Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories (15 page)

‘He showed up one late September morning,’ he’d begin, ‘when memories of monsoon rain were fading with the mild autumn sunshine. He walked into my workshop, silent as a hunter.’

The stranger was greeted with no small surprise—this was the rough ‘wild west’ part of town, an area of strict local laws and devout churchgoers. Not a place for outsiders.

‘I’m from Jatinga.’ His tone was soft, foreign, not of these hills.

‘You came all this way?’ Bah Khraw, assistant at the workshop, sounded as rough as the sandpaper in his hand. He’d worked there thirteen years, almost as long as the place had been open, and felt he’d earned the right to choose the people he wanted to be agreeable to. The young man, tall, thin, with the dusky complexion of the people from the plains, remained silent. He was no more than twenty, but his eyes, quietly pensive, looked much older. The weapon in his hand was a solid 10 gauge double-barrel shotgun, much used and badly in need of polish.

‘That’s because Bah Hem is the best. Number one gunman.’ This came from a gentleman in the corner; a group of them huddled like crows around a bottle of Royal Tusk whisky and pinched tobacco into dust between their fingers.

‘And marksman also,’ somebody added. ‘Four in one hole.’ He was referring to a recent shooting competition held in town where Bah Hem had shot four bullets through the same hole on a target. The trophy stood on a shelf in the workshop, next to many others, which could be dated by the layers of grime they’d gathered. The older ones were of darkest black.

‘Four in one hole.’ The bottle was raised to a slurry chorus of approval.

Bah Hem was seated at a table, writing. He paid them no attention. A cigarette smouldered between his fingers. Eventually, he looked up at the stranger.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘My father bought it from Haflong.’

Bah Hem examined the weapon in silence. He ran a finger over the barrel, unloaded it in a few brisk movements and aimed outside the only window in the room. ‘There’s a problem with the viewfinder…’

‘That’s what my father said,’ interrupted the young man.

‘Oh, and who is he? The gun specialist in Jatinga?’ Bah Khraw bent over the vise machine, tightening it around a small metal plate; the men in the corner sniggered.

The young stranger flushed but didn’t retort; in his eyes a small anger glowed like embers in a winter chula.

‘Ignore him; Khraw has the manners of a pig.’ Bah Hem stubbed the cigarette out on the desk.

His assistant scowled.

‘And sometimes the face of one too.’

The men exploded into laughter. They found everything he said funny out of courtesy for permitting them to carouse freely in his workshop. Bah Hem stepped outside with the gun and the stranger followed. From next door, the sound of the dentist’s drill shattered the quiet mid-morning air. In front of them, the main road lay pale and empty.

‘So where did you get the gun from?’

The boy looked down and stayed silent for a long while. ‘My grandfather used to work as a chowkidar in a dak bangla in the Cachar district. Once, this bilati officer came to stay, he was very ill with kala-azar…he didn’t last the week. My grandfather didn’t take anything else, only this.’ He placed a hand on the rifle.

The drill whined to a stop. Bah Hem lit a cigarette.

The young man asked, ‘How did you know?’

‘There’s never been much of an arms market in Haflong. Everything comes from Bangladesh.’ Bah Hem didn’t add that a person’s initials (G.D. Bradbury) were carved on the handle; it was likely the boy and his family couldn’t read.

‘My grandfather never took anything else.’

‘I know people who have taken more, and you still can’t call them thieves.’ Bah Hem added that the gun would be ready in four or five days.

The boy took his leave. He said he needed to start on his journey immediately, otherwise, with all the army checks along the way, he wouldn’t make it home before midnight.

A week later he was back. This time, Bah Khraw ignored him as did the group in the corner, today diminished to a trio resolutely playing cards.

‘Have something,’ Bah Hem offered when the tea lady appeared at the door with a basket of jing bam—soft, sticky ‘putharo, golden brown ‘pukhlien and sticks of hard, honeyed ‘pusyep. The boy ate and drank quickly like a watchful animal.

‘Your gun is ready.’ Bah Hem waved to a row of gleaming weapons lining the wall behind his desk.

‘How much?’

Bah Hem told him. The boy drew out a cloth pouch tied around his waist, and carefully counted out the notes as though it were some sacred, ancient ritual.

‘We’ll be here all day,’ muttered Bah Khraw, picking at a metal spring.

The boy handed over the money and walked out.

‘That’s the last we’ll see of him, I hope,’ said Bah Khraw.

A shout from the corner caught their attention.

‘Lah bowww…’

Someone had a particularly good hand; there was a hundred and fifty rupees at stake. The boy was forgotten.

That night, though, while lying in bed in a silently dreaming house, Bah Hem thought of Nathaniel, his eldest son who’d died two summers ago. He was nineteen then, and consumed by a disease they couldn’t understand.

It had started with him feeling nauseous and fatigued, his brow burning with a low, steady fever, his throat sore and painful. What they’d written off as a seasonal flu didn’t improve over the next few months. He lost an alarming amount of weight. His wife and him took Nathaniel to a hospital in south India, where they placed their trust in a man with a kindly manner and an accent they found difficult to decipher. He told them the name of the disease, it sounded long and terrifying, unfurling like a snake on their tongue. ‘The white blood cells multiply at an abnormally rapid rate,’ the doctor tried explaining, ‘his body can’t produce enough healthy blood cells…’ They understood him well enough though when he said the condition was acute and that they needed to start treatment immediately. The young man who’d walked into his workshop today reminded Bah Hem of Nathaniel before the radiotherapy. Before the machines, those large metallic monsters, slowly blasted out all life from his son. What was it about him? His eyes? The shape of his jawline perhaps; the same shadows filled the contours of his face. His careful silence? Bah Hem wasn’t sure. If he could only find some way, he thought, to see him again.

It was late; the dentist’s clinic had shut, and the neighbourhood emptied as the cold settled into its nooks and crannies. In the quiet of the evening, Bah Hem sat alone in the workshop, cleaning a flintlock pistol. He liked to do these himself. They were beautiful weapons; he liked the way the light glinted off the intricate metalwork, the way the barrel lay slim and smooth against his palm. Around him the workshop was left in casual, greasy disarray. Opposite his desk stood a large table he’d salvaged from the town jail when it was being relocated. Many years worth of equipment and spare parts had built on it a jagged landscape of metal, grime, and dust. The smell of machine oil hung in the air. Just as he was giving the flintlock one last careful buff, there came a hurried knocking at the door. On the steps outside, he found the young stranger, shivering in the cool evening air.

‘Please, we need help.’

Bah Hem stepped aside to allow him in.

‘There’s no time…’

‘You’re cold,’ said Bah Hem calmly. ‘Come inside…there’s no point in falling ill and making things worse.’

The boy’s shoulders drooped and he consented. Bah Hem rummaged under the bench and drew out a half-bottle of Old Monk. He poured a large shot and handed it to him. Then he threw more coal into the chula and pulled it closer.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I–we need you to shoot some…an animal for us.’

‘What animal?’

The boy looked down. ‘A tiger.’

‘A man-eater?’

He hesitated. ‘We think it’s dangerous. And we’ve tried to bait it and hunt it down…and failed. They say you…’

Bah Hem lit a cigarette; it glowed in the dim bare-bulb light. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Kasa.’

‘Kasa, I’ll help you only if you tell me the truth.’

The boy finished the rum in a single gulp and grimaced. There was a little more colour in his face, but he still looked troubled.

‘The army people in the area wounded it…it will turn into a man-eater sooner or later. My father—’ and here he halted, ‘is unwell, otherwise he would have taken care of this himself. He was…is a very good marksman. They say you are too…’

Bah Hem spoke only after he’d finished the cigarette. ‘Alright, I’ll go with you…’ and he raised a hand to stop Kasa from speaking, ‘but we will leave tomorrow morning. Tonight you stay in Shillong.’

Since Kasa knew no one in town he could ask for such a favour, and it wasn’t particularly safe for a dkhar to stay on his own in a hotel, Bah Hem invited him to his house. He and his family lived in Umsohsun, close to a bridge over a large stream, in a lime-washed house built on a sloping hillside and accessed by a line of crooked stone steps. As they climbed, both of them bathed in moonlight, Bah Hem thought how it could have been him and Nathaniel returning home. Esther, Bah Hem’s wife, made up a bed for their visitor, downstairs in a cot in the living room, surprisingly without question. Usually, like most locals in Shillong, she was wary of outsiders and, what they considered, their strange language and habits. Their other children—a son and two daughters—treated Kasa as a curiosity, something their father had picked up from one of the locality melas he was so fond of attending.

‘Patlun lyngkot,’ giggled one of them, pointing at Kasa’s shorts.

Esther told them sharply to behave themselves, especially at the dining table, and spooned out more stew on their visitor’s plate.

Only late at night, in a silently dreaming house, did Esther say to her husband, ‘He has Nathaniel’s eyes.’

Bah Hem said he thought so too.

Before Nathaniel grew too weak to stay awake and spent most of his days lying in bed, dehydrated, with his hair falling out in clumps. By then he also threw up most of what he ate, everything made him nauseous. The fever had been replaced by headaches, a perpetual throbbing at no particular spot in his head. ‘It doesn’t look like he’s getting better,’ Esther would whisper while their son slept, clutching her husband’s hand in terror. Yet when they asked the doctor, he said there was not much more he could do. They needed to be patient. On some afternoons, while Esther rested in the hotel, Bah Hem would sit in Nathaniel’s room, narrating stories, not the ones he’d told him when he was a child, but of what they’d do when Nathaniel grew older. He’d take him fly-fishing to the Bhoroli, hunting in Garo Hills, perhaps they could get Nathaniel that drum kit he’d always wanted. Even with his wife they’d only speak of the past or the future. There was nothing in between. The present didn’t exist; it was a black hole they all stood over. He’d always hated hospitals, and this one with its sterile whiteness seemed to suck away all the colour off Nathaniel’s face. How could he take it away? Why was this happening to his son? There were no answers. Apart from a slant of sunlight that caught Nathaniel’s cheek, now hollow and wasted, the vase of wilted flowers, and the beep of a machine that mechanically monitored his heart.

The next day, they set off early, catching the first bus out of town before the sun’s rays brushed the mist-shrouded hills of Shillong. Bah Hem had wanted to drive his jeep, but Kasa said it was safer travelling in a group.

‘It takes time for the army to check all the passengers, but it’s better than being caught alone by militants.’

They hit the dirt track around midday although the landscape around them had long given way to paddy fields the colour of sand. Soon this too would change to the perpetually lush hills of North Cachar. The army, Kasa explained, had been sent in by the central government two years ago to quell separatist movements in the state. Their presence was less around this area, though, and their numbers mainly concentrated in the other more troubled parts of Assam such as Lakhimpur and Sibsagar. These were the main strongholds of the United Liberation Front of Assam, a group who claimed to be fighting for sovereignty and independence.

‘I don’t know which is worse,’ said Kasa. ‘The ULFA…or the army who trouble us and call us militant dogs.’

Along the way there were seven checkpoint stops—each time they were made to get off while the interior of the bus and its luggage carrier were inspected. Bah Hem had heard of how people were robbed on night journeys—his Mizo neighbour’s niece had hidden her money in the hem of the bus window curtains; the only place that hadn’t been searched. Their rifles were stashed at the bottom of a canvas bag that Bah Hem had packed the night before; stowed under Kasa’s seat. It went unnoticed.

They were dropped off at the outskirts of the boy’s village, from where they had to walk. The gulmohar-lined road was empty apart from a boy herding cows. It was strangely quiet. Soon, the settlement came into view, perched on the edge of a ridge, ringed by sloping hills criss-crossed by dusty yellow footpaths. It was late afternoon and the sun was slowly dragging light away to the west; a thickening curtain of mist hung above the ground. They stopped outside a thatch-roof house slightly bigger than all the others in the line. Faces appeared and disappeared at doorways and windows yet no one approached them. A boy, no older than ten, stood shyly in the compound, peering at them with large, dark eyes. A cat the colour of night twined itself around his ankles.

‘Noru, ask Maina to make tea.’

The boy and creature vanished.

After a quick wash at a garden tap, Kasa ushered Bah Hem to the kitchen, where a girl of about seventeen tended to a kettle on a wood fire.

‘My sister,’ said Kasa.

Maina nodded at their visitor, her long hair falling over her shoulders. She was dressed in a cotton mekhla the colour of mustard, and it made her seem older, as though she’d stepped into someone else’s clothes, and someone else’s role. Bah Hem wondered what had happened to their mother, why she wasn’t here. As Maina bustled around with cups and cutlery, he noticed there was something restless and fluttering about her. Like a caged bird. Noru, though playing with the cat in the corner, kept a careful watch on them all. Kasa and Bah Hem sat at a low-lying table, and an old man shuffled in like a ghost through the door. His age was impossible to reckon; he could have been anywhere between sixty and hundred—immensely thin with a pale chador wrapped around him like a shroud. His eyes, though, were sharp and bright as any youngster’s, glinting with wisdom and wariness.