by Mamang Dai
It was a fearful time, and it was a sad time. Losi’s grandmother wept and shouted for her old man who, however, was safe and mobilizing men on the other bank of the now unrecognizable river, to receive relief material. When the first airplane arrived with food and medicines the villagers had to level a strip of land and place perforated steel sheets on the ground to cushion the weight of the aircraft. Small riverboats floated away and men and women were marooned for days on sandy islets that rose or disappeared with the swelling tide of water. The land was changing, and with these changes lives were changing. Kao saw the river spreading like the sea and watched the sun where it fell into the distant waters. Nenem stared at the restless, agitated land and her eyes scrutinized the broken line of the hills. Once upon a time a tender radiance had mapped these hills and the river…
It seemed her heart died very quietly.
One day, a few years after the earthquake, Nenem went as usual to the water point just beyond the orange trees. She felt dizzy and sat down on the wet stones sighing with wonder at the glittering leaves of the trees. It was the wind that carried her away, they said. She must have lain down and surrendered without a struggle because when the women found her she was already stiff and cold. The first thought that struck the two women was what to say to Kao. They rushed to another village elder’s house and gasped out the news. Kao was away in the new grounds looking at some construction work for an office building that would make Motum the circle headquarters of the area.
‘We must tell him immediately,’ the old man had said. It was a simple thing. Men and women died and the news was told to one and all as soon as possible. It was a mark of respect. But no one had expected Nenem would die so silently without a trace of illness, and no one wanted to be the one to break the news to Kao. In the end two young men ran all the way towards the high fields to look for Kao.
He saw them running up the hill and came down. He had only to look at their frightened faces to know that something terrible had happened. He didn’t say a word but ran past them towards the village.
It is said that when a loved one dies those who mourn should not soil the passage of the soul from one world into another with tears. Those who remember say that it was the village that mourned Nenem’s death more than Kao, because, collectively, every man and woman mourned for Kao as well. He was the one who was left behind, and he was cloaked in a thick cloud of silence that made many people think that he would lose his mind. When the body was laid out the women covered their faces and wailed. They scolded Nenem for going away so suddenly. She was still so young! Oh! What a beautiful woman you were, they cried. Look at you now, oh! Did you not want to stay longer as the beloved daughterin-law of the village? Hai! This is our life! We do not know when our time will come. Go in peace! Go in peace! No other beauty will match yours in this world or in the next. Do you remember how we crossed the river so many times? Now don’t look back. Go in peace!
The village was crowded with relatives and visitors who had travelled from afar. They walked in and out of the house and Nenem’s old friends Yasam and Neyang took over the household to feed everyone and accept the cloth and gifts for the dead. Kao stayed away in the interior of the house. Rakut’s father said that when he came for the burial his heart had been wrenched by Kao’s sadness.
‘The man was pretending. He was looking up into a mirror on the wooden post and he would not turn around to meet me. I just stood there looking at him pretending to comb his hair while he prepared himself to face me. It was terrible… I also wanted to shout and weep but you know, there are moments lived on unspoken terms, and Kao did not allow me to weep. When he finally turned around he greeted me normally and we started the preparations for the burial. Hai! I have never seen a man hold himself like that, but I knew then that he was growing stronger because he had accepted that he would remain inconsolable for the rest of his life.’
When Hoxo and Rakut had barged into Kao’s house that night Kao had been secretly happy to see their fresh, young faces. It was some years since Nenem’s death. He told the boys that he was planning to send his young daughter to the school in the town close to their village, and quite unreasonably this piece of information had excited Hoxo who, for the rest of his stay in Motum, began to visit the quiet house frequently and became very attentive to Kao’s silent nature and unspoken words, just as Kao had once been in the Sogong household. Thus the two families were linked up like this and one day there was a great stir in the schoolhouse of the town when Losi crossed the river with her bags and books to take her place as the new entrant in the school register.
At this time many families were leaving the old home villages and converging on the town in search of open land for permanent settlement. Kao was one of the few who kept his distance and he never left the village again, choosing to stay by the side of his beloved Nenem who was buried in the grove of orange trees. From this vantage point he looked out across the land and saw the hills rising row upon row and sinking into the sheet of water where the river fanned out like an ocean. The land was under siege. Myriad forces were nibbling away slowly but surely at its very foundations: Soldiers of the new rulers of the land, armed bands who wanted their own lands to rule, plainsmen and their co-conspirators from the hills who came to bring down the old trees and flatten the hills. The roots of trees, clumps of bamboo, the hidden life forms in the ancient body of the earth were being uprooted. Kao noted all this with his meticulous eye for detail but nothing worried him in his patient stillness and memory of the past. ‘Nothing changes that much,’ he thought. ‘The hours pass, the days go, and still love lingers while the mist covers the land and the rain drowns the hills. Today, tomorrow, what does it matter? Time moves on and to survive in one piece all one needs is the ferocity of a lion or the heart of an angel.’
He saw the children changing and learning new things, and he smiled when he heard them speak in a new tongue while writing words in new scripts that no one in the village could read.
Across the river, young men and women walked to a school that was more than a mile away from their homes in Duyang. They crossed small streams and hurried through a forest of tall trees and dense undergrowth that could hide tigers and leopards. Many years passed like this. Then, one day, Hoxo’s mother decided to go and call on her husband’s old friend, Rakut’s father. The old man was still sturdy and well enough to pick a quarrel with his son who was beginning to show all the signs of a rogue dedicated only to idleness and flirting with the young girls. Rakut, at that time, was also a terrible prankster and a trick of his had already become the stuff of legend. Once, he had a fit on the way to school. He suddenly collapsed and rolled about on the leaves shuddering and twitching as if invisible strings attached to the treetops were pulling him apart. Of course, he was pretending. He wanted to scare the girls. One of them ran off screaming. The news reached Rakut’s father who responded immediately by sending out a number of relatives to the aid of his son. Rakut managed to keep up the twitching right into the house. In fact, the difficulty now was how to stop! His father, an immense man, watched his son keenly. He was a little perplexed, perhaps, but the women were afraid and making a lot of noise so he lost no time in calling for the shaman. Rakut’s twitching grew more acute. The spell broke when the time came for the householders to catch the black pig that was the expected requirement for the shaman to restore Rakut to his senses. All the squealing and thudding of feet made Rakut titter. The old man got wind of something and Rakut recovered fast enough to leap out of the house clutching his shoes and shouting at the top of his voice, ‘Enough! Enough! Hah! Hah! Hah! Oh! This is too much!’
He stayed away from the house for days and his father did not look for him.
‘Let him play in the forest,’ he said.
Hoxo himself had been writing love songs all through the summer nights of rain and wind, and now he had a thick sheaf of these notes and songs. They were never addressed to anyone by name but Rakut knew and he began to shout out to everyone th
at Hoxo was going mad with love for someone whose face could only be described as a flower and whose body and limbs flowed like liquid gold. So when Hoxo saw his mother dressing her hair and smoothing her ga-le before leaving the house, he sensed that his fate was being decided. She had raised him strictly, with love and attention, and though she had never held long conversations with him nor been demonstrative, the watchful distance, for Hoxo, had been filled with a sure tenderness. Now his mother smiled at him and Hoxo felt his heart swell with love and respect for this wonderful woman who had kept him safe and happy and given him everything all these years, since the death of the man who had rescued him from the burning hills. Rakut’s father was good enough to call on the maternal uncles of the village and they all set out for Motum to meet Kao. It was a simple matter. There was no enmity between the families, and Kao was an educated man who did not question the antecedents of the declared son of Lutor.
So it was that one February day the young Hoxo stood on the ferry and saw the green wall of the opposite bank approaching him. It was the colour he remembered and loved, and when a gust of wind whipped the green bamboo into a delicate dance his happiness was complete. In those days the ferryboats carried chickens, goats, people, everything. A bridge or two had been built, and many more, bigger ones were built in later years, but the ferry remained the best method of crossing the river, as it is even today. The bridges spanning the river have all at some time or the other been torn away by flood waters and the land is dotted with old bridges standing derelict over sandy dunes where the river has changed course so many times.
When Hoxo and his party arrived Kao received him with great joy. His life too was tied up with the village of Duyang, after all. So many of his days had been spent sitting in the house of Sogong, waiting for Nenem to recover from her old wound and learn to love him. Now their daughter was being given away in return as a daughterin-law to that same village. Losi was a very young woman but she carried herself with inherent grace. And as everything was settled with the blessings of all the elders and family clans, Hoxo carried away Losi, daughter of Nenem, across the river again. Apart from the wedding gifts of beads, brass vessels and metal plates that every bride takes with her, Losi also had in her possession the old tin trunk that contained the only tangible mementoes of a vanished past.
a matter of time
Remember, because nothing is ended But it is changed
the old man and fires
In the season of growing cabbages the ground is cold and hard. The tender leaves stoop under the wind and spring towards the light when the sun appears. The old man tended them with single-minded devotion. He looked up at the trees and wondered if they were closing out the light. He checked the hard bark for insects that might devour the growing leaves. He peered around for worms and bugs. In one corner the small patch of garden was fenced in with sugar cane. A wild bougainvillea crept over the wall of the house at the other end, and spurted glowing purple flowers every summer. Now it was a thick, bare coil that appeared dusty brown and dead. Everything was dry and bony, and ragged.
‘I should clip them back,’ the old man thought, looking at the young leaves, ‘and prepare stakes to hold them up.’ But his strength seemed to fail him these days.
Once, he had been as strong and tireless as the big river. How many times he had crossed that great expanse of water with his books and his art, and a zest for living. A fellow student had turned his life upside down. She had come to him like a bright dream that promised everything. He was from the mountains. She was born in the island of fishermen far to the south. A hundred rivers and streams separated their people but they had shared their loneliness in a season of discovery that had shut out everything and consumed them like an increasing fire. He was strong and determined, and she was equal to all his needs.
Then, one day, the unexpected happened. He was lying next to her in his small student’s room when she said, ‘I have to go away, you know.’
He didn’t believe her. He thought she was just saying these things to tease him, or to alarm him, for these were the rituals of love. Yes, yes, he had thought, waiting for her next words.
‘I am getting married.’
He realized that he was holding his breath. She stared back at him and then suddenly gulped and turned her face away. He knew she was weeping and he was terrified.
‘Why? What is wrong?’ he tried to touch her and she wept harder.
‘I didn’t tell you because I thought everything would be sorted out. I said I wanted to study! I told my brother but he has come all the way here to fetch me! The boy’s family wants to see me immediately.’
‘Refuse them!’ he wanted to shout. ‘I’ll go and speak to your brother. You stay here. Don’t move!’ he wanted to say, but his voice was gone. He was crying and talking in his mind. He felt pain and fear rising and rolling in his blood like a silent tongue of fire.
The old man was a secret arsonist. If he saw a pile of leaves today the urge to set it alight rose in him like an urgent desire. The flames would leap up and he would be consumed with the taste and scent of acrid smoke and ash. Ah! It reminded him of so many things.
In his village littered with rocks, fires were lit all the time. He saw the ghostly flare of stars arcing from the brow of the hill and falling into the deep valley. ‘They are the ghost spirits of husbands travelling to visit their brides,’ it was said.
Now he saw his first love again, sitting up and looking at him. Her pale face was streaked with tears but her eyes were changed. She was looking at him and something was turning in his head. He was trying to remember, to find out something he had missed. What was missing in this relationship? What had she told him in their first meetings, in those early days of love? He could not recall any mention of another man. He thought she was too young, nobody would have expected her to be pledged to someone already! A thought crossed his mind. Maybe it was the sister! He remembered her telling him of a sister who was a bit strange. She was not violent, she was not deformed, but their community knew she was ill because on some full moon nights she would run out of the house completely naked. When they coaxed her back to the house she would be covered in sweat and it was an embarrassment to the family to see her beautiful body, and they would rush to cover her nakedness against the lascivious gossip that circulated everywhere. Maybe, he thought, his love was afraid that if she did not accept this offer people would link her with her sister and no one would want to marry her, thinking the madness might rub off on her.
‘I’ll marry you!’ he wanted to say. ‘Now! Let us go and sign whatever has to be signed.’ But deep in his heart he knew it was impossible. A flame hissed. A picture of his mother standing on the long veranda flashed before his eyes. He had no money. He was living on a government stipend and if he married now he would be totally cut off from his village, his books, his inestimable academic life. He had crossed rivers and plains to reach this city that offered the only established academic institution in the whole region. He had sacrificed everything and willed himself to study just so that he could beat the old home in the village and exorcise the memory of hardship and poverty that he and his mother had faced all these years. He thought he would die. He cursed society, and he cursed his destiny. So poor! So poor! With nothing to eat and nothing to wear. On so many days he and his friend had walked to school barefoot, and sometimes used slippers made of wood and bicycle tyres.
The girl was still watching him and her eyes had changed again, till he felt he could not recognize her anymore. A searing heat coiled itself around his heart.
At the time his friend Abo had said, ‘Let it go. Let go. Things happen. We know what fate is: the gods overrule us.’
So one part of his life ended. He never saw her again after that day when she climbed into a hand-drawn rickshaw with her small shoulder bag. He had seen her place her feet on the tin trunk that contained everything she had, and everything that they had shared. Even at the last she had looked at him as if trying to penetrate a g
reat mystery. Then she had smiled and waved proudly as she left him for ever. He convinced himself that her proud smile was her way of saying that yes, they had loved each other. That was sufficient for him. They had loved one another. It was a way of coping with his pain. But deep in his heart he knew it was ash, and at best, the last embers of a jewelled fire.
He had married Nyameng, a simple village woman, and she had borne him sons and daughters and had been a great consolation to his poor, dead mother. He remembered how the old woman had always said, ‘A good woman is a blessing. A good woman is a treasure beyond any calculation.’ His mother had come to visit him once in the town where he was working. To humour her he had taken her to the big concrete market and there she had glared at the shopkeepers and bargained sharply for every purchase. She had bought an unusual piece of bright cloth with tasselled ends. She had had it wrapped. Then she had said, ‘This is for Nyameng. We have been very lucky.’
Yes, he too had been lucky. He had travelled all across the land as an officer and had been well loved and respected for his upright dealings in the service. Throughout, his wife had provided rest and support. It was not a passionate relationship but it was comfortable and they made few demands of each other. Her quiet presence soothed him with the warmth of a simple household fire. Now if his bones ached a bit in the winter she rubbed him with hornbill fat and said, ‘There! That should keep you fit.’
He smiled to himself. How quickly everything passes, he thought, listening to his wife’s voice calling out to him.
‘I’m here,’ he called back, leaning his stick against the tree and moving towards the house. The widow of his old friend Abo had come on one of her visits.
It was a year ago that he had heard about Abo having taken to his bed with some complaint. ‘Why, what’s wrong with him now?’ he had thought. Abo had always been tough as nails; just the other day he had been cutting wood and talking about going fishing. ‘Must be old age,’ he had told himself. Then one morning they told him his old friend was dead. ‘Ah,’ was all he said. The news did not surprise him. He knew the end was coming when Abo had started laughing in his sickbed remembering the days when they had walked to school together. That was well over half a century ago! He himself was almost stone deaf now but he could hear those memories weaving in and out of his head as clearly as if they had happened yesterday.