Islands of Protest

by Davinder L. Bhowmik

  However, Jirā rejected with a shake of his head the strong gaze Umichiru had shot. Averting his eyes, he bit his lips at the thought of him being the one hurt and knocked down like that, and he staggered to his feet, brushing the dirt off his clothes and limbs.

  —A difficult thing, that thing called a woman.

  So muttering, he went back into the house he had just left.

  That night, Jirā sat on the verandah, where his own warmth still remained, gazing vacantly beyond the fence that stood in the dusk. He hardly felt able to sleep. There was time still left before dawn, and he thought that he might have an easier time falling asleep if he went to bed in the rear room, where he always waited for Nabii. But when he had almost risen to his feet, Umichiru’s trembling voice called out,

  —Jirā.…

  Cowed by the voice, his hips sank back to the ground. In a panic, he strained his eyes to look around, but she did not even leave the scent of herself as she ran like a leopard to the other side of the darkness. He got up again and started walking to his room. Once again called by the voice, he again sank on the spot. He repeated this gesture over and over. Her form was not there, but her umui, longing, seemed to mingle with the night air and turn into a voice calling him. Unable to return to his room or sleep on the verandah, Jirā merely sighed, facing the gloom between midnight and dawn.

  —What’s the matter today? My insides flutter, my brain tingles. I wonder if my heart goes to Umichiru. It worries me.

  So muttering and sighing deeply, Jirā held his head in his hands. It felt as if Umichiru’s gaze, which had, for an instant, shone like that of a beast, had suddenly pierced the heart of Jirā, who conformed to the Hotara-like view of love by lazily going back and forth between the two inagu. A strange fear spread within his chest. Something pressed toward the center of his body. He felt pain that he had never experienced before. What had happened? Bewildered by the unknown situation and unsure of what to do, he crouched in order to withstand the pain that had begun spreading ama kuma, here and there, throughout the body. He happened to thrust his head too low between his thighs. His bent upper body lost its balance, and he was about to tumble to the ground when he was grabbed by the collar from behind.

  —What’s up, Jirā, acting strange like that?

  It was his mother, Kamī. Her hand’s strong grip pulled him by the neck back to the verandah. He rolled and lay on his back.

  —Waiting for a woman, and staying up until this time of the night, Jirā.

  Past her mid-seventies, Kamī was still very feminine. Her voice carried no hint of her having just woken.

  —A man waiting till now for a woman he doesn’t know. You should forget her quickly. It’s better to forget, Jirā. Look, Nabii will come tomorrow.

  She scolded and comforted him in her usual haughty tone, and Jirā didn’t feel like answering. He stood up with a nod and furtively headed toward his bedroom. Kamī slapped him on the hips and pushed him forward. Following behind as he crawled into bed, she fixed the cover and looked into his eyes. She was still saying things, forever treating him like a child. For a while, Jirā let her do as she liked, but she was going a bit too far considering he was an ikiga in his midfifties.

  —Prattling on forever, what a bothersome, good-for-nothing mother.

  He bad-mouthed to himself.

  Thanks to that obnoxious mother, the pain in his heart was gradually replaced by discontent about Kamī, and in the end, everything about his longing that had gnawed at his chest became vaporous. Umichiru, Kamī, and Nabii mingled into one inside him as mere Hotara inagu. With this, Jirā finally regained his usual calm and melted into his usual sleep. Just before he nodded off, he sensed a faint inagu voice from the bottom of sleep: Jirā.… But whether the voice belonged to Kamī, Umichiru, or Nabii was uncertain. It turned out to be the story of a transient dream with everything dispersing like mist when he awoke the next morning.

  There was a private rumor in Hotara, which everyone knew but no one took the trouble to mention and which was closely hidden from the public side of the island. This urapanasu, inside story, which was told secretly by islanders as a tale underlying the Seven Wonders of Hotara, was about an uncanny incident related to Umichiru’s parents.

  At the center of Hotara was the nakanuya, middle residence, the seat of the nîmutu, root family, where Sanrā lived. To its east was the upper residence, where Tarā lived. To its south was the lower residence, where Jirā’s dilapidated house was located. Around these houses were those of branch families and relatives. Houses were scattered here and there under the trees that stood between haru and haru, farm and farm and around cozy hollows backed by rocks near the beach.

  Close to the northern point of the island is the hamlet called Nagarizaki, or “drift point,” where people, unrelated to any of the other local residents of these houses, somehow began to settle on Hotara starting from some unknown time. Those who live there were called nagarimun, drifters, and they were ostracized from the island community. But, they were not totally shunned. Thanks to their achievements in having lived on the island over several generations, they were permitted to attend public events. Still they formed a group of the weak, living humbly while reading the faces of the genuine Hotara folk.

  On the edge of the beach just off Nagarizaki was a beggar’s hut called purimun yado, “Fools’ Lodge,” although no one knew who built it and when. One glance was enough to see how shockingly decrepit it was, but it had not reached the stage of complete destruction; its traces still remain today. From time to time, nagarimun, drifters, who literally happened to drift on the tide to Hotara, settled stealthily in this hut. Most of them uttered words incomprehensible to Hotara folk. Some used exaggerated gestures in efforts to communicate with the islanders, while others lived quietly, eyes downcast and shoulders hunched, trying not to be seen. Among them were those who chased women whom they spotted, who lay naked on the beach in the daytime, and who howled like wolves in the middle of the night. Because of this curious behavior, witnessed or merely rumored, they were called purimun.

  Purimun is a Hotara expression, synonymous with “fool,” “idiot,” “blockhead,” and so forth. It is a discriminatory term that originally signified the insane but later came to refer to those who are dull-witted, stupid, or lacking in common sense. To put it briefly, Hotara folk used purimun as a general classifier for quirks and stray oddities difficult to comprehend within the boundary of Hotara-like reasoning.

  Purimun who drifted into the lodge settled there with no particular permission from anyone and breathed their last there at some point. Many of them died at an early age in comparison with Hotara folk, who prided themselves on their longevity. Each time the Hotara folk mourned a drifter’s death, they speculated that the absence of mental strength, characteristic of drifters, must wear out their lifelines, causing their early mortality. Notwithstanding, once purimun drifted to the island, they never left it. Perhaps the geothermal warmth, peculiar to Hotara, attracted strangers once they landed there, and perhaps it also made those who set foot on the island want to stay. These reasons came to mind to islanders as they reflected on their own habits while observing the drifters, who never attempted to leave even though they were disliked and discriminated against.

  It was also the case with the drifter quirks that after death their bodies were set afloat by islanders from Niraipama, the island’s northern shore, associated with the other world. Even though living from day to day absentmindedly, quirks did have some contact with islanders in their own way. Because meeting the end of their lives on Hotara qualified them as Hotara folk, they would depart to the other world by the water-sending ritual, conducted with the islanders’ careful treatment. No one knew, however, what happened to the purimun soul once, on the forty-ninth day after death, it was separated from the vine-covered body floating to the offing and tossed and swayed by the waves. Because, to Hotara folk, drifter quirks were, after all, quirky strangers, and coexistence could not be extended to their so
uls. At least this seemed the true sentiment of Hotara folk, who believed that they had since the old days bred a pure culture.

  Under such circumstances, Hotara society deeply rejected crossbreeding with strangers. The secret story about Umichiru and her mother also recounted an event that could be deemed a tragicomedy born of this society, which is a barely surviving remnant of human evolution.

  This is about Chirū, Umichiru’s mother.

  According to yuntaku tales, Chirū was rumored to have been a woman with something nonhuman about her appearance and demeanor, in short, a purimun-inagu, quirk-woman. At a glance, she had ordinary Hotara-like brown skin. But rumor had it that her body strangely seemed to have no human weight. She looked as if all that might be deemed feminine roundness and charm had been scraped off. When she passed by before your eyes, she gave off nothing more than a sign, say, of a young she-oak bending in the wind from the sea. She did not give off a human scent. The only thing noticeable was her voice, which was oddly thin and high pitched. You might turn your head toward the melodious, quivering voice and blink a few times, when, out of the breeze-like atmosphere, her form would appear. At one glance, you could see she was a strange woman, difficult to discern, with a bright gleam in the exceptionally large eyes of her slender face. So the story went.

  After completing the modest curriculum of compulsory education that the public office forces on children who reach mental and physical maturity, every Hotara woman helps with her family’s trade, learning farmwork, fishing, and weaving, and thus starts her life as a working female adult. Chirū, however, never tried to engage in anything of the kind, neither at the age of fifteen nor at eighteen. Lazy men who had no intention of working and were supported by women rolled about Hotara like rocks, and their resulting lifestyles were socially recognized; yet women who did no work were regarded as a kind of quirk, or purimun.

  Aside from Chirū’s strange appearance and her label as a woman who did no work, her purimun streak that set her apart from ordinary people came with an actual situation: starting at a certain point, she was looked on as a perfect purimun as she wandered on the island, here and there. Eyes blank, dragging a broken bougainvillea branch, she would walk along island paths and surprise children by suddenly emerging from the shade of trees, revealing her white teeth, and snickering as she wandered away. Her purimun nature had left a strong impression that still surfaced like a fresh memory in Tarā’s brain, which, unable to free itself from Jirā’s languid storytelling, was becoming drowsy.

  Well, let’s see, the event related to Umichiru’s birth, gossiped about privately as a backstory to the Seven Wonders of Hotara, occurred soon after Tarā was born.

  It was an early afternoon in late summer that year. A tall magi-ikiga, huge man, with skin as black as charcoal, drifted to the northern shore of the island. A fisherman, still young and with good vision, happened to pass by and spotted the drenched tall, dark form, shaking its head by the side of the rocks. The witness apparently thought that a horse that had drowned in the offing had finally reached the shore and, out of relief, somehow reared up on its hind legs. When he took a better look, the long, dark form was not ready to neigh; it remained standing, gazing at the sky.

  —Oh, it’s not a horse, another quirk has washed up.

  So saying, he averted his eyes from the strange, dark form.

  —Oh, the revered,

  he uttered as he pressed his palms together in prayer and looked away. As the story goes, he walked up toward the village, shaking his head a few times, so as to quickly forget what he had just seen.

  For a number of days after, the big man stayed by the rocks on the shore. When he could no longer withstand his thirst, he approached the community well at the outskirts of the village and drank water and bathed without being seen by the islanders. He plucked and ate the bananas hanging by the roadside on his way back, dived into the seawater that spread before him, and caught a fish and bit it while it was still raw. During this time, he had gone into the Fools’ Lodge, which happened to be vacant, and had begun to live there.

  The tall, naked man, who was first spotted standing with his penis exposed, did look like a black horse on its hind legs, but as the days elapsed, yellow and dark-brown spots of different gradations could be seen on his broad back from afar. In time, his entire body faded to a copper color, with, at close glance, pale purple showing here and there where his skin seemed to have been scraped. After around two months had passed, his entire body shone light brown. His greenish-blue eyes and massive body drew attention, but no matter how people looked at him, those who saw him found it impossible to tell what race he belonged to. Whatever his circumstances, whether by chance or by will or by sudden incident, he seemed to have floated on the sea for tens of days on a single raft, although he was still alive. He had blackened, exposed to the direct midsummer sun. He was rumored to be a foreigner, over six feet tall, quite craggy looking and with looks somehow suggestive of an ancient Greek slave.

  It was about the time of year when the intensity of tida, sun, that covered this world began to show signs of weakening that Chirū, idling during her hours apart from the islanders’ daily work, came to this northern edge of the island out of boredom. On the beach, bathed in the sun, still dazzling in the early evening, she found the man’s shiny back, which absorbed half the sunlight and reflected the other half.

  The shining back turned around, obliquely obstructing the sunlight with its swaying motion. She felt as if his eyes, which seemed to reflect the expanse of the blue sea, had caught hers and relaxed. Then he turned around again and walked toward her, without hesitation. He approached her in big strides, shaking what sat in the center of his body. Taken aback, she sprang from her tōntacchī, kneeling position. As she rose, she saw the blue sea sway. She was only five or six yards from the man. She felt as if something that had warmly risen from the core of her body had quietly retreated. Unlike his appearance, his motions did not seem at all ferocious. What reached her from the tall, naked man as he approached, swaying and rocking his upper body from left to right, resembled rolling big waves from far out at sea being pushed to the shore.

  As his arms extended high in the air as if ready to hug the island itself, these billows turned into a voice. The cry could be heard as a groan, a surprised scream, or an expression of joy, but in any case, it sounded like a roar of instinctive desire by a man who met a woman after a journey at sea. Soon his large body blocked her vision. His rocky, craggy face was just above her eyes. His eyes, sending blue flames from that rock, shook Chirū even more than his cry had. It was Chirū who, speechless, gave a strained smile. As if invited by this unanticipated loosening of her lips, his massive body bent, the dark-brown rocky surface suddenly touching the tip of her nose, and his hands, like baseball gloves, assaulted her as if a palm tree were fanning a strong wind.

  —Ai!

  Chirū screamed.

  Suddenly flying in the air, her limbs kicked up toward the sky. Just as she nearly fell to the man’s chest, she was snatched into his arms. The rock’s nose approached her eyes, and warm breath blew at her. A voice—ruro, rurororo!—vibrated in her ears. It seemed to whisper something, but after tickling the eardrums and burring through the throat, the words of the stranger only sat with a grumble at the bottom of the stomach. It was like an old song whose tune was hard to grasp no matter how many times one listened to it. Then he shouted, and she was thrown into the water. Just as she felt her body bob and sink like a piece of board, she was pulled upward. The glove-like hands stripped her clothing, baring her skin. Those coarse aliens blindly crawled on her skin. Riding the up-and-down motions, water beat her skin, and the small cry she let out made her consciousness flow endlessly. She dreamily twisted her body, no longer certain of the distinction between the water around her, the stranger, and herself. While drowning, bobbing, clinging, and struggling, a piercing pain shot through her from her toes to her back. As she kicked up her legs, they sent firecrackers of water high in the
air. Vacantly gazing at the blue sea spreading above her eyes like a room-size mosquito net swaying in the evening breeze, Chirū, the story goes, nestled her driftwood body close to the large body by her side.

  There seemed to be an intimate connection between the rumors about the nagrimun purimun, drifter quirk, who apparently stopped strolling nightly through the village and stealing into people’s farms, and about the female quirk visiting a stranger day and night. It did not even take three days after Chirū met the male quirk before this connection came to be whispered on all lips every day.

  At first, the matter was greatly enjoyed as a fine source of yuntaku chats, the islanders’ favorite method of diversion from the tedium of island life, in which the only incidents were occasional disputes among drunks. But for Chirū’s relatives, it was troubling enough to make them hold their heads in their hands and ask,

  Oh, no, what is going on?

  At eighteen, in the prime of womanhood, long after the rite of reaching maturity at fifteen, Chirū had nothing much to do, did not take the trouble to look for men, received no offers of courtship, and just idly passed her days. The moment they thought she finally had a suitor, alas, they discovered it was a nagarimun purimun.

  Ufuchirā, her mother, took it particularly hard. When she returned from farmwork around dusk, she always stood still in the kitchen, slouching her shoulders and letting out a bubble of a sigh. When she lifted the lid, she saw that the full pot of yams she had boiled early in the morning was—oh no—reduced to half. Two of the deep-fried mackerels she had saved for dinner were missing. The marinated mustard leaves she had hidden away were—akki samiyô, well, I never—gone, container and all. Such things had happened repeatedly for the past severals weeks. As purimun a daughter as Chirū was, she was, after all, Ufuchirā’s real child. Naturally, a mother wishes her child to at least experience a bit of female happiness while she is alive, and with this thought, Ufuchirā had put up with people’s finger-pointing. Still, with such incidents occurring again and again when the kitchen supply was poor to begin with, she could no longer turn a blind eye.