Legends of Pensam

by Mamang Dai

  It was on one such evening that Pinyar, walking home briskly, swinging her arms, had seen a young man running towards her at breakneck speed. He was shouting something, and sensing trouble she too had hurried forward. Then she had heard the word: ‘Fire!’ Hai! Her house had burned down.

  It had started with smoke billowing out of the thatch, the young man told her, and then suddenly the bamboo had exploded like canon shots as the flames shot up and threatened to engulf the whole village with flying sparks. The villagers, the few who were around, had rallied to help, but it had been no use. Her poor-widow’s house was gone.

  When a house catches fire, the luckless owner is banished to the outskirts of the village. So Pinyar built herself a shack at the extreme edge of the forest. When I met her with Mona, she had just crossed the period of taboo during which no one could go and eat with her for fear of provoking the tiger spirit that causes fires and tempting it to follow them home. Pinyar was still angry. ‘The fire swallowed everything with an evil appetite,’ she told us, cracking another piece of wet cloth before putting it away to dry. ‘It seems my destiny is cursed!’

  She sat down with us and recounted again how she was on the threshold of a new life when her husband was shot through the head in the forest. But these things happened, she said. ‘Every year at least three men die in hunting accidents in our parts.’

  ‘Are all these deaths really accidents?’ Mona wanted me to ask.

  ‘There is never any doubt about these deaths.’ Pinyar replied. She looked down at her hands and was silent for a while. Then she said, ‘You know, I used to make this powder for the rice beer. I don’t do it anymore.’

  Then she told us why. Once upon a time, there lived a race of supernatural beings called the miti-mili. These small, quiet people were the first to make the mysterious si-ye that is the yeast used to ferment rice into beer. Before the miti-mili race disappeared, deranged by strange visions, they gave this sacred powder to mankind, and a strong belief grew that si-ye had special powers and that it was something to be handled with respect. Only women were allowed to handle it, and Pinyar herself made the best si-ye cakes. She mixed the white powder with ground rice and roots and berries and shaped it into small flat biscuits. ‘However, they are strictly forbidden before a hunt or a journey,’ she said. ‘It makes men hallucinate, just like the miti-mili race. But sometimes some households forget to observe the rules, and then our men die in the forests.’

  I was surprised. I knew it was very rare that a man who had shot someone during a hunt would be accused of murder. If he surrendered his gun and fled into the jungle to observe the prescribed taboos, everyone accepted that it was an accident. But I had never heard the explanation that Pinyar was now giving us, not even from Hoxo.

  The man who made Pinyar a widow was now very old. Pinyar knew him well, she saw him in the village every day, but she did not hold him responsible for her misfortune. ‘There is a bad spirit lurking in the si-ye that makes men go mad,’ she said. ‘That is why we sprinkle si-ye on the eyelids of those who die an unnatural death, so that their spirit will not return on some restless search.’

  Mona and I were silent. Pinyar looked at us with her black slanting eyes and smiled. Despite her long, hard years she was lean and agile, and she had cropped her hair very short like a man’s. She did, however, observe the traditional custom of wearing large cylindrical earrings that dragged her ears down, and she still wore all the beads, silver coins and amulets that she had first put on as a young bride.

  The plight of the widow Pinyar made me wonder if a woman’s heart is not bigger than a man’s. How she came to lose her child, then her husband, and finally her home in the village was common knowledge. But there was another story that people did not like to remember or recount.

  In a distant village, Pinyar’s son from Orka had grown into an able-bodied young man. Kamur had done well for himself. He was a clerk in a government department that entitled him to live in a brick building in Pigo town, where he worked. He had married a good woman, a girl from our village, and was father to an infant daughter and two sons. One afternoon the young wife was in the kitchen. Her long hair hung loose, like a broad, thick rope, and she had a towel draped over her shoulders. In the adjoining room, her baby girl lay in a low cot that she could see through the door directly behind her. It was just at the moment when she had turned her back on the sleeping child when she heard a small sound, a sharp ‘nyek!’ She turned around and saw her husband standing by the cot, holding a bloodied dao.

  Without a word she turned and leaped out through the kitchen door. He came after her.

  The small garden gate was unlatched, but as she reached it she felt the blow on her back. She screamed and as people came running out of the houses on either side, her husband dropped the sword and fell to the ground blubbering and weeping. ‘What happened? What happened!’ he asked. ‘What have I done!’

  He was the one most aghast at the horror. He could not remember anything of the murder of his baby girl. And he could not remember how he had stalked and cut down his younger son who had been cycling in the backyard. Only the older boy, who was at school, had survived.

  Kamur begged forgiveness. He rolled on the floor in agony and said he had no memory of those black moments. All he could plead was that he must have been under a spell. An evil spirit must have traded his soul for that terrible hour when he picked up the rusty dao and went hunting for his children and for his wife, whose loose hair appeared to have deflected the blow that would have finished her.

  Everyone in the town who heard of the incident spat and remained silent. What was the meaning of this kind of thing? They understood that it was a nebulous zone that divided the worlds of spirits and men—in fact, at one time men and spirits had been brothers. They knew that what was real could well be an illusion, and that reality might only be the context that people gave to a moment. But they were shaken.

  Looking back, they saw that there had been signs. At least two other men in that town before Kamur had acted strangely, and one of them had killed himself. People talked about the peculiar trees of the place. They remembered the aubergine plant that had grown to the size of a tree. Nobody could recall who had planted it or when. It bore small poisonous-looking flowers that grew into long, bloated fruit, menacing and shiny. It was a ghostly tree and no one dared to cut it down. Kamur had sometimes been seen under that tree at odd hours, doing nothing in particular.

  As on so many other occasions, the community rallied to restore sense and order. Kamur had never exhibited the least sign of derangement or psychopathic behaviour before this. The poor man was more to be pitied than feared, some people argued.

  ‘He is not to blame. It is something in the blood,’ the village elders had said when we heard of the incident. ‘There are men and women, guardians of history, who can identify this fault in the blood.’ The old people of our village had sat around speculating on clan titles and origins, on births, loves, marriages, and spirits and ghosts. The right or wrong kind of marriage, the right or wrong kind of life, could always be traced to something in the blood, they said. Down the line certain traits appeared suddenly, in a nephew, an aunt or a great grandson. No one knew why.

  ‘Some blood lines are almost taboo to mention,’ they said. ‘They see visions. They are visited by spirits, and like the miti-mili they are seized by bouts of madness.’

  The widow Pinyar, I remember, was not part of these discussions. She had rushed to be by the side of her long lost son.

  She wept when she saw him and she fought like a wild cat to shield him from the anger of the town. Kamur was put in chains and locked up by the local police, but Pinyar arrived like a whirlwind waving papers signed by political representatives who mattered. These papers approved a case for Kamur’s release on the basis that his closest relatives would keep him, and, moreover, that no one, not even the injured wife’s family, was asking for punishment. It was a long and complicated process but Pinyar’s determination and
swift action saved her boy.

  ‘Come, we will go home,’ she said to Kamur. ‘We will go back to the village together.’

  She returned with him to our village, and he lived there in his wife’s house, surrounded and watched by her brothers and uncles. Everyone agreed that no one would ever really know what had happened. The truth, after all, exists only in portions, and the rest is a matter of words changed by each person’s perception.

  According to the account that I heard most often, Kamur had seen crowds of people pressing in on him. In panic and desperation he had hunted for his gun, overturning cupboards, pulling out clothes and running back and forth in the house. It was all a dream, for no one had heard him make a sound. But the sword he had used to cut his children down was real. He had found it on top of the big cupboard, in the depression that had been loosely covered with old newspapers and balls of string and other bits of junk.

  After the madness, he had withdrawn into silence in prison, till Pinyar came to him. He heard her saying, ‘Come, we will go home. We will go back to the village together…’ and he broke down. He spoke in a stream then, like a frightened child.

  ‘I know, mother, you think there is something wrong with me. But it is not true. I am only tired. This is the best place for me.’ Then he laughed aloud. ‘I have been sitting here all these years waiting for something to happen, waiting for my wife to yield with love, waiting for my sons to smile into my face, for my daughter to rush into my arms. Before that I waited for you and my father. Mother, I waited for you when I was sick and shivering with fear! Everyone is so busy, hah! Hah! My wife looks at me with hate now. Something has happened! She was so shy once, hiding behind that radiant hair. Something has happened! My son is afraid of me, as if I would hurt him. No one knows how this hurts me. My heart is gone away to that place where they beat me and beat me! Now everything has happened, and you want to remove me from this place where I have become a man!’

  After she brought him back, Pinyar said, ‘My boy is being haunted by an evil spirit because we failed to observe certain rites in the past. It was a mistake on the part of our parents and our parents’ parents. It was my mistake too. But now I know what we have to do. All the great priests will come to exorcise the bad spirit. I have called them.’

  In his wife’s house, meanwhile, Kamur walked up and down, up and down. He jerked his knees, grimaced and laughed to himself. His heart was no longer where it used to be. Once there was a dwelling place. A place for safe return. Now it was twisted beyond recognition. Only one picture hung before his eyes like a drawing in blood. His ears hummed with the distant howling of children.

  ‘Look what you have done! Look what you have done, you cursed offspring!’

  ‘But it was not me,’ he whimpered.

  Sometimes his anger choked him and he screamed, ‘I was a good child. What happened! What happened?’

  This is what I heard. And all this, of course, is conjecture, even rumour. What I did see clearly was Pinyar sitting long legged on the veranda of her house, saying that she would fetch all the powerful priests from across the river to drive away the spirit that had taken possession of her son.

  What is it about a mother’s love, I wondered. After Orka took him away, Kamur had come to see Pinyar once, maybe twice. And it was only about a year that she had kept him with her before that. Yet, for years the fearless and outspoken Pinyar would break down and talk of the squirming, naked child who had wailed in her arms.

  ‘When people looked at him he would hide his face against my shoulder. He was so shy!’

  It was whispered now that Pinyar appeared distracted and that she was beginning to smile in a different sort of way. If I had asked her about her son, I was sure that she would have had all the words ready in her heart to absolve her boy of any sin. Kamur himself had never had a fit again. He now lived somewhere else and his wife had gone with him. Pinyar rarely heard from them. Their surviving son was already a stocky lad who had dropped out of school and was looking for a job. No one mentioned anything of the past.

  The last time I saw Pinyar in her shack at the edge of the forest, she gave me an old necklace to carry for her daughterin-law. I travelled so much, she said, I was sure to pass the town where her son lived. She opened the small package wrapped in cloth and showed me the old silver coins strung together with the tooth of a tiger and a wild boar. Symbols of luck and success, perhaps. Pinyar herself was not sure. She only knew that they were auspicious things to have. ‘Faith is everything,’ she said.

  small histories recalled in the season of rain

  In dreams, my people say, they see the rain mother sitting on the treetops, laughing in the mist.

  Her silver ornaments clink as she rides the wind, brandishing her sword.

  Every time she twirls her skirt, the storm clouds edged with black rush up to cover her.

  ‘We’re close to the season of floods,’ I said to Mona. ‘I should take you back to Gurdum.’

  Every day I saw clouds dropping lower and lower like ominous waves. The hills were blue, their outline rimmed in black, and the trees were still. Soon, the first fat beads of water would tear the giant leaves of the wild yam. Then fierce, hissing rain would cover the land like the sea.

  At such times it seems the heavens brush very close to the earth. The wild fruit born of this union is of unknown family, bittersweet, pungent, often misshapen and hardy, or swollen to an unnatural size. Hidden by mountains and covered by a charcoal sky the forest and rivers become battlefields ferocious with the struggle for survival. Astonishing plants with gills spring up in clumps. Delicate green shoots unfurl into monstrous fans and umbrellas with stinging hair. The wild berry covers itself with ants. Insects like miniature armadillos emerge out of nowhere and move about briskly until a flick of the broom transforms them into crumpled balls protected with green headlights.

  It rains during the day, it rains all night. It can rain non-stop for sixty-two days at a time. Not a peep of sunshine. Not a breath of wind. Every summer the tangled undergrowth clinging to the hills is swept away by the downpour, causing landslides that cut off all communication and links.

  ‘What is wrong with these hills?’ the exasperated villagers ask.

  ‘They’re under a spell of diarrhoea!’

  ‘What weather! What a godforsaken place!’

  Mona, however, seemed quite content. ‘It’s strange, but I feel drawn to this place,’ she said. ‘Can’t we stay longer?’

  Perhaps it was the spirit of the place, I don’t know, but every time I came back I noticed that the village had this quality of absorbing visitors into a forgotten newness of things. It was a feeling of how things might have been, and a sudden revelation of why it was not so anymore. This was particularly the case in the company of men like Hoxo.

  But it wasn’t as if change hadn’t touched our land, or had come only recently. The first white priests, surveyors and soldiers had begun arriving in the region almost two hundred years ago, in the early 1800s. Since then, people from other worlds had come and gone, though the only records of their journeys are the stories that the older men and women remember.

  It was already a confused and haunted time of change when Hoxo was found. He pointed to a corner of the house where the old basket in which his father had brought him home hung on the wall. It was a man’s carrying basket, like a rucksack. It used to be the only thing a man took with him on any journey, and contained little more than a knife, a small parcel of salt and a piece of flint. This one, partially hidden by clothes and old swords, was smoke-blackened but still sturdy, and the original weave of the cane was polished with age but unbroken. I imagined Hoxo as a baby being carried through the forest in it. How could a baby fit in there? Had he slept all the way? Didn’t he cry? Where had he come from?

  ‘He fell from the sky,’ Rakut’s father used to say. People believed him because he was old, and because he had been with Hoxo’s father in the lands from where the latter had returned with the boy on his b
ack.

  The villagers at that time had only a vague idea of the places the two men had been to. They knew that far in the east, where there were big caves in an evergreen forest, a road was being carved out of the mountainside. Reports reaching the villages said that the migluns were digging a tunnel right across the world. They wanted help in this work and a labour corps was being recruited from the various hill tribes.

  ‘It was the duty of the village elders to persuade able-bodied men from our villages to join the work force,’ Hoxo explained. ‘The general feeling at the time was that the elders had been brainwashed by the migluns: What! Ask our own boys to go off into an unknown land and dig earth and die like worms? Everyone had heard the fearful stories of war. The migluns were fighting the Japans, and fires raged on earth and in the sky.’

  It was said that there were different types of migluns, and that some of them had wings. Those from a big country called America shouted a lot and they were more frightening than the original migluns who were the Bee-ree-tiss. But when it came to building the great road for their armies to march against the enemy, they were one.

  The men recruited from the hills were given rations and bedding but the work was the work of the devil. Those who went and returned said the forest and the skies were like nothing they had seen before. The migluns were terrifying in their energy and determination. In the lashing rain and the wet earth that buried men up to their waists they drove elephants to cross rivers, remove logs and trample the jungle. The elephants strained and quivered to the shouts of their mahouts, slipped, struggled, knelt, struggled on, and many of the poor animals lost their footing and hurtled off the mountainside bellowing like mythical beasts with their eyes rolled up skywards. It was unimaginable, what the migluns were trying to achieve. In the swampy valleys men died like flies, shivering with fever and fear. Sometimes, a miglun died too, wheezing and panting as he struggled like an animal possessed through the foetid mud.