Something akin to nature’s justice, or perhaps a design conceived by the vital force out of the desperation to live, Subedarni would laugh witlessly, talk to unseen beings, unable to register pain or suffering.
Night fell. Everybody stopped to rest. But Subedar wished that night would never come. He would scold Subedarni. That night the infirm ate her fill and more, but the healthy had no appetite.
On the next day, he carried Subedarni in the same manner. He had no lingering sense of fear, but in sudden pangs a cold terror would overcome him. He would keep calling out to Subedarni, even though she was on his back, he would jolt her and call her name. Today he intensely distrusted Subedarni’s sleep.
Even as he was walking, he realized that Subedarni’s hands had gone cold. He put her down immediately. Subedar fell on the corpse and cried. Jayamaya howled and cried in the thick of the jungle. And, as if she understood everything but was incapable of action because of the body’s insentience, a few drops of tears appeared in the eyes of the deceased.
Subedar buried the body by himself and sat by the grave. Jayamaya couldn’t bring herself to ask her father to get going. Eventually, somebody else pulled them away and forced them to keep walking.
There was no count of how many more days they walked.
When they arrived at Takab, the length of the banks of the river was strewn with saris and other belongings. Takab had risen and become unfordable. Those who had arrived early had thrown themselves into the current and waded across. But a few days of rain had enraged the river. Some soldiers had fashioned a footbridge of long bamboo stalks, putting up a railing hanging from a length of rope—but it had already been swept away along with an entire family. The river that gathered in untold corners of the jungles on the mountains above suddenly unleashed here with great fury. It had a rapid current, and it was of very cold water. With each fresh wash of rain it threatened to sweep away the banks.
Rice and dal were available here, but alongside flowed Takab, as if appointed to swallow half of the population.
When his foot slipped a little under the water, a father had been lost along with the son he carried on his shoulder. When a wife panicked and made her husband panic in turn, both met their end in the river.
Around then, somebody slaughtered a buffalo that had been abandoned by the Nagas. Amidst the incessant rain through days and nights, they barely showed the meat some fire and ate it half-raw. Corpses lay scattered everywhere—nobody had the sense of throwing them down the river. They would flip a body over to scoop up the water underneath. A few dozen who had gone to fetch fresh water from the river couldn’t return. Something like cholera ran slaughter through the camp.
With sunken eyes, dirty hair, facial hair grown to an untidy bush, Subedar considered the people living in squalor all over the riverbank. Ever new groups were still arriving. It was a throng of the diseased and the wounded. It rained unabated. From under all the shelters fashioned out of tarpaulins and raincoats, wet, dull wafts of smoke thinned, and as they rose, dissolved, disappeared.
A few lone soldiers still swam across the river. But the women and children couldn’t cross. Five or six young men stood like stakes driven into the river and held a long, thick rope, and asking the elderly to hold on to the rope, sent a dozen people across. But when the Takab swept away those who panicked in eye-high water and let go of the rope, that audacity was also abandoned. No other option remained but to wait on the riverbanks for the rains to cease, the river-swell to ebb.
One day, Subedar walked upstream along the banks of the Takab. Jayamaya also came with her father.
The Takab became even more unmanageable upstream.
After a half mile’s walk they came upon a great confluence of rivers where the river on whose banks they stood joined a river flowing in from the other side. The river on the other side was bigger, and perhaps was the Takab. But the flow of the tributary on this side overpowered the waters of the Takab—perhaps this river was deeper, or perhaps it flowed faster and with a greater force. ‘If I jump into its currents, it will throw me halfway across the second river, and with a few strokes of my arms I can swim across,’ Subedar speculated.
It was a much clearer day. After giving Jayamaya his coat and gun, Subedar entered the water.
And in no time, and with much less effort than he had imagined, he reached across.
Only when he shivered with cold on the opposite bank did he understand what a grave error he had made. He entered the water once more to take his daughter across. The current threw him back, wouldn’t let him cross. Although he thrashed and kicked with all his might, the river swept him farther downstream. Jayamaya shouted his name from across the river and wept.
Somehow Subedar managed to return to the far bank of the river.
‘Walk downstream along the riverbank. I will swim across from a little ways downstream,’ Subedar shouted the instructions across the river.
Carrying her bundle and the gun, Jayamaya cried as she walked downstream. Subedar was also walking downstream, scoping for a suitable spot on the opposite bank.
At times Subedar would disappear from Jayamaya’s sight. Frightened, Jayamaya would shout her father’s name. Eventually, the sight of her father’s white shirt would reassure her, and she would become angry with her father.
At one spot the river had pooled deep, and in another spot there were large, slippery rocks in the white water of the river, but Jayamaya crossed all of these obstacles and came downstream.
Further along was a difficult spot where she would have to skirt around the riverbank. She went around the spot and returned to the bank to search for her father. Subedar wasn’t in sight. Repeatedly, Jayamaya sent her voice across the river to call for her father. Subedar didn’t appear anywhere. Imagining that her father had already climbed much farther, she hurriedly ran downstream. She stood at different spots and cried and called for her father. Jayamaya was beginning to cry alone under tall, unfamiliar trees. She also realized that evening was falling around her.
Soon, the days of rains ceased and the river began to subside with each day. Soon, it came no higher than the waist.
Now all who had survived began crossing the river. After having sent so many to their deaths in the swell of the river, those who crossed easily now experienced a guilt borne of unknown crimes—as if it was a sin to continue living while others had perished.
Fighter planes would machine-gun a thin trail through the jungle. Another unending journey began onward with just that support. Jayamaya remembered nothing of this part of the journey. She remembered only one incident:
After about two days of walking she found Lieutenant Baghbir Mukhiya running in the opposite direction, unkempt like a madman. He appeared transformed and frightening—Jayamaya recognized him only from his voice.
He was screaming as he approached—‘All of my people are on here. How can I go away on my own? My wife is here, my children, everybody is here. Who do I have there for me to go?’
And so he ran away, screaming…
After twenty-two days on the road, Jayamaya’s group arrived at Lekhapani in Assam. When they saw in the distance a few whitewashed houses, a motor car speeding, nobody found anything to say. In nobody’s heart was the joy of arriving.
Mountains and Rivers
A high mountain under constant supervision of the Himalaya. There sat a village of Nepalis: growing, becoming thick with each passing year. Home since aeons—it was also called the clan-home, the place of origin—it sat atop a hill. Old houses of stone, mud and wood. With some exaggeration, it could be called a three-storey house. Thatch on the roof: compact, neatly tied. It stood well and handsomely, that Nepali house, on top of the hill.
It was a house bequeathed by the ancestors but, in spite of all the repairs and patches, in spite of fresh plaster and wash, even from afar it was recognizably the home of poor folks who managed only a hardscrabble life. Happiness arrived unannounced sometimes perhaps during the festivals; otherwise life
was the constant negotiation with a string of worries and fears: a landslip might take the house with it, or a storm might blow it down. Everybody fretted over the same questions: how solid was the ground on which the house stood? How strong were its masonry and joinery?
A dream had bound them together: that they would someday earn prosperity through a common striving, that they would share it equally, that each would have his share of plenty. But the awaking was different: always in gloom; the sun shining as if a reluctant favour. ‘As if it’d lost its way here,’ said Sainla, as always busy shoring up the stone wall beneath the ever-crumbling terrace.
In this land of verdant hills and the ruby of rhododendrons, of milk-white magnolia and the gold of marigolds, in a land of colourful birds—a life of such penury seemed incongruent. Will this land forget her people and rush towards heavenly beauty? Is it aeons of poverty and ignorance that burdens the people and leaves them straggling on these mountain slopes?
‘It won’t do to live together anymore,’ one of the brothers thought one day.
‘This house will fall, today or tomorrow. None will rise from this common grave—we who have been inhabiting a common grave. I withdraw my death from the shared lot. My life will walk a separate path.
‘It is impossible to arrive anywhere with this teeming multitude, this people that compulsively crawls along the trodden path. A shorter route for my branch of folks—there is prosperity awaiting us. For how much longer can we wait for a future for all? I must live in the present. I shall wrench away my present from theirs, and my future too, separate and different.’
He studied the faces of his brothers.
‘I have skin fairer than his; I am different. I am darker than that one; I am different. My nose is flatter than his but higher than the other one’s; I am different. I am not a pauper like they are; I am different. Neither am I a moron like they are; I am different. I am well-schooled, I have much money. I possess cunning.’
The gaping maw of suspicion swallows him whole: Are we all truly of a kind? Are we indeed a common folk?
A young man and an old man.
They were climbing towards the Mahakal shrine.
The old man kept a slow but steady uphill pace. The young man had to climb and wait, and therefore found time to formulate and ask questions.
‘Uncle, you must tell them to not go their separate way. They listen to you.’
‘Nobody listens to anybody,’ the old man said. He had paused to catch his breath. The young man didn’t like the response, but he also didn’t know what he should say in return. He merely scrutinized the sombreness on the old man’s face.
‘Everybody pursues their own interest,’ the old man said, still standing.
‘They are the selfish ones. What could be our interest in this?’ the youth promptly contradicted.
‘Perhaps their interest is minor. Perhaps we have the bigger claim. But both are selfish claims.’
The pair walked quietly. They saw the soil and rock of the path; they saw green grass by the wayside.
‘Selfishness can also be a service. Perhaps a narrower service, or perhaps a greater service.’
‘Will the government give them reservation?’ the young man asked urgently, his thoughts having arrived on that topic.
As disappointment, this answer:
‘Politicians in this government have their own interests.’
Suddenly the entrance to the Mahakal shrine came into view.
After prostrating and receiving the tika, after walking around the shrine, as he prepared to leave, the old man saw the young man reading something carved on a large bell hanging by the shrine.
‘Read this,’ the young man called the old man over.
‘Looks like a poem,’ he said with a smile.
Two short men strained to read the high writing.
Mountains
Green and flowers
Needlessly swept away by rivers.
Rivers
Bright birds
Unimpeded was their movement—
Needlessly obstructed by mountains.
Shanti! Shanti! Shanti!
The young man says, ‘Hills are us, who stay behind. Rivers—those who leave.’
The old man replies, ‘Rivers forever hurry to somewhere, but also always remain here. Hills are fluid and ever changing, too.’
On the day of his departure, imagining that he would never have any use for them, he discarded everything Nepali in his possession. He hurled away the khukuri, still in its sheath. Into the same corner he threw the bundle of freshly disrobed daura-suruwal and topee. Clothed in barely a stitch to hide his shame, he jettisoned over the yard the water-pot of copper and plates of bronze, the carved bowls and Bhanubhakta’s Ramayana. ‘I reject it!’ he shouted in Hindi—‘I reject dashain! I reject tihar too! I reject sel roti!’ He trampled on pouches of sour gundruk and pungent sinki, of mountain pepper and the chimfing herb.
By the time he left home the sky had turned dark. The heavens rumbled on and on, as if to recite a string of Nepali adages.
‘They were aloof even when together,’ said Ranimaya, who was carrying home an armful of squash vines from the kitchen garden. She had picked long vines, to collect mature stems to feed the goats.
‘I have ancient pride, I have ability,’ yet another brother calculated. ‘I have artistry, I have industry,’ another weighed inwardly—who there was truly dispossessed? These numerous talents required protection, required preservation.
‘We are the ones who really need protection!’ The stack of arguments grew.
And, thus, after begging for reservation from the state, after being granted it and after receiving it in upturned palms, so many hid their departure to slink away in the night, while so many marched away in broad daylight.
Those who remain worry now—‘Have we perhaps become weaker?’ But that worry lasts a mere few days. Still they are in numbers large enough to revolt. And those who departed haven’t really left: their bravery, talent, skills haven’t left. Neither are gone the culture, the language, the nationhood, nor is absent the rhododendron flower, the fragrant magnolia and bright marigold, or the forested hills. History hasn’t departed, and there yet remains a destination for the nation.
People here were attentive to whatever news arrived from the land they left behind. They took pride when they heard of revolutions and sacrifices—the land isn’t without courage! Witnessing oppression, they could only feel pity.
A day in winter, after many years had passed, a day after a quake:
A beneficiary of reservations who has reached a high position in the government feels the desire to inspect the condition of those who had been left behind. The old house must have fallen. I will see the ruins, he thinks. I’ll shoot it with a video-camera.
We have separated, but not parted, he thinks inwardly.
Shakes his head. As if to shake loose something inside.
Even if he flies there in disguise, like the clouds, he doesn’t understand why there is always the urge to spy on the mountains.
The very next day, he has already entered a government-owned car and some controversy.
With a fellow traveller, he takes a rental car and heads for the border. With the dusk he enters Nepali territory.
‘Don’t talk about the history of political unification. It is only a series of conspiracies, deception and acts of oppression. If that is how the creation of a people begins, where will we get to?’ he says.
‘Political unification and ethnic unification, political construction and ethnic construction aren’t the same things. If the political victory was a short mission over three decades, the development of our people has been a long process, spanning three thousand years. A king may harbour, on his own, the ambition for a political victory. But the progress of an entire people needs the participation of everybody,’ the answer arrives.
‘We are still separate creeds, separate castes—we haven’t yet become a people. In truth, we are many separa
te tribes,’ he says.
‘Who do you include in this “we”? This “we” is our people. It exists. We’ll survive as a people—we can—but we won’t survive as separate creeds—we can’t. Look at the world—have people each become unified, or have they fragmented into groups?’ Another query.
‘Fragmenting from unity, we are dispersed around the world.’
‘But it will retain the consciousness of selfhood for aeons.’
‘Reservation is not wrong. To have a nation of our own is also a sort of reservation. A people to belong to, a region to inhabit, to have a home—all are forms of reservation,’ he says.
‘We have the nation as a common reservation. For ages to come, we have our people, the Nepali people. Reservation, preservation, security—let’s seek them on the basis of our identity,’ the response arrives.
‘If my gains from reservation sustain me, your troubles will be lesser,’ he says.
‘Your gains from reservation excludes others; our troubles increase,’ the answer arrives.
After the car trudges uphill for many hours suddenly electric lights from across the dark rise fill his view.
He is startled.
‘From the morning tomorrow, I’ll inspect the situation.’
He has ventured out after swallowing his morning snack and sees that the people milling about in the streets are well dressed. He tells himself, ‘They are inwardly hollowed by the expense of keeping up a prosperous façade.’ He sees shops everywhere, ‘Most of these are shops selling the bare necessities.’ He sees tall houses on either side of the road. ‘How many of these belong to people of our kind?’
‘Cities lie about our condition, they aren’t truthful,’ he decides.
On the path leading away from the village he sees a healthy old woman climbing down to the bazaar with a grandson—plump and clad in new daura suruwal topee coat shoes—strapped to her back with a shawl over her forehead.
Long Night of Storm Page 2