Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories

by Janice Pariat

  Alarmed that I might have caused more trouble than the incident was worth, I try to tell him not to bother, that I’m sure it won’t happen again.

  But he won’t hear of it. ‘She’s always been a bit odd…if you know what I mean. Parents died in an accident in Assam… you know how rash truck drivers are on those roads. She lives alone…I don’t think that’s good for a young girl…’

  Vera and I had sworn to keep away from local gossip, but I couldn’t see how I’d squirm out of this one.

  ‘Last year, we were having a wall built near the forest, you know to keep all those youngsters out—they come and drink there and create such a nuisance. One day, Dariti came running out of her house, screaming at the workers that they couldn’t cut any trees…what could they do? They had to get rid of a few to build the damn wall. Anyway, she stood there and refused to move…for days. Crazy woman.’

  ‘Were the trees saved?’

  Bah Norman looks at me as though that wasn’t the question he expected.

  ‘Yes, yes, finally the forest department issued an order.’

  I want to say I’m glad to hear that, but my rangbah shnong looks slightly peeved, so instead I mutter something about how that must have been terribly inconvenient for the colony. He softens up.

  ‘I’ll have a word with Dariti,’ he repeats.

  ‘Please don’t bother,’ I say hastily. ‘I’m sorry I brought it up. I’m sure you have other more important things to do.’

  I tug Seth away from the lamp post, and politely take my leave. Now, more than before, I am curious about the woman with the red Fiat. We walk past rows of neat houses, until the road curves again and the buildings to our right give way to a deep-green pine forest. The air is cooler, quieter; somewhere far away I can hear the sound of rushing water. I don’t know what I will say when I get there, but I decide to pay Dariti a visit. Seth is overjoyed at this sudden expansion of his odorous kingdom.

  Where the road ends, a rough dirt track begins, sloping its way up into the trees. In the distance, I can see a tin roof badly in need of a coat of paint. As I climb, an Assam-style house with large windows, lime-washed walls and bare wooden beams looms into view. Parked in the porch is a red Fiat. There are no lights on, even though day has faded into dusk. Seth whines, out of excitement or fear, I cannot tell. I press the doorbell, and wait. It sounds like someone inside is speaking on the telephone. Around me, in the veranda, are stacks of unframed pictures—charcoal portraits and sketches of (what I think are) surreal landscapes. My eye, trained through many classes on drawing and illustration, catches strokes of talented detail—the vividness of the eyes and texture of skin, the tricky play of light. The artist works quickly, I thought. It was the only way the pictures could look this effortless. Above the door, hanging from the ceiling is a small wooden wind chime, with a clapper in the shape of a bird in flight. I reach up and tap it, the sound rings soft and clear as a bell. Suddenly, the door flies open and a woman dashes out. She’s barefoot and her hair hangs long and loose. The dress she wears is smeared with charcoal dust.

  ‘It was because I thought I was going to die.’

  ‘W-what?’

  She pushes away a strand of hair falling on her face. She’s younger than I expected, in her late twenties, with an air of highly strung energy.

  ‘When I nearly ran you over. And your dog.’ She points to Seth, who, unusual for him, is sitting quietly.

  ‘But how did you know it was…’

  ‘Bah Norman called.’ She sits on a wicker chair, stands up again, and walks out into the garden.

  Seth and I follow, hesitantly.

  ‘He told me…and then you show up here.’

  ‘Well, I thought I would—‘ She starts walking towards me, and I stop.

  She wrings her fingers in small nervous gestures. Her eyes are dark and troubled, as though they’ve been sketched with the same coal dust that’s on her dress and hands. Her face is pale and thin, and overcast by shadows.

  She speaks again softly. ‘You see, the other night, I had a dream…I was sitting there,’ she says gesturing to the veranda, ‘and sketching, and then at the gate I see my parents, and they’re calling me…’ “No, it’s too soon,” I tell them, “I’m too young” but they say, “In your heart you are not.” So I follow them, and you know what they say about following the dead?’ She looks at me with eyes the colour of burnt coal.

  I nod. I’d read it in the book of Khasi dreams and mythology.

  ‘We walk through a forest,’ she continues, ‘and slowly they start changing…their hair and fingers turn to leaves and their arms and legs grow thick and gnarled…Did you know that people’s souls turn into trees?’

  She walks away from me to the edge of her garden and stares into leafy darkness.

  ‘I used to hear them at night, you know, whispering in the darkness. And then last year they came to cut them down, all these spirits wandered around me lost and weeping, I had to do something. Now I know what I am…’

  She is silent for a long while; I wonder whether she’s forgotten we’re here.

  ‘That day, after my dream, I drove around for hours, looking for all the places my parents took me to as a child. I thought, maybe, I wouldn’t be here long enough to see them again. But even now they’re gone…the forest in Motinagar, the stream near Polo Grounds, everything’s changed…’

  I feel I ought to say something consoling, but my words—‘I know what you mean’—drop flat and feeble onto the grass.

  She turns around, nervously twisting her dress between her fingers, her eyes wide and distraught.

  ‘But Bah Norman told me I must apologize. I–I’m sorry. He says I must be more careful in the future. I will be more careful…’ Her voice trailed off.

  ‘It’s alright,’ I say. ‘Look, we’ve all driven too fast and reckless at some point of time. There’s worse things…I’ve made too much of this…I’m sorry to have dropped by unannounced.’ I hesitate, but thinking perhaps it might make her feel better, I continue, ‘Your drawings are very good.’ I gesture to the veranda. ‘You have an eye for detail.’

  She looks down. I cannot tell whether she is upset or pleased.

  As we leave, she is still standing outside, framed by a cluster of tall, dark pine.

  At home, I find a monstrous black Bolero parked outside. We have a guest. It’s our friend Charlie. He is in the living room where Vera is serving him tea.

  ‘Passed her in Laitumkhrah, and offered her a ride back,’ he explains, reaching out for a handful of biscuits. ‘Couldn’t allow my cousin to walk home carrying all that shopping, could I?’

  ‘She usually takes a taxi,’ I say.

  Vera is trying to catch my eye by way of apology or commiseration, but I stoically avoid her gaze. She throws Seth a cookie, which he snaps up in a second.

  ‘I also get to see your fancy new place. When’s the housewarming?’

  ‘Soon, soon,’ replies Vera airily. ‘Here, have some tea. You look cold.’ She pushes a cup into my hand.

  ‘Where have you been?’ asks Charlie.

  I say I’ve been out walking Seth.

  ‘Ah, doing your duty, I see. Got him well trained, eh, Vera? I mean your husband, not the dog.’

  ‘So tell us about this new project you’re working on,’ says Vera hastily. ‘The one at Barapani.’

  Barapani is a large artificial lake on the outskirts of Shillong. We’d go for family picnics to its once largely untouched shores. Sometimes, if you left town early in the morning, the lake would look magical, overhung with strands of silken mist and framed on all sides by low-lying hills.

  Charlie reclines comfortably, his expansive frame taking up most of the sofa.

  ‘We’re planning to open an amusement park—multiplex, mall, food court, water sports. You know, draw in the tourists. Multi-crore project. You’ll get all the details when you put it up on the website.’ He looks at me and winks. The phone rings just then and Vera leaves the room to answer; it’
s her mother on the line. Seth wanders off after her in the hope of more biscuits. Charlie and I are alone.

  ‘We’re hoping to have the website up by March.’

  I nod, sipping at my tepid tea.

  ‘That gives us a good three and a half months. You can come into office sometime next week…we’ll sort out details.’

  I want to point out that I haven’t yet accepted his offer, but he begins asking questions on where and how we sourced various raw material for the house. You see, he too wants to build a place, possibly in Lachumiere…with a floor each for all his children. At last count, that was five. I remark that it would be a rather tall house, but he, unruffled by my sarcasm, agrees. Finally, he heaves himself off the sofa and says he must be going. We walk outside, and the roar of his vehicle’s engine shatters the still silence of the evening.

  Later that night, Vera is working at the table while I sit on the chaise longue with a book on my lap. It’s been open on the same page for almost an hour.

  ‘Will you be taking up that website project?’ she asks, her pencil busily scratching at a blueprint.

  I look outside, at the immense sprawl of Shillong, at the hills lit up by pin-pricks of light. There are barely any left, those dark patches and empty, uninhabited spaces. The town has hardly any room to breathe. I can feel it, its raw, ragged breath. I can hear its vast, gentle heart race like a frightened animal. Suddenly I want to cradle it in my hand.

  ‘I found out who nearly ran us over.’

  ‘What?’ There’s a flicker of confusion on her face.

  ‘The driver of the red Fiat.’

  ‘Oh, that. Who was it?’

  ‘This woman…who lives near the forest.’

  ‘And why the hell was she driving like a maniac? Where was she rushing to? It wasn’t the end of the world, was it?’

  Outside, a breeze rushes through the pine trees, and stirs the wind chimes. They keep away the ghosts, they summon the spirits.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘something like that.’

  An Aerial View

  In some places time is fluid. It moves in circles, hoops and swirls, in tiny storms that churn up shipwrecks and lost worlds. At Normandy, they say the sounds of battle can occasionally still be heard, the cry of men and whine of weaponry. In a palace garden in Versailles a doomed queen has frequently been sighted, playing with her children, dressed in summer white.

  What about Greenwich, she thought?

  Where time ended and began, where it was split and halved and scattered across the earth. Perhaps here it was easier to slip back and forth, slide from one life to the next, clamber into childhood and stay there in a secret place hidden from the withering reach of age and the hours.

  The light seemed perpetually frozen as it lay over London, grey yet softly illuminated from within, neither evening nor day but some second before twilight caught and stretched to last for hours on end. In stark sudden contrast, the oak trees in the park stood rich and green, recently drenched in a shower she’d missed as she was travelling on the train.

  Where would I go if I could choose a moment, she thought? Which day in my life? In someone else’s?

  She sat on a bench that looked relatively drier than the others, beside the tarmac path that wound through the park and up a small hill in the distance.

  What moment would I choose?

  Any time before last night would be alright. She wouldn’t be picky. Any time before he told her about Lily.

  Lil-lee.

  It tripped so prettily off her tongue.

  She imagined her pale, white like the flower that heralded death, with leaf-green eyes and a slim, lithe body that had lain under her husband or, as he often preferred, on top.

  Can you smell betrayal? she asked herself. Does it linger like the scent of mud and grass after rain? Did it cling to hair and skin? At the airport when her husband had picked her up a week ago, there’d only been a brief, fleeting prickle of awkwardness. She’d put it down to jet lag, and the fact that they’d been apart for three months.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, holding his face between her hands.

  ‘I love you too.’ He’d pulled her closer. Perhaps he didn’t want to meet her eyes.

  Then he’d taken her back to a flat in Putney, a one-bedroom place his employers had found for them. They’d made love on the sofa, on the bed. Had they done it there too? Her husband and Lily. She looked up at the sky, framed between the fringes of trees; she felt nauseous.

  She’d sensed it a few days after she arrived, after the jet lag had worn off and the hours had settled into place. He hung back in the kitchen not saying a word, she caught him watching her while eating, reading a magazine.

  She’d taken his hand. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Was it different, the way they made love? She’d read somewhere that, after months apart, bodies needed time to readjust to each other’s rhythms, and contours and needs.

  When he was away at work, she spent the day in the flat acquainting herself with the view—on one side a small leafy park, on the other rows of identical terrace houses spread in lines like an orderly army—and the chill in the air even at this time of the year, when back in India they’d be gearing up for relentless summer. She watched strange daytime TV, read The Guardian and grappled with the change in the focus of the news. The euro was collapsing. Hapless old men in black suits mourned its demise on screen while printed pages carried lamenting obituaries of Spain, Italy, Ireland, and Greece. When she grew tired of the news, she’d cook the evening meal carefully, worried the splatter of turmeric would never wash off the shiny white kitchen counters. This was alright for a week, she thought, but then what? They hadn’t spoken yet of her looking for a job.

  Yesterday evening, when she heard the click at the door, she rushed to open it.

  ‘I’ve been thinking—’ she began.

  And he interrupted. ‘Listen, we need to talk.’

  She didn’t know how she’d made her way here. To an obscure bench in an empty park in a godforsaken part of the city. She’d left the flat earlier that afternoon and walked aimlessly until she reached an overground station and taken the first train out. Back in the flat—for she couldn’t call it ‘home’—he was lying on the sofa, asleep, in the clothes he’d worn to work the previous day, the clothes in which he’d told her about his unfaithfulness, in which he’d fought, and cried, and pleaded her forgiveness. Yet forgiveness couldn’t be given away like old clothing. It had to be nurtured and coaxed, springing slowly from some sort of understanding.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ she’d asked over and over, until the words were ragged and sore, and dripped from her mouth like open wounds.

  He couldn’t come up with an answer, at first, for why he’d cheated on her less than a year after they were married. Before they’d even celebrated their first wedding anniversary.

  Then he tried to patch together an explanation. He’d been newly transferred, she wasn’t around, he was lost and alone in a new and strange city, they’d gone out for drinks after work, and had too many tequila shots and danced together, and everything after was a hot, boozy blur.

  ‘Such a blur that you went out with her again and again to clarify how good it was?’

  After that, all he did was apologize.

  Lily meant nothing. He’d stopped seeing her months ago. He was so glad, he added, to have her back.

  She would have liked to believe him. Perhaps she would have if she didn’t feel as though she were drowning in a pool of deep, cold water.

  A light breeze brushed her face; she was surprised to find her cheeks wet. The cellphone in her pocket beeped, it was a text from a friend in Delhi, asking how she was. ‘Fine,’ she replied. ‘Speak soon.’

  She couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone. Not yet.

  She felt shame stamped all over her body. As though somehow she was the one who’d failed. At her convent school, the nuns punished her once by making her clean the blackboards in all the classrooms—after that, h
umiliation always smelled of chalk. That dry, dusty, calcium-white odour that clung to her clothes, and hair and fingers. She was glad it had rained most of today in this grey city. The air carried a sharp, uncontaminated freshness.

  Last night, after they’d run out of things to say, she stood at the window, watching the lights of an unfamiliar city flicker against an unfamiliar sky. Somewhere far away stood a tall cylindrical tower burning scarlet; otherwise London was low and discreet—waves of roofs and chimneys rising and falling endlessly. He was sitting at a table, laden with two cups of untouched coffee and a vase of flowers, slightly wilting.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked. ‘Before I made my way here?’

  ‘Because,’ he replied simply, ‘you wouldn’t have come.’

  It was a trap, he’d set it up as a careful illusionist sets up his tricks.

  At least he could have given me that choice.

  In the park today, there was hardly anyone around—a couple of children played on the open green and a man in a heavy grey overcoat stood smoking nearby under a tree. It was soothing, she decided, to sit on a bench, in a park and be anonymous to the world. She’d stayed away from the river. It was where he’d taken her first, the day after she’d landed. For her, that was the moment when life had dropped into her hands like a perfectly polished shell. It lay there, bright and shining, this new world that they’d been allowed to enter—the sparkling shops and restaurants, the brisk locals and thronging tourists, the embankment lamp posts, looping around in dark, elegant coils. They had broken away from the crowd back in Delhi with its mess and fury, where they’d met, and their respective hometowns, with their sometimes single-minded regression. Here they were, together, in a city where everything could only be better. Although she’d laughed when she first saw the river.

  ‘All those poems about the mighty Thames seem a bit silly now.’