Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (20 page)

‘Don’t you feel,’ you asked, ‘as though you are elsewhere?’

I knew what you meant; in the midst of Assam’s lush landscape it was a sudden desert hollowed by dips and dunes. When we were close to the dry river, you threw off your slippers and walked in, I followed. The sand was warm and slippery, shaping itself fluidly under our feet. It was hard to imagine that once where we were standing, a river flowed, swift and spirited. We found perfectly smooth stones that fit the palm of our hands, and strange, contorted driftwood, some large enough to cradle us like boats.

On some evenings, when the light seemed to last longer, we’d hire a boat and a fisherman would row us out on the Brahmaputra. Mostly you’d ask him to go upstream and then allow us to drift, stopping before the current swept us too far out. We’d sit on the plank in the middle; it smelled of fish, and a certain wet wood dampness, like a forest, I thought, that grew in caves. You looked happiest then, when we floated past the world, gently rocked by lapping water. On some evenings, dusk fell around us, and we were guided only by lanterns and the fisherman’s song.

Every night we’d curl around each other in the bathtub, like river reeds, the water deep and warm around us. Sometimes, down my neck, you traced the stars. Sometimes you spoke about your mother.

‘Why did she do it?’

You shrugged, the water rippling over your shoulders, the steam quivering off your skin. ‘I know why even though I can’t explain it.’

Sometimes you tried; you sat up, smoking, feverishly talking. ‘Don’t you feel that way? This awkwardness, with your place in the world. You know, when I put my head under water I hear nothing, I see much clearer…’ And you’d plunge into the tub, grazing against my stomach, my thighs.

The morning we left, you were nowhere to be found.

‘I do apologize,’ your father said. ‘Ever since her mother… you know, ever since it happened, she’s been like this, a bit difficult.’

My parents, ever gracious, said they understood, that there was no need for him to be sorry, that they’d had a wonderful time. In turn, they invited your parents to Shillong, and although they promised to come, you and your family have not made a visit.

On our way back I was mostly silent, watching the landscape outside the window flash past. Everything seemed unreal—the low-roofed houses, the swathes of paddy land, the endless stretch of bridges—changing, I felt, on a screen at a distance. Soon, we were climbing, the engine moaned, and the valleys deepened. We passed the sweeping blue waters of Barapani, shimmering coldly in the sunlight, and I felt a great sense of emptiness—as though it had been drained and all the world lay hollow like the lake.

The Shillong we drove into was as cold and dispirited as we’d left it. I found it hard to believe we’d been away. Nothing, and everything, had changed. That evening, Sarah, one of my close friends, called, as she’d promised, to fill me in on events I’d missed. She had a crush on twin boys, but couldn’t tell one from the other; someone else had been kissed behind the shelter of an umbrella at Ward’s Lake. Jason, she giggled, was eagerly awaiting my return.

‘And you?’ she asked breathlessly. ‘How was your holiday?’

I thought of you, your hands, your face. And folded them up, our secret lives.

I went to a lake and drowned.

‘Nothing special.’

When I think of you now, it’s the feel of wet sand and long grass that comes to me, the smell of cigarettes, and cloves and creatures that live close to water. The stench of your old sadness. I imagine you waiting, like when I first found you, for someone to lead you out to where all rivers end, to the sea.

Embassy

I
t was a corpse-cold evening in mid-December when Josephine broke his heart. The sky was the colour of razor blades, lying flat and square outside the window and slivered delicately between the branches of bare trees. The air both numbed and sharpened his senses, froze and shaped his breath. In his ears was the echo of her silence when he asked about Ashley, the Anglo boy from the neighbourhood next to theirs, the boy with the blue-grey eyes who played the guitar like Slash.

‘Lal said he saw you with him last week, and yesterday. Just tell me the truth, Jo…’

And in her own way, he supposed she had. First she laughed about it and treated it all as a joke. Then she denied ever being with Ashley in the chai shop—or maybe she’d joined him once, but it didn’t mean anything, and surely Tei would not be the sort to begrudge her a cup of tea with an acquaintance. Finally, she lapsed into sullen silence, as though it were all his fault for bringing this up. That things were otherwise alright, and he’d gone and disturbed the peace.

‘Just tell me the truth…’ he pleaded.

‘I don’t know,’ she snapped at one point. ‘What truth? Whose truth?’

It was very simple, he said, did she want to be with Ashley or with him?

And when she kept quiet, he knew. He walked aimlessly for a while, pacing the sloping streets of his locality until he reached the bustle of Laitumkhrah. The pavements were crowded with evening shoppers and local vegetable sellers stocked with sheaves of mustard leaves. A crowd of youngsters buzzed around the aloo-muri man at Police Point; they stood with banana-leaf bowls, laughing loudly and eyeing each other with interest. Further down the main road, he saw a group of friends turn into a jadoh stall for chai and conversation. Any other evening, he would have joined them, but today he walked swiftly past. Only when he reached Don Bosco Square did he realize what he wanted was a drink. He debated over taking a taxi—the roads were clogged to bursting with traffic—and decided to walk to Police Bazaar instead. Maybe it would warm him up. Perhaps it would clear the pain, and stop thoughts of Josephine running through his head like a madly looped tape. Also, he would save on taxi fare. That twenty bucks would buy him an extra drink. It would keep him warmer than the arms he’d never find himself in again.

After he navigated Jacob’s Ladder, a long flight of narrow, slippery stairs that led to the bottom of Don Bosco Hill, he walked briskly by Ward’s Lake and the main post office building. Eventually, he strode down the sloping So So Tham Road towards Khyndai Lad junction, a pulsating heart of people and traffic. From here, spreading out in long, grasping fingers, were seedy, unlit streets, each an accomplished specialist in various nocturnal offerings, from the medically urgent to the dubious and debauched. Keating Road on the left came to life after the liquor stores in town had closed. It was lined with makeshift stalls that sold alcohol ‘in black’ alongside perfectly legal yet deleterious deep-fried prawns packed in greasy newspaper. On the right was Jail Road whose genteel bakeries and music shops gave way to a dkhar vegetable market and rows of sweet shops that smelled perpetually of rose water and ghee. Running parallel to this was Quinton Road whose one major landmark was the blue-and-white Eight Sisters Hotel—a name which, as everyone joked, referred less to the states in Northeast India than the number of whores you could pay to have in your bed at the same time. Along Glory’s Plaza Road, where Tei was now walking, these working women stood outside Payal Cinema, their bodies carefully preened and positioned. ‘Come-hither’ their hips and hands beckoned, while their eyes darted through the crowd, sharp and knowing. The men they smiled at were the ones they picked as potentials; they could tell, even from a distance, those who were the slightest bit interested or intrigued. Even though he hadn’t ever paid for a woman before, for a moment Tei was tempted—an image flashed in his mind of Josephine and Ashley, together, doing the things she’d allowed him to do to her, on her bed, on his sofa, on their long drives to the countryside of Kyrdemkulai. The world roared in his ears. He wanted to be with someone as revenge, as redressal for betrayal. Maybe all he needed to get Josephine off his mind was a good, hard fuck.

Something must have shown on his face—if not the keen edge of desire then something lonely and desperate—for a woman smiled at him and moved closer. She was wearing a silky, shiny blue top and a long black skirt; over this she’d draped a red-and-white jaiñkyrshah.

‘Want a good time?’ she asked in Khasi. Unlike most of the others, her mouth wasn’t stained scarlet by kwai or khaini, and her lips were full and plump. She had a roundness that he suddenly felt a lust for—voluptuous arms and thighs that he imagined entwined around him, his fingers sinking into her flesh.

‘How much?’ he asked, his voice raspy in nervousness. If anyone he knew, or someone who knew his parents, saw him…

Her smile widened. He could see the tip of her plump red tongue, its infinite wetness.

‘Depends on what you want…but why don’t we decide on that later.’ She reached for his hand—he could see her bitten fingernails, the braceleted wrist—and at the touch of her skin, something like a splash of icy water hit him at the back of his head. What was he doing? It had vanished, his nerve, his bravado, the inkling of lust, and all that remained was a wretched emptiness.

‘Next time,’ he said, feeling embarrassed, but she already knew, and had already lost interest, her eyes once again searching the crowd.

He walked briskly on, awash with self-reproach, and, in an attempt to assuage the guilt, stopped to drop a coin for the blind duitara player on the sidewalk. The narrow street was lined with food sellers and their shaky wooden carts strung with gas lamps and burners that shed dusty, hazy pools of light into the evening. It all looked appealing—chillies stuffed with potato and mint, brinjal fried in gram flour batter, noodles tossed in fatty pork bits, boiled eggs halved and sprinkled with pepper and fresh coriander—but he was in a hurry. His thirst was stronger now.

Bisesh, the chiselled-face Nepali chap at the counter, nodded as Tei walked in. Everyone knew Bisesh only spoke to regulars. Most of the time he behaved as though he owned this place. He didn’t; some Marwari man did, but he wasn’t usually at the bar. Shillong was safe now for outsiders to own businesses, but not that safe. Merely twenty years ago streets rang with the cries of ‘beh dkhar’. Memories, in cases like these, were long and warily forgiving. It was best to keep behind the scenes like an elusive puppeteer. Hence, even if Embassy had changed hands a hundred times, from one dkhar to another, nobody inside knew; most, of course, were in no state to care. The place looked the same as it had when it first opened in the mid-’60s—two rectangular rooms that echoed like empty tombs, joined by short, stubby steps, filled with rows of wooden tables, and on the ceiling, long-stemmed fans that blossomed like tragic flowers. Here, people drenched their grief in alcohol, and stashed their dreams behind the familiar, flimsy darkness that smelled faintly dank and sour, the odour of defeat.

Tei looked around, over the crowd of heads, and for a moment his intention wavered—he’d come for a drink, but there wasn’t a single table free. He stood undecided for a moment, he didn’t know of another place he could go to in Police Bazaar—the bar in the fancy hotel on the main road was excruciatingly expensive, and all the cheap alcohol joints near his neighbourhood in Laitumkhrah had been closed by order of the Seng Kynthei, a local woman’s organization aiming to eliminate (what they considered) vice and immorality in town. Damn them, he cursed silently. There was always the option, he supposed, of buying a bottle and drinking it on the sidewalk, like so many others did. Then again, there was the danger of someone he knew walking by…his musing was interrupted by a rumble of slurry voices calling him over. The drinkers were in an amiable mood tonight, and more than that, could recognize a thirsting, despairing soul. Hey, bro, they beckoned, join us. Ei, shong hangne. And from a dark corner, a single word—‘Teiskem’—someone who knew his name.

From that distance, Tei couldn’t make out the man’s face. It might have been anyone. Yet, even as he approached the table, he couldn’t place him. It was a face that wasn’t uncommon, marked by the singular weariness that settled over everyone’s features in a town landlocked by more than towering mountains. Somewhere, the light shifted, a shadow moved, Tei caught the highlight of his nose, the familiar eyes, and a name snapped into place like a cocked gun.

‘Mama Lang?’ he asked to be sure.

The man replied by lifting his glass and knocking back the remaining liquor. Then he waved Tei to an empty chair. His large hands were knotted and gnarled, rough as tree bark, inflicted by a steady tremor. He probably wouldn’t be swift and nimble enough to make kites like he used to, thought Tei. Mama Lang’s kites flew the highest in the locality, and his mynja, string dipped in shards of powdered glass, was the toughest to cut in a mid-air fight.

‘Thank you,’ said Tei taking a seat.

‘You look the same,’ said Mama Lang, pouring out two generous measures of whisky. Tei couldn’t possibly say that about him. A decade ago, Lang was good-looking, in his mid-twenties, but now he was an old man. His eyes settled on nothing in particular and flickered like dark moths around a bare bulb, his skin, puffy and pale, hung on his face like a cheap wrinkled suit.

‘What brings you here?’ he slurred; the smell of stale alcohol clung to his breath, pungent and strong.