by Mamang Dai
Sirsiri lived in the top row of houses in Gurdum, and her sweeping glance passed like a compass over all that lay below her.
There was the single steep, slithering road that linked all the sectors and markets of the place. There was the bank and post office intersection. A few identical grocery stores were scattered here and there, and the road itself was worth only a few kilometres and was bereft of traffic signals or street lamps.
One could pass the whole day staring out of the window. By five o’clock, sometimes, the clouds would lift and the steep fall of the mountain would be visible. At such times the small town would appear to sway and lift with the force of the wind that would begin to build up from the northern side. This was also the hour that Sirsiri would feel the pull of an addiction that seemed to have hit everyone in Gurdum. If the phone rang at this time it meant someone was calling to say, ‘Come over. Are you ready?’
Playing cards had become the grandest pastime and Sirsiri was the keenest gambler among a group of women who played as hard as the men. Some card groups played for days and nights, deserting their homes, offices and shops, even their small children. They were elated by their victories, bruised by serious losses, and they moved from house to house, the incorrigible regulars boasting about how much they had lost rather than about how much they had won. Serious drinking was expected on these occasions. Cars came and went. Some players fell asleep, then roused themselves to play again, refreshed by more drink and cigarettes. At these times it seemed the human brain functioned at an extraordinary plane. Men bragged that their minds were clear and razor sharp, despite the claustrophobic air and dim lights, the heavy haze of cigarette smoke and the lack of food, sleep and any sense of time. It was an addiction that heightened speech, laughter, and feelings of friendship. It veered minds towards nostalgia, philosophy and, more often than not, spiteful gossip and shocking disclosures.
‘Do you know,’ said Sirsiri, ‘I saw Kalum the other day, driving that new woman teacher.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I think there’s something going on.’
‘What!’
‘The way he was driving, saying something to her and the way she was smiling…I thought the car might run off the road!’
‘Hai, come on! He must have been just giving her a lift.’
‘Hah! I can tell about these things. I have a feeling.’ And Sirsiri declared her hand of winning cards with a flourish.
Sirsiri had a narrow, swarthy face and restless, glinting eyes. She moved like a fly alighting swiftly and then darting off. She always left a place with a high, shrill laugh. When she wanted to be friendly she moved close to a person and shaped her lips into a half smile that was meant to suggest eagerness and concern. ‘We never see you, where have you been hiding?’ she would say. Or, ‘Hai, you have been travelling? How lucky! I am the only one rotting here!’ Then she would laugh and dart a meaningful look at her husband Pesso, a quiet man originally from Duyang, who smiled stoically at all her jibes.
Some fifteen-twenty years ago Sirsiri had come to Duyang as a young bride from a distant village. People said she had sung songs on the radio and that it was at the new, tiny Radio Station in Pigo that the young Pesso riding in on a bicycle to deliver mail had first set eyes on her. Soon old man Pator was spreading the happy news that a great singer was going to become a daughterin-law of the village, and Sirsiri had been welcomed with great honour. Her husband Pesso was a good man. He owned plenty of land near the river and he was also employed in the government office. This raised his status in the eyes of all the people of Duyang. However, this had not impressed Sirsiri. She had other dreams, and no matter where she was, she always wanted to be elsewhere. She was unhappy even after Pesso sold his land in the village and moved to Gurdum for good. After the birth of two daughters and a son the shy young girl turned into a brisk, talkative woman and as the years rolled on and the children grew up, the Pesso household began to show signs of greater and greater strain.
Pesso never understood why she was always in such a temper. In their house, voices rose and fell at odd angles. They flew across the rooms, bounced off the walls and crashed from the ceiling. There were shrill voices and chanting voices uncoiling in a litany of complaints. Sometimes, lost strains of hidden music broke through, but this was rare. Usually, voices whispered urgently, pattered, shrieked and raged and swiped at objects and beings. Then silence rose like a dense wave that twisted meaning and context.
Talk. Talk. Talk. Sirsiri talked everything to death. Words rolled out of her mouth like a long tongue of vengeance. Her talk antagonized well-wishers and drove away visitors. In the end, it even drove Pesso out of the house. ‘What did I say?’ the poor man had muttered as he slipped out one day and stayed away for two days. Soon, this became a pattern and sometimes he would be gone for several weeks. He hardly realized that the root of the endless words lashing at the world was his very silence, and his lack of words to say to the woman he had married.
Sirsiri’s complaints were loudest in the long season of rain. She cursed the sky and the mountains and her frustration grew as the rain poured down in sheets day after day.
When the rains stopped, the day sweated vapour and lethargy. Men ceased to think and sometimes, in a fit of madness, they rushed into the forest to hack away at the undergrowth and hunt with brutal instinct, killing three deer in one night. Others escaped to the big river, throwing their nets into the summer flood while their women waited, worn out at home. The men trampled the forest and shouted at the wind. They cut into the earth, removed the trees, ravaged the soft soil and wept in their dreams, not knowing for what or whom they mourned. The earth trembled under the burden of heat and rain. All the talk was about earthquakes.
‘If one ever came, the place would go,’ they said.
At night Sirsiri left her clothes just so, draped over a chair to be able to grab them and run out in an emergency. She dreamt of mudslides, and started at the sound of the late-night lorries. She made sure the candle was within reach, and aware that nothing bothered her husband, she worried about their investment in the shape of a concrete building now being raised in a steep place above the road. What if the road broke? What if the pillars collapsed? Everyone knew that workmen used sub-standard material all the time! She imagined the mountains folding and saw the tangled roots of trees upturned to the sky. She saw rivers of mud and the rising dust of fallen buildings and heard herself wailing in fear and frustration.
Oh! What a place! Cursed, ill-chosen, disturbed! A little clearing in the forest full of stones and rain! When everywhere else, cities were rising overnight like columns of light into the sky! Sirsiri was bitter and bored and nothing consoled her.
the golden chance
One day I was sitting in the small bank building of Gurdum, staring out at the sloping road and thinking, ‘Ah, now I must really start doing something worthwhile, I must work and save money and give something to my relatives,’ when Kasup came in and sat down beside me. He greeted me loudly, then shuffled papers and began to talk earnestly with the bank manager. When I prepared to leave, clutching my account book with its puny, secretive numbers, he suddenly pushed back his chair too and said, ‘Come, come, I want to ask you something.’ He drew me to one side and bending close to me he said, ‘Are you happy?’
What! I started. It was the last thing I had expected to be asked.
The days in Gurdum were clear and mostly calm. At night the wind moaned down the gorge and rattled the rooftops, and my sleep was full of vague dreams that unfurled like a mist. My papers and books lay scattered about and I liked the seclusion that allowed me to be indolent.
‘Why?’ I said to Kasup, almost whispering, as if I were guilty of something.
His wide, fresh face broke into a smile and I understood that because Kasup had travelled to the city recently his head had been completely turned by the sights, sounds and smells of the other life. The representatives sent to the National Development Council for Backward Areas
had been thoroughly overwhelmed by the sea of people, the lights and the roar of traffic and they had returned triumphant, as if they had learnt the secret of modern life.
I nodded and made my way back to the little building I called my home. All summer my plans had been erratic. I was still landscaping, trying to fit the outline of the hills within the frame of bamboo and young foliage that surrounded my house. When the phone rang I jumped at it, just wanting to hear another voice. It was my friend Mona from the city and she was shouting at the top of her voice. ‘I have been trying to reach you for days! Listen, someone wants to make a film. Can you help?’
‘A film? About what?’
‘About Duyang and the other villages! The place and the people. This is a golden chance! He’s a very famous documentary film-maker. You better come down!’
According to Mona the film crew were working out the logistics and had already applied for their Inner Line Permits and other entry formalities. We just had to fit the pieces together—the storyline, the places to be filmed, and instructions to the would-be players about what to do.
‘Why don’t you prepare the itinerary?’ she said with great enthusiasm. ‘Tell them about the caves. About the bead mountain. But first speak to the villagers. I’m sure they will be interested. After all, it will be a golden chance for them too!’
I imagined people like Hoxo rolling their eyes. Appear in front of a movie camera? Sit on a rock, chant something? No! Never! It would be too funny! Who wants to see us? Others, like Rakut, would be sure to say, ‘Forget it! It will take a hundred years to get it right.’
I couldn’t see what this golden chance was about, and why it had so gripped my friend. Huh! I had heard about chance and opportunities a thousand times, and actually there was nothing like that at all. Help some film crew? I wasn’t sure. I sat on the cane sofa and put up my legs to think, staring at the TV screen. There was a Hindi film on, a fight scene out on the road, in the middle of honking, screeching angry traffic somewhere in Bombay or Delhi or some other big city.
The phone rang again. ‘What are you doing! What are you doing?’ I had almost forgotten! It was Omi and Dabo reminding me about the dinner at their place to celebrate Dabo’s new play. It had not been staged yet, but we all knew the lines by heart, because whenever anyone of us felt like getting together, we met on the excuse of finalizing the play. Now I rushed out to buy something for the party. In the market they were selling fish buried in ice. These came packed in crates from distant states and the sellers lifted the gills swiftly for inspection, to check for freshness and superior taste. But there were only ten fish in a pile, the last of the heap, so I turned to the local products, which were livelier: Green leaves with thorny stems, slabs of preserved, moist bamboo shoot, camomile, bitter clerodendrum, wild berries of the belladonna family. The women were sitting in a row on open ground just as they have always done, with their baskets of greens, among the fish scales, the mud and ooze, and the men weighing live chickens.
Omi greeted me happily. ‘Come, come in. Bless you!’ Dabo also started up. There were many friends here already, and a delicious smell wafted in from the backyard. A group of young men and women from their village were handling the cooking, Omi said, and we were not to lift a finger.
‘God bless them,’ said Dabo of these clan brothers and sisters who travelled down from the hills like a migratory labour force in search of any old job to help them cope in these times of change.
Dabo has a full and untidy head of hair and works in a small cubbyhole of an office in the Weights and Measures department in the busy centre of Gurdum. Here, among the dusty files and the shrubs creeping up the stained and dusty windows, he imagines the sun and the moon thundering across the sky and writes and rewrites his unending plays where entire villages and the people of Gurdum town are the cast of characters.
His latest play, the one we were celebrating, was called Sepek, Sepek. The word implies the sound of a beating stick. Briefly, the play was about guarding food. Anyone would recognize the pointed face of the old lady who could be seen peering in through a door in the first frame…
She is the quickest woman in the village to raise her bamboo tongs in defence of her food, and there she is, bending over an inert, sleeping form. A rooster crows, to tell the audience that it is dawn. The thief gets no time to wake up and run before the bamboo tongs fall on him, repeatedly: Sepek-sepek-sepek! Next frame: The maid is now captured looking over her shoulder with hands stretched out, in a posture of lifting or taking something, and finally frozen in the act of drinking all the milk. She gets it, too: Sepek-sepek! The famous door bursts open again and another unfortunate is seen flying out. Sepek! Final cut: There she is again, the old woman, with a look of cunning triumph on her face. She is trotting towards the storehouse holding an enormous lock. Then she is heaving and locking up the place with a good turn of the key as large as a gun.
We laughed over this play and spent many hours outlining the old lady’s set face with her eagle eyes and a short, round haircut.
‘When is it going to be a hit?’ Omi said. ‘When are we going to rake in the m-o-o-lah!’
We were always imagining pots of money and lots of goodies. Dabo smiled sheepishly and said, ‘Well, wait a bit. I want to set the characters right.’ He told me that he had asked Sirsiri to act in the play and that he was trying to fit in a scene where Sirsiri could sing. ‘Perhaps it will lift the play,’ he said.
We knew what that meant. Sirsiri would make outrageous demands and the play would languish. Like many others Omi, too, found her intolerable. ‘She’s like a shrimp jingling with her beads and necklaces,’ she said. On the other hand, we knew that Sirsiri’s presence could add splendour to the play, because whatever one might say about Sirsiri, there was no denying that she had stage presence. And she could certainly sing.
‘Well, whatever it is, just finish writing the play!’ Omi now said.
Outside, the young helpers had taken over the kitchen and there was a big fire going in the backyard. The place was littered with bamboo shavings, leaves, baskets and roasting tomatoes and chillies. An iron grill covered with skewered pieces of meat was sizzling and dripping fat into the fire. A young boy of about eleven years was crouched near by, poking at the coals with a long stick. Now and then he held up the flaming end of the stick and stared at it. Then he pushed it back into the fire.
‘Aiee! You’ll burn yourself. Don’t touch the fire so much,’ shouted Omi.
‘Really! This boy is too much. He’s always playing with the fire!’ A young man darted forward and gave the boy’s hand a smart slap. Then he was grinning again, and went back to chopping and cutting and stirring and doing everything all at once. Omi told me he was Rigbi. They belonged to the same clan and he was the father of the boy. The boy also grinned and continued to throw in bits of paper and twigs into the roaring fire. They reminded me of another of Dabo’s plays about a boy and his father from the village, a play that might well have been modelled on Rigbi…
The young boy. Today, perhaps, is the happiest day of his life.
His heart is humming with happiness. He is with his father and his father is cooking a lot of food. He sees the green onions, leaves, wild fern; and he wants to jump up, run, dance and sing. He takes a deep breath. The aroma of roasting meat! It is all he desires. Meat, bone, gristle, fat, skin! He remembers the taste of sizzling fat burnt black and dripping onto the hard rice, with bits of charcoal still sticking to it. He will eat it all. It is a taste he can never forget. The crackling would stick to his fingers as his mother watched. He cannot remember ever seeing her eating, and she never smiled, but in those moments he had seen some happiness glowing in her eyes, before she closed them forever one cold winter when the meagre crop in their fields had perished. Ever since then he has stayed close to his father who is still young and strong and dashing.
‘We may not have much but we have this. Look!’ His father would tap his head as if it contained great treasures. Sometimes he wou
ld roll up his shirtsleeve or flex a calf muscle and say, ‘Look! We have this!’
His father chopped wood, played football, and sometimes the boy saw him struggling with papers and stamps as he pursued jobs and sent off one application after another. Now they are in the town, and nothing has changed. But his father says, ‘No fear. We are close to the ground. If we climb very high and fall off we would break our backs! Hah, ha!’
The skinny boy laughs happily. One front tooth has broken off and he looks like a thin bunny rabbit. This endeared him to the old women of the village who scolded him for eating too many sweets.
‘Hah, what sweets!’ he would think in his tough little heart. For him, it was always about meat. His friend’s father’s drying rack was always full of meat. His friend brought strips of meat in his pocket and they would eat it while running over the stones. It hardened their jaws, the juices filled their mouths and flowed into their blood like the taste of wind, sunlight and salt. He could feel the light streaming into his eyes, stretching his limbs and changing his skin, teeth and bones until he thought he was turning into a tiger…
Now father and son were positioned near a big pot that was steaming and bubbling. It was a special pork curry that Rigbi was cooking with freshly ground turmeric.
‘Rigbi loves to cook,’ Omi was saying. ‘God knows how he enjoys it, but he is always trying some new combination. Tribal modified, he says. I remember his old man was a big eater. He would throw a fit if he found the rice bins half full. Rigbi’s wife, poor thing, had a hard time keeping the old man happy. I think the last years were really bad. She used to say her legs were cooked standing under the hot sun, knee-deep in water for hours on end, planting rice. Ai! It’s backbreaking work!’