Bisesh, the chiselled-face Nepali chap at the counter, nodded as Tei walked in. Everyone knew Bisesh only spoke to regulars. Most of the time he behaved as though he owned this place. He didn’t; some Marwari man did, but he wasn’t usually at the bar. Shillong was safe now for outsiders to own businesses, but not that safe. Merely twenty years ago streets rang with the cries of ‘beh dkhar’. Memories, in cases like these, were long and warily forgiving. It was best to keep behind the scenes like an elusive puppeteer. Hence, even if Embassy had changed hands a hundred times, from one dkhar to another, nobody inside knew; most, of course, were in no state to care. The place looked the same as it had when it first opened in the mid-’60s—two rectangular rooms that echoed like empty tombs, joined by short, stubby steps, filled with rows of wooden tables, and on the ceiling, long-stemmed fans that blossomed like tragic flowers. Here, people drenched their grief in alcohol, and stashed their dreams behind the familiar, flimsy darkness that smelled faintly dank and sour, the odour of defeat.
Tei looked around, over the crowd of heads, and for a moment his intention wavered—he’d come for a drink, but there wasn’t a single table free. He stood undecided for a moment, he didn’t know of another place he could go to in Police Bazaar—the bar in the fancy hotel on the main road was excruciatingly expensive, and all the cheap alcohol joints near his neighbourhood in Laitumkhrah had been closed by order of the Seng Kynthei, a local woman’s organization aiming to eliminate (what they considered) vice and immorality in town. Damn them, he cursed silently. There was always the option, he supposed, of buying a bottle and drinking it on the sidewalk, like so many others did. Then again, there was the danger of someone he knew walking by…his musing was interrupted by a rumble of slurry voices calling him over. The drinkers were in an amiable mood tonight, and more than that, could recognize a thirsting, despairing soul. Hey, bro, they beckoned, join us. Ei, shong hangne. And from a dark corner, a single word—‘Teiskem’—someone who knew his name.
From that distance, Tei couldn’t make out the man’s face. It might have been anyone. Yet, even as he approached the table, he couldn’t place him. It was a face that wasn’t uncommon, marked by the singular weariness that settled over everyone’s features in a town landlocked by more than towering mountains. Somewhere, the light shifted, a shadow moved, Tei caught the highlight of his nose, the familiar eyes, and a name snapped into place like a cocked gun.
‘Mama Lang?’ he asked to be sure.
The man replied by lifting his glass and knocking back the remaining liquor. Then he waved Tei to an empty chair. His large hands were knotted and gnarled, rough as tree bark, inflicted by a steady tremor. He probably wouldn’t be swift and nimble enough to make kites like he used to, thought Tei. Mama Lang’s kites flew the highest in the locality, and his mynja, string dipped in shards of powdered glass, was the toughest to cut in a mid-air fight.
‘Thank you,’ said Tei taking a seat.
‘You look the same,’ said Mama Lang, pouring out two generous measures of whisky. Tei couldn’t possibly say that about him. A decade ago, Lang was good-looking, in his mid-twenties, but now he was an old man. His eyes settled on nothing in particular and flickered like dark moths around a bare bulb, his skin, puffy and pale, hung on his face like a cheap wrinkled suit.
‘What brings you here?’ he slurred; the smell of stale alcohol clung to his breath, pungent and strong.
Tei drew back, a little uncomfortable, a little repulsed. He couldn’t believe this was the same person he’d looked up to as a kid. The one who taught him how to win at marbles, construct a sturdy kali het to joy-ride down the neighbourhood slopes, to fly kites with a quick, confident hand.
‘Still staying in Laban?’ Mama Lang peered at him over the rim of his glass. The golden liquid sparkled in the dim light.
Tei shook his head. ‘We moved…ten years ago. To Nongrim.’
To a better part of town, less rough, less poor. Away from the riff-raff as his mother used to say.
‘That’s why I don’t see you any more.’ Mama Lang chuckled good-naturedly. The drinks were going down particularly well this evening.
‘And you still fly kites?’ Mama Lang scrambled on the table for the matchbox. Tei pushed it across with a finger.
‘I work.’ In the agriculture department…as a special rural development officer. His parents were particularly proud. It was so difficult to get a government job these days. At least without a decent number of contacts in all the right places, and they’d only been in touch with a distant cousin who said he would help but it all depended on how Tei conducted himself at the interview.
‘Where?’
Tei told him.
Mama Lang tilted his head and howled like a wolf at the moon. Tei almost spilled his whisky in alarm. A few of the other drinkers turned around and told him to shut up or they’d have him thrown out. He stopped and said, ‘Good, good. That’s what we fought for. To give our Khasi youth employment and opportunity.’ He hiccuped and gulped his drink to subdue it.
Tei shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He didn’t want Mama Lang to bring up the KSU days. The days when Mama Lang and the others fought and rallied and lived as outlaws. He’d heard it all before. Over and over again. From friends and relatives and neighbours. He’d come here to think about Josephine and her brown eyes and her full pink lips that he’d never kiss again. He watched his companion struggle to light a match, the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth like an embarrassing dribble. The murmur in the room was louder now, the air sticky and warm, the number of figures seemed to have grown silently like a damp patch on the wall.
‘What brings you here?’ asked Mama Lang again. Maybe he remembered Tei hadn’t answered the first time, maybe he forgot he’d already asked the question. With the alcohol snug in his throat, Tei began, ‘There’s this girl…’
‘The most beautiful girl in the world,’ finished Mama Lang. ‘And she left? Dumped you like a used condom?’
Tei felt a spray of spittle on his face. He wiped it off and nodded.
‘Was her name Angela?’ Mama Lang had managed to light the cigarette by now and dragged on it deeply.
Tei shook his head. He had a feeling he wouldn’t be able to tell his story. But what was there to tell? He loved her, and she’d said she loved him. But she didn’t really. And how could he compete with Ashley, with his slick Yamaha bike, his trendy haircut, the shiniest leather jacket in town, and a multitude of talents he was sure extended beyond playing the guitar like a rock star. Tei finished his drink and poured out another.
‘My girl’s name was Angela, you know. She was…,’ Mama Lang struggled to find the words.
‘Like an angel,’ finished a small, supremely intoxicated man from the next table.
‘Or the devil in disguise,’ added his equally inebriated companion.
‘Don’t make fun of her, Rit.’ Mama Lang lurched forward. His hands slammed the table. Tei steadied the whisky bottle before it toppled over.
‘Let me pour you a drink,’ he said hurriedly. ‘What happened to her?’
‘Kai khlaw,’ Mama Lang muttered as he settled back into his chair.
After he was suitably appeased, he began—it happened, he said, in the mid-’80s.
Those days, Mama Lang was in the KSU, running from the CRPF, the central government police force that was sent by the droves to this hill-station town in the middle of nowhere. He and his ‘brothers’ hid in the jungles (plenty at that time, not like now), ate wild animals, and camped wherever they could find a dry patch in the undergrowth. But he went to see her every day.
Mama Lang shook a finger at nothing in particular. ‘Every day,’ he repeated.
She lived in Malki and he’d tramp through the adjoining Risa Colony forest just for a glimpse of her long, black hair and her smooth, amber skin.
Just like my Josephine, thought Tei.
Angela was beautiful but poor. Her father, a modestly successful tailor, had died of tuberculosis
when she was nine, and her mother was wilting under the same disease. She had five siblings to look after and bring up on her own.
‘I couldn’t help,’ said Mama Lang, clutching his glass so tight Tei thought it might break. ‘Running for my life, living in the wild. I didn’t have any money to call my own. How could I help?’
Angela tried to make ends meet by working as a tea lady in a bank and in as many households as she could manage after work hours. But it wasn’t enough. What with her mother’s medicines and her siblings’ school fees and food to feed so many hungry mouths. In desperation, she approached the manager of the bank for a loan.
‘He’ll give it to me,’ she told Mama Lang, her eyes shining like the fireflies he watched in the jungle at night. ‘He said he’ll give me the money.’
Try as he might, Mama Lang couldn’t believe a dkhar—‘and that too a lazy, filthy Akhomia’—would be willing to help. But she was happy and relieved and he kept his reservations to himself. Weeks passed, and every time he asked about the money, she’d clam up…he knew she was hiding something from him.
‘What? What was she hiding?’ asked Tei.
Mama Lang held up his little finger, said he needed to piss, and shuffled out to the loo.
‘Ei, ei.’ Rit was leaning back on his chair and miraculously not falling over. ‘Ask him if he’s sure she wasn’t a puri. Lots of them in Risa forest.’
‘They were so stoned most of the time they wouldn’t know a real woman from a ghost,’ added his companion.
Rit laughed and choked on his drink. His friend thumped him on the back.
‘They say if you sleep with a water spirit, you’re done for,’ he continued. ‘And look what’s happened to Lang—lost all the screws in his head, and taken to drink.’
Tei was tempted to ask if that was the reason why they’d hit the bottle as well, but decided against it. Who knew how far their alcohol-induced good humour would stretch.
‘But they say there was some girl…’ said Rit’s companion.
‘Bah,’ his friend spat, ‘there’s always some girl. There’s always some girl and there’s always some money, and there’s always love that wasn’t enough or true.’
At that moment, a waiter brought a bottle of whisky to Tei’s table.
‘Bah Lang ordered,’ he said.
‘To Angela,’ chanted the two drunks behind him, lifting their glasses.
‘Or whatever he’s calling her today,’ Rit added.
When Mama Lang returned he asked, ‘What happened?’
Tei hesitated. ‘Nothing. The waiter brought another bottle of whisky. Why don’t you continue your story?’
One afternoon, Mama Lang began, he and his friend Bantei (killed in a police shoot-out during that year’s monsoon) went to the Risa stream to bathe and wash clothes. It was a pretty spot where lovers usually lingered, but with all the trouble in town, nobody visited any more. When they reached, they noticed that two people were sitting by the stream just before it tumbled and vanished deep into the forest.
‘Can you imagine my surprise when I saw Angela? Sitting there in her best Sunday dress with a ribbon and all in her hair. And next to her, this dkhar man with a thick moustache and lecherous eyes. My mother is unwell, Angela was trying to say, we really need the money…please…
‘I will give you the money,’ he said, ‘but what can you give me? The bank calls it collateral…’ He laughed and put his hand on her knee. Then he tried to force himself on her, his black moustache scratching her skin.
‘What did you do?’ asked Tei.
‘I–I was paralysed.’ Mama Lang’s head drooped, the grip on his glass loosened.
Only when the man took out a pair of scissors to threaten Angela did something snap inside him and Mama Lang charged at them…but it was too late.
‘Too late for what?’ Tei leaned forward. The whisky buzzed in his head, he clenched his fists.
She jumped.
Mama Lang tipped his glass over. The liquor flowed over the table and splashed to the floor.
‘Like nohkalikai. She became a waterfall.’
When Tei left the table later that evening, Mama Lang lay slumped on his side. Maybe he was asleep. Tei didn’t try to find out. He staggered out between the empty chairs and tables as though on a boat at sea. When he reached the counter, he fished into his pocket for money and, with some difficulty, counted out the notes. Bisesh, who was tallying figures on a long sheet of paper, glanced up at him; his eyes were sharp and shrewd like a bird.
‘You been sitting with Lang over there?’
Tei nodded. Bisesh crossed his arms and rested them on the counter.
‘What’s he been telling you? About his girl. What was her name? Mabel. Or Angel.’
‘Angela…yes, how did you know…?’
Bisesh laughed. ‘He tells that story to any dumb fuck who’ll listen.’
‘But it’s true…’ Tei protested.
‘Oh, it’s true alright. Lang was part of the KSU and all, but there’s another version of the story. Where the girl fell in love and ran away with an Akhomia bloke. Hurt Lang’s pride, it did. And his…’ Bisesh tapped his temple, and laughed again.
When Tei emerged onto the empty street, he realized it had been raining. In Embassy, things like seasons, and Christmas, and changes in weather passed by unnoticed. It was bitterly cold. Tei stamped his feet and blew into his hands, his breath turning white as though he were exhaling ghosts. As he walked, scanning the road for a taxi he was sure wouldn’t pass, rainwater gushed around his ankles. It was dark and murky, it could be blood for all he knew. Wounds ran deep in this hill-station town in the middle of nowhere.
The Discovery of Flight
As always, there was no dearth of premonitions after the incident. Someone had heard the rooster crow five times that morning. The moon on the evening before, conjectured another, was ringed twice. And the symbols in everyone’s dreams—from dead cats and dismembered limbs to fallen trees and a flock of birds taking flight—became sure signs that Ezra would walk out of his uncle’s house and disappear.
The grandest, most obvious omen of all, however, was the rain. It was raining like the apocalypse had revisited Sohra. The first time was the Great Earthquake of 1897, when entire mountains were whipped and swallowed by faithless tremors and rivers transformed within minutes into magnificent waterfalls. This could easily be the second. The locals were used to rain—every year the monsoon beat relentlessly upon their tin roofs from June to September—but that morning it was the rain of the old days, slap bam briew they called it, rain that wouldn’t stop until it had taken lives. It was a living, breathing monster that howled piteously through the hills for blood.
‘Why he would go for a walk in such weather, god only knows,’ said Kong Syntiew, a housekeeper who’d been in Ezra’s uncle’s service for over thirty years. She hadn’t met him before he left that morning, but she’d been the one to discover the kitchen door unlatched, the kettle that had cooled by the stove, and a teacup washed and placed to dry by the sink. ‘He’s always been a neat boy,’ she added, ‘right from when he was a child.’
When Ezra didn’t return that afternoon, a mild confusion settled into the household. His aunt and uncle were gentle folk, accustomed to a quiet life of careful, impeccable routine. Mama Kes was an averagely important government officer, and Kong Milly ran a small primary school near the Sohra market. When they got back home, at about three o’clock, the maid would serve Mama Kes tea in his study where he’d be reading the newspaper, while Kong Milly drank her cup in the kitchen with Kong Syntiew. That afternoon, Mama Kes appeared at the doorway and stood there awkwardly, unsure whether to come in or stay out.
‘Where’s that boy Ezra?’ he asked.
The women shook their heads. Behind them, rows of streaky smoked meat swayed gently above the large wood fires.
‘He may have gone to see Ailad,’ said his wife.
Ailad was a car mechanic who ran a workshop nearby, and though he
was almost forty, older than Ezra by a decade, he got along well with their nephew. He did most of the talking, while Ezra sat on an upturned pail or a discarded tyre, sipping tea, smiling and nodding.
Mama Kes was reassured by that explanation and trundled back to his study. Later, in between dozing and watching a Doordarshan programme on rural farming, he was shaken awake by his wife who said she wanted him to check Ezra’s room.
‘What?’ He blinked at her, his eyes adjusting to the bright tube light she’d just switched on.
‘See if there’s anything there that might explain where he’s gone.’ It was also a man’s room and more fitting for her husband to check it, but she didn’t need to say that out loud.
‘Have you tried his mobile phone?’ asked Mama Kes.
‘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.’
Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories Page 16