to where all rivers end, to the sea.

  Embassy

  It was a corpse-cold evening in mid-December when Josephine broke his heart. The sky was the colour of razor blades, lying flat and square outside the window and slivered delicately between the branches of bare trees. The air both numbed and sharpened his senses, froze and shaped his breath. In his ears was the echo of her silence when he asked about Ashley, the Anglo boy from the neighbourhood next to theirs, the boy with the blue-grey eyes who played the guitar like Slash.

  ‘Lal said he saw you with him last week, and yesterday. Just tell me the truth, Jo…’

  And in her own way, he supposed she had. First she laughed about it and treated it all as a joke. Then she denied ever being with Ashley in the chai shop—or maybe she’d joined him once, but it didn’t mean anything, and surely Tei would not be the sort to begrudge her a cup of tea with an acquaintance. Finally, she lapsed into sullen silence, as though it were all his fault for bringing this up. That things were otherwise alright, and he’d gone and disturbed the peace.

  ‘Just tell me the truth…’ he pleaded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she snapped at one point. ‘What truth? Whose truth?’

  It was very simple, he said, did she want to be with Ashley or with him?

  And when she kept quiet, he knew. He walked aimlessly for a while, pacing the sloping streets of his locality until he reached the bustle of Laitumkhrah. The pavements were crowded with evening shoppers and local vegetable sellers stocked with sheaves of mustard leaves. A crowd of youngsters buzzed around the aloo-muri man at Police Point; they stood with banana-leaf bowls, laughing loudly and eyeing each other with interest. Further down the main road, he saw a group of friends turn into a jadoh stall for chai and conversation. Any other evening, he would have joined them, but today he walked swiftly past. Only when he reached Don Bosco Square did he realize what he wanted was a drink. He debated over taking a taxi—the roads were clogged to bursting with traffic—and decided to walk to Police Bazaar instead. Maybe it would warm him up. Perhaps it would clear the pain, and stop thoughts of Josephine running through his head like a madly looped tape. Also, he would save on taxi fare. That twenty bucks would buy him an extra drink. It would keep him warmer than the arms he’d never find himself in again.

  After he navigated Jacob’s Ladder, a long flight of narrow, slippery stairs that led to the bottom of Don Bosco Hill, he walked briskly by Ward’s Lake and the main post office building. Eventually, he strode down the sloping So So Tham Road towards Khyndai Lad junction, a pulsating heart of people and traffic. From here, spreading out in long, grasping fingers, were seedy, unlit streets, each an accomplished specialist in various nocturnal offerings, from the medically urgent to the dubious and debauched. Keating Road on the left came to life after the liquor stores in town had closed. It was lined with makeshift stalls that sold alcohol ‘in black’ alongside perfectly legal yet deleterious deep-fried prawns packed in greasy newspaper. On the right was Jail Road whose genteel bakeries and music shops gave way to a dkhar vegetable market and rows of sweet shops that smelled perpetually of rose water and ghee. Running parallel to this was Quinton Road whose one major landmark was the blue-and-white Eight Sisters Hotel—a name which, as everyone joked, referred less to the states in Northeast India than the number of whores you could pay to have in your bed at the same time. Along Glory’s Plaza Road, where Tei was now walking, these working women stood outside Payal Cinema, their bodies carefully preened and positioned. ‘Come-hither’ their hips and hands beckoned, while their eyes darted through the crowd, sharp and knowing. The men they smiled at were the ones they picked as potentials; they could tell, even from a distance, those who were the slightest bit interested or intrigued. Even though he hadn’t ever paid for a woman before, for a moment Tei was tempted—an image flashed in his mind of Josephine and Ashle
y, together, doing the things she’d allowed him to do to her, on her bed, on his sofa, on their long drives to the countryside of Kyrdemkulai. The world roared in his ears. He wanted to be with someone as revenge, as redressal for betrayal. Maybe all he needed to get Josephine off his mind was a good, hard fuck.

  Something must have shown on his face—if not the keen edge of desire then something lonely and desperate—for a woman smiled at him and moved closer. She was wearing a silky, shiny blue top and a long black skirt; over this she’d draped a red-and-white jaiñkyrshah.

  ‘Want a good time?’ she asked in Khasi. Unlike most of the others, her mouth wasn’t stained scarlet by kwai or khaini, and her lips were full and plump. She had a roundness that he suddenly felt a lust for—voluptuous arms and thighs that he imagined entwined around him, his fingers sinking into her flesh.

  ‘How much?’ he asked, his voice raspy in nervousness. If anyone he knew, or someone who knew his parents, saw him…

  Her smile widened. He could see the tip of her plump red tongue, its infinite wetness.

  ‘Depends on what you want…but why don’t we decide on that later.’ She reached for his hand—he could see her bitten fingernails, the braceleted wrist—and at the touch of her skin, something like a splash of icy water hit him at the back of his head. What was he doing? It had vanished, his nerve, his bravado, the inkling of lust, and all that remained was a wretched emptiness.

  ‘Next time,’ he said, feeling embarrassed, but she already knew, and had already lost interest, her eyes once again searching the crowd.

  He walked briskly on, awash with self-reproach, and, in an attempt to assuage the guilt, stopped to drop a coin for the blind duitara player on the sidewalk. The narrow street was lined with food sellers and their shaky wooden carts strung with gas lamps and burners that shed dusty, hazy pools of light into the evening. It all looked appealing—chillies stuffed with potato and mint, brinjal fried in gram flour batter, noodles tossed in fatty pork bits, boiled eggs halved and sprinkled with pepper and fresh coriander—but he was in a hurry. His thirst was stronger now.