The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  A week later, Mr Pradhan phoned to say that he needed the furniture which he had offered five years ago to Mr Sanchan. Not all of them, just the extra bed and the dining table. There was also the matter of Laizhal Villa itself. March was upon them; it was now five months since Mr Sanchan’s retirement, and Mr Lhaduri, the new principal director, was still living in a guest house. Mr Sanchan spared him any embarrassment. They had packed, he said, and were returning to Delhi in a few days, so Laizhal Villa would be returned to the department, a month ahead of schedule. Mr Pradhan was concerned that their hospitality had been found wanting and to reassure him, Mr Sanchan said, ‘Medical reasons. You know how Madam’s gout is. Best doctors are in Delhi only.’

  Now, in Lajpat Nagar, at dinnertime, Mrs Sanchan remembered that the hydrangeas had not been put out into the balcony and they had not been watered in the evening. She decided to let them stay in. ‘I should have taken them out. I keep forgetting. That’s why they are not going to last very long.’

  THE STORY OF TANIK, THE MYTHMAKER

  Mamang Dai

  Today, with new opportunities for employment, many women have branched out into running their own textile units. The weaving centres of yesteryear are quite forgotten, but it was the small centres that kept the art of weaving alive. In traditional society it was the duty of a woman to provide clothing for her household and the implements of weaving for the simple portable loom are an inherited property for women. With the establishment of government weaving centres young women could enroll to train or teach, and they were entitled to accomodation at weaving hostels in the town. In a way these weaving centres offered freedom from the confines of the village and were the first step towards economic independence for women to earn by doing what they were good at. I know romances also bloomed in these places, and many women scraped at their savings to support young men to get a college education. And though some of the attempts at evolving the industry with new techniques and motifs threatened to destroy the original patterns, the early weaving centres alive with the thump of the batten and the lively sound of the new spinning drums and fly shuttle looms achieved the great goal of keeping the traditional cloth of the tribes from disappearing.

  The truth about the Daji household was that they had risen from nothing. Sirkung was an old village on the last range of mountains overlooking the river. Everyone here had their fields and their pigs and chickens but only in numbers sufficient for each household. No one had more. The Daji family were no better off, or worse, just the typical villagers in communities that knew no caste or class distinctions, until the night of the storm reversed their fortunes. Suddenly the man and his family began to buy cattle and despite pestilence and harsh weather their mithuns flourished and calved regularly. Their animals grew sleek and big, and their stock multiplied until everyone began to talk about it and traders from far and near began to notice them. In time they became one of the most influential families in an area where the wealth of a man was measured solely by the number of mithuns he possessed.

  Tanik grew up in this atmosphere of wealth and benevolence. He was surrounded by uncles and the old parents of his father whom he had never seen. The old man, his grandfather, had cursed when his son left that grey afternoon and not a day passed when he did not utter his son’s name with rage to anyone who came to the house, but after many years had passed, he began to mutter to himself and the young Tanik heard the words- ‘exchange’ and ‘beads’ and ‘the storm’. These words imprinted themselves in his mind. He was a quiet child who liked to roam alone, climbing trees and staying out in the forest, and he might have stayed that way like his friends in the village if his mother had not decided to strike out on her own, in search of a better life for her son. She remembered the man who was her husband and father of Tanik, but it was more than a decade that she had seen him. In all this time he had not sent a single word and she could barely recall the tone of his voice. Perhaps he had died somewhere far away. No one spoke about him and she did not seek news of him from anyone. Her old in-laws treated her well and plied her with precious beads and brass ornaments as if to remove the burden of wealth from their house. They sensed she would be leaving them soon. Tanik’s mother received the gifts and waited. It was almost a godsend when an outbreak of cholera and strange fevers that rotted away a person’s teeth and left the skin raw and blistered crept up the hills and struck their village. It was time to leave.

  It was during this time that Gagil had first met Tanik’s mother when she arrived one hot afternoon, her face flushed with exertion and her hair soaked with sweat. It was a year before the China war and Gagil herself was a young mother who had moved into the first concrete house of her husband’s family in Pigo.

  ‘This is the child,’ she had said. Gagil saw a fresh-faced young boy stepping forward to greet her and it had struck her even then that the boy had a clairvoyant air. His mother had brought him here to introduce him, she said, to families who had travelled to their remote villages as Gagil’s brother, the legendary Dinu, had done. Gagil had immediately risen to go into the kitchen to ask the young girls to prepare something for Tanik and his mother who was now speaking in an angry, shaking voice. Everyone knew the boy’s father, and everyone knew that he had deserted mother and child. What no one could figure out was why. The man had withstood all the pleas of family and friends and had simply fled as if he could not bear to answer their questions. He was living in a faraway place where, they said, where people were cutting trees and selling them. Other stories reaching them said he had become a soldier and had gone away to live in one of the towns in the plains. No one knew for certain, and as there was no word from the man his relatives ceased to find out anything more about him, saying that for all purposes he was dead to them since he was so adamantly resisting all their efforts to reach him and spurning all their cries of love.

  Now he lived solely in Tanik’s heart. Tanik never asked his mother anything about him but he kept his ears open and did not miss anything. He heard his mother weeping softly sometimes, but when she looked at him her eyes were bright with a fierce light that halted all the questions churning in his heart. After the visit to the Gagil house Tanik noticed that his mother seemed to take heart. In fact she became determined that he should join college in the town. To achieve this she resorted to an old, forgotten gift that she had. She wove cloth and said that she would sell them to the aying traders who had shops in the market.

  ‘What will we do with this, hah?’ The first shopkeeper they went to asked his mother.

  ‘Put it up there,’ his mother pointed to a corner, and added, ‘then you will see what happens.’

  The aying stared at her and, for a long moment, seemed to be trapped in her dark, bitter eyes. Then he laughed and said, ‘Okay. But I will give you twenty rupees for it, not fifty.’

  The woman took the notes of money without another word and mother and son left the market. They lived in a shack like a cowshed that Tanik’s mother had occupied with the help of a relative. His name was Tasong, but he was an uncle, his mother told him, and Tanik should call him Tasong-Paji. Tasong had left the village a few years before them and he worked in a government office. The man squeezed Tanik’s shoulder and promised his mother that he would try to help her earn some money. Now Tanik wondered if the cloth had been sold. When his mother asked him to run down to buy a box of matches he leapt at the chance. A small shop nearby sold matches and bidis and thread, but he sped right past this down to the main market unable to resist the desire to see if his mother’s cloth had been sold. He was startled when he saw the corner empty. It had been sold! Some one had bought it! He ran back and almost choked when his mother said, ‘Is it sold?’

  ‘Yes! It’s gone.’

  He saw her smiling and his heart filled with joy. His mother was smiling! Later he worried that the cloth might not have been sold after all, but that it had simply been moved to another corner or even put away out of sight, but his doubts were laid to rest when his mother began weavi
ng another piece immediately because the shop keeper said he wanted more. At this time the government was setting up craft emporiums in the bigger towns and weaving centres were being opened to employ local women to produce cloth for sale to visitors who were beginning to show an interest in the region. This was how Tanik’s mother got herself a job as a weaver in the long weaving shed where the first treadle fly-shuttle looms, along with drums of thread, were placed in rows for weaving instructors. The clacking sounds of these looms became the rhythm of their days and nights like the rhythm of the years passing. His mother, however, had no love for these new looms. She worked on them because the weaving centre offered food and shelter, but at night she wove on her back-strap portable loom by lamplight.

  The colours of yarn were the bright red of the temen creeper, indigo dye and green from a small rhizome called gamba. Each piece of cloth was unique. From his place near the fire Tanik would watch his mother stooped over the bright pattern. He saw her fingers stretch and curl over a strand of thread as she pulled it through and looped it round again making the dots and small squares that became the ‘grasshopper’s tooth’ design. He listened to the soft thump of the batten, the sumpa, as his mother pressed the thread down, and he saw the woven strip expanding inch by inch as the light flickered and his mother still continued with her labour, weaving attentively and lovingly with her legs stretched straight in front of her and the cane belt around her waist holding her up together with the wonderful band of colour. The years passed. His mother acquired a plot of land and opened a small shop of bamboo and thatch with the help of Tasong. Their lives were untroubled and soon Tanik met Kijji Ongo who looked and him and said, ‘Timber! Timber is the new wealth.’ Whatever Kijji touched turned to gold. They went into the timber business and Tanik followed Kijji through hot, dusty towns and watched as Kijji stood before timber merchants and stopped in mid-sentence, rolled his eyes and then craned his neck forward to whisper something into their ears. When NEFA became a Union Territory Tanik’s career took a turn when he plunged into politics and became a member of the first Provisional Legislative Assembly. Since then he had not looked back. He had enough now to support his mother and make her live like a queen but the woman never gave up her weaving. Tanik did not know it then but in all his life, in all his travels and the long career that was to catapult him to the highest pinnacles of fame and power, he would never again experience that sense of rest and comfort that had filled his heart every night just before he closed his eyes to sleep. His mother spun cotton on a wooden spindle and she was spinning his life, spinning colour and texture, spinning dreams and desire. Each movement of her hand over the shimmering band of cloth – smoothing it, pressing it down, pulling it taut, each thread she lifted, each strand she wove, each beat of the sumpa and each time she leaned back a little and began again was a magical expression of a mother’s blessings for her son.

  MY MOTHER TAMPAK, MAID OF CHONGTHAM

  Binodini

  Translated from the Manipuri by L. Somi Roy

  One day, not long ago, Sudarshan showed me a photograph. Sudarshan, a young man I am friends with, is a photographer. He said, ‘Imasi1, they say this is a photograph of the fourth queen of Maharaja Churachand. Did you know her?’ Yes. The photograph was of my mother Tampak, Maid of Chongtham. I was entranced. Enchanted. I was close to tears. Mother! My beautiful mother, where have you been hiding all this time? I looked again and again at this champak blossom of Langthabal, this nymph of Chinga Hill. They said you were a nymph. Did all the land not say that, my mother? I was beside myself. Memories of days gone by unfolded vividly before my eyes. I looked again at the old photograph.

  On its back was inscribed: Queen Chetanamanjuri Tampak, 4th Queen of Sir Churachand Maharaj of Manipur – died Thursday June 7, the 28th day of Kalen, 1959 age 63 years. I wanted to cry out, ‘I’ve found it, I have found it!’ Just as the man in Rabindranath Tagore’s story Guptodhon had done, ‘I’ve found it! I have found it!’

  Indeed, I had found it; I had found a rare treasure. I was able to see the face of a nymph which otherwise would have disappeared, unnoticed. She was Tampak, the Maid of Chongtham, fourth consort of my sovereign father, my Pabung Sanakhya. I knew her very well. I had known her for a long time. When I found this picture I was already a mother. My sons Bobby and Somi had already been born. News came one day: ‘The Respected Grandmother the Lady Chongtham is ailing; she wants to see you.’ At that time my mother, the Lady Chongtham, was staying at her royal birthplace at Chingamakha.

  After my father died in 1941, our palace, our household, had scattered. World War II followed. We could not keep track of who went where. No one even enquired about anyone else. Since the 10th of May – the day Japan dropped its bombs, and my birthmother2, the maharani the Lady Ngangbam, and our family, took refuge at her farm estate at Malom – we have not returned, even to this day, to our palace home. Today we are outsiders. We merely look from a distance. When we are near, we only pause but for a while. Around this time I was so tied up that I did not even have the time to ask about the whereabouts of my mother the Lady Chongtham.

  As soon as I got the news, I accompanied my husband Dr. Nando and went with him to see her. I was able to wait on her. Thereafter I saw her regularly without missing a single day. My mother the Lady Chongtham said, ‘Princess Wangol3, your mother is pleased. If only your sister, my daughter, the princess Tampha, were with us today, she would have taken care of me…’

  On this day too, at this very moment, the photograph of my beautiful mother looks at me. It seems to be saying, Little One, Little Wangol, from whom did you hear that I am not well? It seems to say, what will you do for your mother? Your sister is no more; Mother’s Tampha is now dead… How my thoughts crowd me! I said, I am here Mother – your littlest, weakest child is still here. I will fulfil my obligations… Mother, now that I think about it, I feel so unhappy. How did you, Beautiful One, come to be in the big, glittering prison of a palace? Were you happy? You had no offspring. You left no child of your own. You never had a child from the man you loved. Did you live with that hurt all your life, without letting a soul know; how did you live with it among your sister queens? I never knew that either.

  At the time, I was but a child and knew only happiness; of suffering I knew nothing. It is only now, when I think of this matter, that it sears me all the more. But this one thing I want to know, one word from your heart. Your daughter Tampha was your friend; she surely would have known. You must surely have told her. I saw you were very friendly with my older maiden sisters. You came often to the royal quarters of the maharani, the Lady Ngangbam. You laughed, loudly, among them all. That made it known that you existed, that the Lady Chongtham was present.

  But behind that laughter, did you sigh with the pain of being childless? I know now, in the life of a woman, especially in the life of a woman in the royal palace, being childless is an enormous defeat. I heard that once you took on a trip to Brindavan, where it was believed that if a husband and wife were to take a dip together in the sacred pools of Radhakunda and Shyamkunda they would be blessed with an heir, they would have a child. It was said that you could not bring yourself to bring this up to His Highness, your husband. You were unable to overcome the barrier of your step-queens’ mockery. Oh, the shame. And so the Lady Chongtham withdrew. I do not know who spread this rumour.

  I am happy today. I have been able to once again meet my mother the Lady Chongtham, fourth consort of the maharaja. Memories of the vast household of my sovereign father Maharaja Churachand fill my eyes. But the portrait of Tampak, Maid of Chongtham, is yet to take shape. My search for her is not complete. The search for the women of Kangleipak4 is not over. The intimate stories of the queens of the land are yet to be told. So I am not yet done, my story still remains.

  When I first became aware of things around me I found that there were six living quarters of the maharaja’s queens, in a single row in our palace, starting with that of my birthmother, Maharani Dhanamanjuri or the Lady
Ngangbam. The custom of the land allowed the king to have up to five wives. The five would be women of high birth and approved by custom. I do not know when this tradition started, but I shall find out. The position and titles of the five queens were:

  1. Leimarenbi (Maharani)

  2. Apambi Ahal (Rani)

  3. Leimakhubi Ahal (Rani)

  4. Apambi Naha (Rani)

  5. Leimakhubi Naha (Rani)

  To my sixth and last mother, Subadani, Maid of Meisnam, were extended all rights even though she did not have a title, and she lived in the palace with my sovereign father. And in the reign of my sovereign father, my mother Tampak, the Lady Chongtham, held the rank of Apambi Naha and was the fourth queen.

  So my mother Tampak inspires the story I am thinking of writing, called The Maharaja’s Household. In the beginning of the story is Tampak, the fourth queen of Maharaja Churachand. I had even thought of calling the story Upon Seeing the Photograph of Tampak, the Lady Chongtham. And so I ask, in the vast and splendid household of Maharaja Churachand, Who was Tampak? What was her place?

  Dumbrasingh, the scion of Maharaja Narasingh and the grandson of crown prince Bhubonsingh, was the eldest brother of Maharaja Churachand. Among the five siblings, which included two girls, Churachand (Amusana) was the youngest. When the British put him on the throne at the age of eight, the elder prince, Dumbrasingh, was a strapping young man who was already married. He took care of his little siblings. He looked after their widowed mother, Numitleima (Lalitamanjuri), Maid of Moirangthem. So it was said that the child king was king in name only, and it was Raja Dumbrasingh who ruled over the land of the Meiteis5. Even after Maharaja Churachand came of age and assumed full powers as the king, his older brother never stopped watching over his younger brother. It was said that all the royal princes of the land trembled in fear at the mention of the elder prince. We also saw this. We were very frightened of him.