Legends of Pensam

by Mamang Dai

  She had arrived unannounced in an overloaded jeep-taxi that deposited her half a kilometre from the village, since that was the end of the road. Young boys from the village had helped her carry all her bags and boxes to the house and she had grumbled about the lack of development in our parts and the money she’d had to give the louts. She flung her clothes about the room and kicked the enormous cardboard boxes to one side. I was struck by the amount of luggage she moved around with, and how she travelled alone in night buses and broken cars to reach strange, remote towns in her new avatar as travelling saleswoman. She flew to big cities, to Bangkok and Bombay, and booked single rooms out of travel brochures. She shopped eagerly and returned to quarrel with customs and bulldoze her way through walls of officials and middlemen. Once she had been beautiful. People saw this and retreated before her fierce face and taunting smile. Then she arrived in small towns like Pigo and Gurdum and the women succumbed to the new bright clothes, the delicate fabrics, the cosmetics and herbal remedies.

  ‘It will make you glow,’ she would say. And she seemed to grow light herself as she said this, sparkling once again as we did in our youth. Now, her body had expanded. She hid herself in baggy tracksuits and muttered in her sleep.

  ‘The problem is we are too good,’ she was saying. ‘We take everything lying down. We love too much—but never mind, eh? You and I can’t help it. We still have time to make money and live well. We just have to work and push our way through. So what, eh? Our happy days will surely come.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about money,’ I said. ‘You know I am hopeless at business.’

  ‘That you are! But you’re lucky, you know. You have your mother. There’s nothing like a mother in the end!’ She sighed and shook her head.

  Ah yes, my mother. She dreamt long, wounded dreams and recounted them to me on many mornings in a surprised, laughing voice. I knew she laughed because she was nervous. She often saw river waters gather around me. Once she saw me plunging off a cliff, plummeting down like a stone.

  To be happy, a woman has to be born lucky. I was superstitious too. But I was not afraid. There were enough things to manage with, I thought. Books. Paintings. Writing. My mother, however, had changed her views. Years ago she had sent me to the town further downriver and then to distant cities to study, but now she said, ‘Education is of no value. You gain so much knowledge and your mind goes off. What great insight are you looking for? It serves no purpose at all. Go out. Live!’ At such times I pretended not to hear. I kept to myself and looked for words in the garden and the evening sky. Give me a little time and I will survive, I said to myself.

  My friend said she didn’t like the way I was hiding myself either. She herself fought in the open and was prepared to lose, but only after a good fight. ‘So what, eh?’ she cried. ‘I earn good money and it is all mine. At least I can say and do what I want, like all the men. My poor parents are dead but they were good people. I have nothing to be ashamed of.’ Then she would add, laughing loudly, ‘It’s just that I’m a bit down at the moment.’

  My mother enjoyed her presence. They had things in common. They believed there were auspicious people and inauspicious people in this world and that one must fight for one’s place in it. They believed in conversation and food. The kitchen became a busy, bustling place, especially at night, and my mother was comforted by this. She had a terror of being alone and my life, so remote and unknown to her, caused her many moments of anxiety. My friend was like her in that too. She left the doors to her room wide open and grumbled loudly when she found mine shut. But I could not help myself. I clung to my private space. I groped around. Sometimes, when I thought I was safe, I confronted an image that took shape before me at any time of day or night and always without warning: two bodies, polished like mirrors by an early sun.

  The man traces the lines of the woman’s body. He weeps with jealous rage at a past that has known her before him. She vows to love him for ever. He tests her. He leaves, and returns.

  ‘Write a story about us,’ he said. ‘Let us have a child.’

  He left, and returned. The years slipped away. The sunlight became different. The landscape changed. The summers when they could move shadows and place them out of sight were gone. Love was not enough.

  ‘You have to nag at them all the time,’ my friend told me. ‘Never let anything pass. Get to the bottom of things. Hang over his head like a harpy. Sooner or later you’ll know. Don’t weep. Claim, claim! You should have hung on just for the sake of making his life miserable, hah!’

  I could not help laughing. She also bent her head and laughed uncontrollably.

  ‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘He lied to me,’ she began straight away. ‘He ate up my life. I worked hard. I worked for both of us and I prayed for a child but he had other alternatives. He is now living with a young thing somewhere. I have not spoken to him for a long time.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Since I found out and we fought and I hit him on the head.’

  She started laughing again. I winced for the pain that suddenly touched my heart.

  ‘What to do? My only right was to believe or disbelieve. I chose to believe. I made a mistake—so what, eh? I asked him point blank, and his look gave him away. That’s the best way. Point blank. And then when I shouted—‘It’ll come to no good!’—he said, ‘It may do me no good but it’ll do me no harm.’ I couldn’t resist punching him then. We had a good tussle and after that I didn’t care what he did.’

  That year winter was long and cruel. Ghosts and spirits walked the riverbanks and watched jealously from the dwindling forests. They followed so closely it was impossible that someone should not succumb to their persistent presence. A young woman fell asleep resting on the warm stones by the river and woke only when the sun had already dipped behind the hills. In our parts, it is considered a grave error for a woman to linger by streams and rivers after sunset, for the night is restless with strange dreams and lost spirits. All of the next day, the woman complained of a heavy ache in her belly. Something had happened, and the old women who understood began to prepare for the rites of exorcism.

  A shaman was called and the ceremony began with ritual chanting, calling the spirits to speak and disclose what they wanted. It was a bargain; a dialogue of exchange. ‘We will slaughter chickens and prepare you delicious food. We will pour wine over the stones and scent the wind with blood and ginger. We will observe taboos and maintain our peace.’

  My mother knew about these things. At such times one should raise hell, she said. People should gather together and make a big noise, otherwise your senses would be stolen. She kept her own vigil and we watched the great shaman murmuring and singing, entering the spirit world. Now, through him, the assembled relatives heard the cry of a young woman. Her sobbing was like the wind rasping down the gorge.

  ‘I drowned in the green pool. My unborn baby died with me. I died there last summer. Oh help me! I want to live! I want my life back! I want to live!’

  We are all haunted, I thought. Paths cross, stars collide, and even though we whirl away we continue to look back over our shoulders, for the debris of that unexpected collision still holds us in thrall. We all want our lives back.

  I continued with my patient, preoccupied life. I was so engrossed with my thoughts that I barely noticed how the ducks were laying eggs again and how my mother watched them and waited for the chicks to hatch. A constant drizzle swathed the village in mist and often I saw her moving in the garden, planting and transplanting stems and shoots and bulbs.

  ‘You’ll get all wet,’ I shouted sometimes.

  ‘If I don’t do it now it’ll be too late,’ she would reply archly and I would watch her wide shape bundled in her old skirt and familiar blouse drifting around the garden.

  One day she told me her feet were feeling numb.

  ‘How do you mean numb?’

  ‘They feel cold and tingly,’ she replied.

  She had pushe
d them out of the sheet and I touched them briefly. We had never been a demonstrative family. My heart beat uncomfortably at the unexpected proximity and I wondered what should be done. She seemed to sense my discomfort and said, ‘Get the maid to fill the hot water bag. Then she can massage me a bit. I think that will help.’

  I sat with her that night. I looked around the room and was shocked to see the old photos and how we had been smiling together. In one picture I, the only child, had my arms draped around both my father and mother and on my school blazer I sported my mother’s old brooch. I left the room many times because I felt choked and ready to cry. The maid and she talked constantly for a while and when she fell asleep the maid signalled to me that my mother’s breathing was very weak. I felt fear for the first time and stared at her. The maid placed her hand on my mother’s breast and motioned for me to do the same. It was a strange sensation. Now I gazed at her face and saw how deeply the cheeks were lined and how the thin eyelids stretched with age. There was a small scratch just by the bridge of the nose, probably from a rose bush.

  I dreamt about roses that night and did not know the exact moment when I lost my mother. She slipped away quietly in her sleep. I awoke to the terror of regret and panic like nothing I had experienced before. People poured in. People who knew and loved her, my old aunts, old Me-me and Yayo and Losi. They embraced me and told me what a wonderful woman she was. How she had fulfilled her obligations. How much she had loved and worried about me.

  It is hard to describe pain. I had always coped by choosing silence and showing indifference. My friend’s words came back to me now. You’re lucky. You have your mother, she had said. There’s no one like a mother. My poor mother! Though I knew that her concern for me was like a talisman that would never lose its magic, I had spurned it so often as an obstacle breaking my stride. I had shielded myself from her gaze with words and books that she had never understood nor read. Yet she had continued to regard me with patience and love. I remembered the stories of creation, of our village and our people that she had told me before I grew up to expect happiness far away from her. I remembered the quiet routine of the house and the fire lit in the evenings. I remembered her muffled cough at night. My cruelty stunned me now. What was I doing? Where had I been? When my aunt turned to me I broke down and wept. I touched my mother and clasped her for the first time in my life. I felt her soft, drooping cheeks and pressed her lifeless hands. I thought I would die.

  ‘Come,’ my aunt whispered. ‘Let no tear touch her now.’

  The ceremonial rituals passed as if in a dream. Songs of lamentation were sung, recalling the days of my mother’s childhood. Her old friends sat by her and talked amongst themselves and to her. They asked her to remember the good times and said what a good homemaker she had been as the eldest daughter, as a wife and mother. ‘There was always food in your house,’ they told her. They reminded her that when the soul reaches that other place, ancestors step forward in greeting, and under the big tree the pure soul is crowned with a shower of sacred leaves.

  My mother was buried with her head pointing west, so that when her soul rose, she would wake up to face the east and walk into the house of the sun.

  The long vigil soothed me. There was great consolation in showing grief and sharing grief. My friend sat with me throughout. She did not bring any cartons with her this time. Life is like an egg, she had said. How unknown every moment was. Experience was not everything. After you had prepared yourself so carefully, life pulled out her greatest surprise and you had to start all over again. I begged my friend to stay. She looked after visitors and guests and walked with me in my mother’s garden. The wind blew fiercely and wrapped itself round our bare ankles. My friend’s hair lifted and she clutched at it wildly as we skirted the flowerbeds. Walking through the garden now was like walking through a minefield. Everywhere something had been planted. One could hardly move without drawing back in surprise. Sharp, green blades were shooting up everywhere. Frail twigs were suddenly full of growing eyes, and the roses, battered by the wind and the rain, were trailing higher and wider than ever.

  Live, my mother had said. I knew she would always be with me, watching the hard, sad circle of hills and dreaming about moon babies. The earth was soft and porous. I saw that pushing everything aside the lilies were thrusting up with folded hands as if it would be a crime not to bloom when the earth was so fertile.

  river woman

  ‘Do you have any old family photographs?’ Mona asked Losi. ‘Any pictures of your father-in-law, or your own parents? Anything from the early days?’

  Mona had become a friend of the Hoxo family. She came to the village every time she visited me in Gurdum, which was three or four times a year now.

  ‘There is nothing like that,’ Losi said to her, laughing. ‘There are only stories that I hear all the time, and most of the time I think my husband just makes them up!’

  But she went to a corner of the house and began pulling clothes and biscuit tins out of an old trunk. She struggled with the lid of one of the tins and rummaged through its contents. Then she came back holding out a creased postcard-sized sepia print.

  In the picture was a young woman, with a handsome man in uniform. He was tilting slightly towards her and smiling into the camera. At once my friend and I recognized that here was a woman who was eternally young. She was radiant and darkeyed and her long hair was pulled back in a simple knot. It was a picture of the legendary beauty Nenem, mother of Losi, better remembered as the woman who fell in love with a British officer.

  I wondered who might have taken the photograph and how they might have posed, or dared to, in front of an officer’s bungalow. She must have been very brave, Nenem, to accept the miglun’s attention and give him love in return in the face of so much gossip and astonishment. Rakut remembered that his father, happily employed with the migluns at the time, riding the single bicycle in the village and delivering government mail, used to say that he had seen Nenem flitting in and out of the sahib’s office many times, but that he had never accosted her. Only once he had nodded briefly to her but she had looked away quickly.

  Those who had known her said Nenem was of quiet demeanour, but with an impulsive streak that was unpredictable. ‘Like the river,’ they said.

  It was the time of war in all the world. Such a war had happened once before, but it had not brought many miglun soldiers to the Siang Valley. Now, they seemed to be everywhere, for they were fighting the Japans further to the east, where Hoxo’s and Rakut’s fathers had gone.

  Of course, the white sahibs were not strangers in the region by then. Since the Abor expedition of 1912 after the Komsing incident, the whole of the Siang valley had been opened up for exploration and the numerous villages of the frontier hills had been brought under British administrative control. When gunfire set the villages ablaze, the elders had conceded defeat by waving tattered old newspapers. Some years before the war began, the British had set up permanent camp on the banks of the river at Pigo, having bargained with the villages of Duyang for land. The villagers had agreed on a square mile of territory to house buildings for the political agent, a doctor and a police officer.

  Now the whole area had become a free trade zone with land and river convoys, officers, traders and porters moving in all directions. The villagers saw the lights of Pigo from their hilltops and were seized with a desire to learn new things, or at least to examine them and find out what it was all about. Everyone was flocking to this new destination which was now the recognized seat of power.

  One day, a group of young girls from Duyang were walking to the market in Pigo. It was the season of oranges and the dark green trees were bursting with fruit. Every village in the area boasted the sweetest, biggest oranges, and the girls were carrying baskets laden with the fruit. If they could sell everything they would buy paraffin, molasses, maybe a wad of leaf tobacco. Or they would tuck the coins into their bodices and walk back home.

  Suddenly they saw a cloud of dust swirling up
and they all stopped.

  ‘Aiee! It’s the migluns!’

  ‘Sshhh! Let them pass.’

  They all looked down at their dusty feet, clutching their basket straps. An olive green jeep was driving up, and as it passed them it seemed to slow down. Nenem lifted her eyes and met the gaze of the young man who was driving. They stared at each other. Then the vehicle lurched and shot off towards the river. Yasam and Neyang started talking immediately.

  ‘Aieee… I thought it was going to stop!’

  ‘As if!’

  ‘For what would it stop?’

  ‘Maybe they would have bought our oranges!’

  They walked steadily for another hour and a half, and when they reached Pigo they settled down under the big tree where other women from the outlying villages were already seated. Nenem chose her place and laid out her oranges in small, shiny mounds. She got her coin bag ready, the braided one that she had carried with her just for luck.

  The market was laid out in a circular design, with wooden front shops that sold rice, cloth, beads, tobacco and salt. They were run by ayings, plainsmen, who all spoke the local tongue, and no one minded them coming and setting up business like this as long as they were friendly and gave in when the villagers bargained with them. In the centre of this circle stood the old, giant tree, its branches spreading out like a green umbrella over the tin roofs. A small paved path ran round the massive base of the tree, and it was here that the tribes occupying the banks of the river were allowed to sit and lay out what they had to offer. It was a jumble of food, vegetables, bamboo baskets, edible insects, jungle roots, herbs, ginger and local medicines. Some women even brought pieces of woven cloth and jungle twine, flapping the bright colours in the wind and crying out that they would last forever.

  Nenem had sold two mounds of oranges when she became aware of a small commotion at the main entry to the market. She noticed that all around her people were sitting up and craning their necks. Then she caught a glimpse of a jeep and saw people moving out of the way as it slowly circled the market and came to a stop by the dusty little bakery. A man jumped out and she started.