Legends of Pensam

by Mamang Dai

  It is unimaginable how unwieldy and terrifying the body of a dead man can be, Bodak said. The body slipped and the men choked and shuddered as the torn limbs threatened to come apart in their arms. When they reached the bridge, Bodak and Loma carried the body ahead while the others followed with their guns and Kalen’s headgear. Just when Bodak had crossed the bridge with the body, the cane lashings came undone and the bridge swung and sagged in the middle, toppling the rest of the men into the stream. It was a cursed afternoon. The villagers lit bamboo flares and waited all night to receive the men who returned ill and dazed, as if they had come back from the realm of malevolent spirits.

  Kalen’s widow, Omum, now lived with his parents. She had two small children and was barely in her mid-twenties. When we saw her, she was still wearing her hair tied back in colourful bands like a gymnast. She fetched water, lit the evening fire, fed the pigs and chickens and carried on with her life without stopping to pine or utter recriminations.

  The village, too, carried on. Like Omum, it was resilient in an unconscious way, as if programmed to be so. In the midst of injury and death, newly-weds fought, stormed out of their homes, deserted the children and hurled abuse at one another, as if the business of living and loving was a temporary arrangement. They came back after a month or two looking nervous and sheepish, and finally settled down to a kind of heaving, unpredictable domestic life, cursing and laughing.

  But there were always the few who never returned. Their rage and confusion carried them so far away, beyond the mountains and down the river, that those they left behind learned to live without them. Sometimes they were remembered in songs and stories, like the dead.

  the silence of adela and kepi

  Losi was cooking a feast for us, and sitting on the bamboo veranda with Hoxo and Mona, looking out into the evening smoky with wood fires from the houses huddled together, I felt that all of the world that I would only read about could be reproduced in this dusty village with its one road. Just as all the loves and births and accidents of this habitation in the forest could be enacted anywhere else. People everywhere made peace in all sorts of ways, and coped until fate cut them down or lifted them up.

  Hoxo’s mother came out with rice beer for us and sat next to Mona. Already, a strange bond had grown between them. I could see that Mona had been affected deeply by something, and when Hoxo’s mother turned to me and said, ‘Tell us about our guest, is she a mother?’ Mona understood. ‘Tell them,’ she said, ‘tell them to pray for my daughter.’

  Mona is of Arab-Greek extraction and her husband Jules is French. They are a powerful, successful couple by any estimate— he a famous development scientist and she the proprietor of a glossy magazine, Diary of the World, that carries unusual true-life stories. They have what I call a mobile lifestyle; they move across countries and continents and were at that time on a brief posting in New Delhi.

  Jules travelled more than Mona. It was during one of his long tours that Mona, alone in their apartment, suddenly realized that something was wrong with their three-year-old daughter. They had hired a maid, a middle-aged widow from Garhwal, and given her the small room at the top near the fire escape. The woman was sturdy and she performed all her duties without any cause for complaint. Mona’s daughter, Adela, loved the maid and the two got on so well together that Mona began to leave the house for longer and longer periods to pore over her papers and peer into her computer at office. Then, one day, her daughter refused to speak.

  Mona crouched down beside her and tried to get her to utter a word, and the girl stared back at her for a long minute and then turned away as if she had never seen Mona before in her life.

  For the next few days Mona tussled with her child.

  ‘My baby! Tell me! Tell me what has happened to you!’ she cried, shaking the girl to get a reaction.

  She went to doctors and consulted her relatives and friends. She rang her mother and tried to retrace their family history. No, there had never been anything like it before. There was no history of any illness like asthma or autoimmune disease in the family that could be linked to autistic behaviour, because by now little Adela was being diagnosed with the mysterious condition of autism.

  Jules came back and they quarrelled bitterly.

  ‘She must have done something!’ Mona raged, accusing the maid who fell on her knees and wept.

  ‘What’s the good of saying that now!’ Jules shouted at her.

  The words struck Mona like a slap in the face. Jules’s manner and tone seemed to imply that it was her fault and she was so angry and hurt by this that she thought she would spit on his face and walk out of the house for ever.

  ‘He was the one always travelling around the world. There were so many times he could have skipped a meeting but he never did.’ Every time she remembered those terrible days, Mona was close to weeping with rage.

  Finally, they had put Adela in a school for autistic children. They trembled with fear and sorrow when their child was seated behind a desk and given paper and crayons. The woman in charge told them that there were many cases like theirs; they should be brave.

  ‘I just want my baby back,’ Mona said when I had finished, and looked at Hoxo and his mother, wanting them to understand. ‘I just want to be a mother again.’ She said that when she dropped something or bumped against a table or cried, her child laughed without any feeling.

  Hoxo had listened to us in silence. Now he said, ‘Some things are beyond recall, and such things happen all the time. It is better to be ready.’

  Then he told us of the tragedy that befell the Karyon Togum family at about the same time that little Adela withdrew from the world.

  It happened in the playground at the edge of the neighbouring village of Yabgo. Togum’s son had just crossed two years then. A cough had been rattling in the boy’s chest, so his mother had bundled him up in his father’s woollen scarf and put him on the back of the young girl they had hired to help out with the housework. He looked cozy strapped to the girl who was, maybe, only eleven or twelve years old herself. The young girl muttered cooing words as she set off to stand around with the other children in the playground, all of whom carried younger siblings securely fastened on their backs with shawls and cane straps. They jumped around, making a good racket like children should. They made spinning blades out of the jack-tree leaves and ran in between the houses and raced over the mud and stones. Old widow Dajer, spinning cotton in her dim house, was the only one annoyed by their exuberance.

  ‘Watch out you don’t fall!’ she shouted angrily.

  Late that evening the child was burning with fever. Mother and son spent a fitful night lying near the fire and in the morning she noticed how still the boy was. She was a practical woman and did not want to rush him to the general hospital. Children had all kinds of ailments, she knew that, and she had nursed two daughters already. But she was worried. When the child’s condition did not improve, the parents finally decided to take him to the hospital in Pigo. They left early in the morning, by the only bus that took the road at the base of their hill. It took them till noon to get to the town. The regular doctor was away, so they had to wait for the new doctor to see them. It was very late by the time it was their turn, but the doctor was kind. He prescribed some tablets and instructed a nurse to give Kepi, the little boy, an injection. Then he said that the boy must be kept warm and in bed for a week, after which they were to bring him back.

  Kepi seemed to improve after this. His mother fed him mashed rice and warm water and he opened his mouth and ate everything she gave him. But at night he cried out in a highpitched wail that filled her with an icy fear. One morning the boy’s father, Togum, noticed a dark bruise mark on his upper arm. It had probably been there all this time but they had mistaken it for a mark left by the strap of the basket he was carried around in and had paid little attention to it in the tension of running to the hospital and watching over him at night. When old Dajer came around to visit she said crossly that the way all the child
ren had been playing and running about the other day, she wouldn’t be surprised if the maid had dropped the child. When they questioned the maid she admitted that she had slipped and fallen but that the baby had not fallen off at all. They had just landed together with a thud on the ground. That was all.

  Togum did not speak to his wife all of that day and night, till she shouted at him for holding her responsible for their misfortune. The next morning he put his hand on her arm without a word and she understood the fear that he too was hiding and she forgave him.

  Quietly, slowly, the days passed. Children are the life of a family and by now terror had seized everyone. Hai! The entire village rallied to the aid of the parents who watched their child open his mouth wide and emit silent cries. Kepi’s mother wept and quailed at the touch of his lips against her fingers when she fed him. Togum moved around as if he was drugged, nodding silently to everyone who came. On the advice of relatives many rituals were performed. Togum travelled far and wide in search of famous shamans. A year passed. The child did not move during all this time but he cried, ate, and slept with his small torso twisted stiff and unmoving. They carried him everywhere. Then someone said that they should think about performing a special ceremony, rarely performed these days, in case it was the spirit of a snake that had coiled around the body of their son.

  It was Hoxo who was called to conduct the ceremony. He told us now how he saw it all quite clearly. He saw Togum leave on a sunny morning for the timber depot in the middle of the forest where he had been felling trees. The logs were still lying in a pile and an elephant had been hired for the day to move the logs to the platform above the trench where they could be marked and sawed. The workmen were talking loudly and moving towards the woodpile when the elephant stopped dead in its tracks. No amount of cajoling, prodding or threats would move the beast to take another step forward. It dawned on the frustrated men that maybe a snake had made its home among the logs. What else would frighten a tusker standing nine feet tall and with the strength to kill them all if it wanted to?

  Togum thought it might be a king cobra. They couldn’t see anything and they dared not move the logs. The ferocity of the cobra is legendary and it is known to attack without provocation. There had been many instances of this snake rearing itself up and running after some unfortunate man. Once its fangs had hit, it would keep pumping its jaws, injecting as much venom as possible into the victim.

  All night Togum lay awake thinking about logs and elephants. He heard his wife sighing and he thought he heard the rustling of leaves. He saw a full moon rising. He wondered what he should do. They lived in the forest surrounded by animals of every kind, but unlike many of his friends Togum had no experience of hunting and he did not want to kill. He prayed that if there was indeed a snake in the pile of logs, it would move away during the night.

  The next morning, he put on his old hat and armed himself with his shotgun reluctantly. He hoped he wouldn’t have to use it. He carried only two cartridges.

  They coaxed the elephant again but the creature still refused to budge. Togum positioned himself and crouched by the logs for a long time. There was no movement. The rest of the men and the elephant had moved into the shade and Togum could feel his back burning. Suddenly his eyes were dazzled by an iridescence that took his breath away. It was gold, it was green, it was dark amethystine and changing and shining with an indescribable beauty. In a flash he pointed his gun and fired at this vision that had exposed itself so suddenly, trapped in a ray of sunlight. The shot blinded him. There was a thud as a log splintered and pieces of wood flew in all directions. The men rushed forward but the iridescence had vanished. They waited again. There was no movement and everything was still and silent as before. By now the men were impatient and edgy.

  ‘Come on, let’s try moving the logs,’ one of them said, and cursing and spitting they began to heave and roll the logs while Togum pointed with his gun again. Every nerve and muscle in his body was tense. He was not thinking of anything, just waiting and at the ready, praying he should not miss. Then he saw a frightening sight. With every movement of the logs an enormous coiled python unwound itself loop-by-loop, rearing and twisting fiercely. And the horrifying thing Togum remembered forever afterwards was the absolute silence of the snake, its body torn in the middle by the gunshot, still struggling, the afternoon light shining into the vertical pupils of its yellow eyes. Togum held his breath. He felt the hairs prickling on his head and almost in reflex he fired at the rotating head. He was lucky. The shot blew the head away. And although the body of the snake continued to heave Togum saw the fabulous shimmer dim right before his eyes even as the sunlight and the green forest around him seemed to dwindle and fade.

  ‘This was why,’ Hoxo told us, ‘the serpent ritual had to be performed. But sometimes it is a matter of time, too.’ He said that all night they had chanted and negotiated with the spirits, calling them to restore the sick child, but the spirits had moved away to a place beyond recall. ‘They are the most dangerous ones, the ones who go away and never return,’ he said.

  Mona and I listened. I knew the story well, just as everyone else in the village did. ‘These things happen all the time,’ Hoxo said. ‘We only begin to know about them when they happen to us.’

  Hoxo kept talking like this. He seemed to live in a timeless zone and from a great distance, sitting in this village house, in his green galuk and khaki shorts, he followed his interests in the lives of men, animals and plants, in the origin of the universe, or quite simply thought about how to be a good chess player. It was as if he would never be surprised by any condition or behaviour of man or beast. When I had spoken of Adela’s autism, he had listened and understood, and been able to express his sorrow for Mona quietly. Whereas I had had to look up the term in the library when she first told me. I had been too troubled and agitated to share her grief.

  The two children had this in common: they both loved music. At the centre for autistic children in the big city, Mona and Jules had stood still as the voices of children rose and wavered in a strange cacophony that brought tears to their eyes. Then they had watched their daughter beat a small drum and smile lopsidedly, and they had been comforted. In the village, Togum’s little boy lay in bed all day and listened to radio music that filled every corner of the house. His sisters and their friends crowded round him and pulled funny faces and gave him a little pat sometimes, even though no one was sure whether he recognized them or not.

  It was the same every time I came to visit the family. When I took Mona to meet them, the radio was playing and the boy’s mother smiled as she greeted us. She was young and robust. Togum, who was lean and dark, rose from his corner and said, laughing, that he was the babysitter now since the new maid had gone home for a while. We drank bitter tea. The wife did everything and Kepi’s sisters, who were skinny-legged adolescents now, shuffled and bumped into each other till the mother shouted for them to leave the house and let us talk in peace.

  And I saw again how their days were passing: the fire burning brightly in the hearth, the dogs curled up close to the flames, the cot in the corner. Life moved on quite normally, except that like so many others in so many unseen recesses all over the world, they hid their pain, while the seasons turned.

  pinyar, the widow

  Pinyar, the widow was drying clothes by the fire when Mona and I went to see her. As usual, she was grumbling and cursing, shaking the wet clothes with an angry thwack. Thwack! Thwack! Pinyar had been widowed when she was not yet twenty-five, in the third month of her marriage to a good-hearted man with whom she had hoped to make a new life.

  Before that, she had borne a son to another man, one she had lived with for some five years. His name was Orka, and he had come to her from a village beyond the Siyum hills, far to the north of the country. He was a big, handsome man with laughing eyes and he had swept the young Pinyar off her feet. Her family had opposed the liaison, saying quite openly that the clan of Orka was no good, they were trouble. But nothing
could convince Pinyar, and one day she announced that she was pregnant with Orka’s child.

  Her family called all the elders to negotiate and solemnize the marriage. Orka, however, skirted the issue, and though he acknowledged paternity, within a year of the birth of their child he was preparing coldheartedly to abandon Pinyar.

  They had named their child Kamur. When he left for his village, Orka took Kamur with him, for the child was a son. Though he said he would return, he never did. Pinyar bowed her head in shame. But by all the laws of her clan she alone was to blame for her misfortune and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  Some years later, her life seemed complete again when she became the wife of Lekon. Her family advised her to nurture this relationship and behave with propriety, but soon after they had married Lekon was struck down one evening in a hunting accident.

  That had happened some twenty years ago. Now Pinyar lived alone and worked in the fields all day. In our villages, the ‘fields’ are patchy clearings that dot the thickly wooded hillsides far from our homes. Every household has plots here for growing vegetables and herbs. These are the open workplaces that their owners grow so accustomed to that they set off from home very early to work all morning, weeding, clearing and planting. They carry their food with them, and when the sun is high overhead they shelter in small thatch shacks and eat their midday meal and stretch out by the fire, sipping black tea. This outdoor life in the clear and silent space of the high valleys is addictive, and some villagers often spend the night in their solitary shacks. The others, who leave, pile all the days pickings of green chillies, pumpkins, yam and ginger into their baskets before setting off on the long trek back to their village.