Legends of Pensam

by Mamang Dai

  Yasam poked her in the shoulder. ‘Isn’t that the miglun we saw just now?’

  ‘It’s him! It’s him! Lets try to attract his attention and hope he buys all our oranges,’ said Neyang.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Nenem, feeling hot and bothered by her friends’ excitement.

  ‘Why not? After all he saw how we had to carry this heavy stuff all the way here,’ Neyang insisted. In fact, at this point she almost jumped up and waved to the man who, however, had his back to them just then.

  People milled around. Someone came to ask Yasam about the mushrooms she was selling and Yasam spread her fingers and started counting. Everywhere voices were raised in the lively exchange of buying and selling. Some women with babies on their backs were standing up and rocking back and forth to lull the infants back to sleep, while shouting all the time at the older children for not counting out change as fast as they could.

  ‘Hmm…Or-an-ge…Good?’

  Nenem looked up. The young miglun was standing before her and pointing to the fruit. She nodded. He smiled and crouched down beside her. He picked up an orange and began turning it round and round in his hand, as if he had never seen one before.

  ‘Taste it,’ Nenem signalled with her hand, pointing to the orange and her own mouth. She watched him curiously as he began to peel it.

  ‘Tell him to buy mine also!’ Yasam whispered urgently, and catching his eye she began tapping her oranges.

  The miglun laughed and started eating, nodding to express his satisfaction. Two other men stood by him. They wore khaki shorts, and belts with pistols. They are tribesmen from another country, Nenem thought, but their faces showed no expression and they seemed remote. The miglun said something to them and they ran back towards the vehicle.

  ‘Where is your village?’ he asked Nenem, gesturing with his hands towards the river and the hills.

  She laughed and waved her arm in the direction of the hills. Hers was the village hidden by the trees and separated from this town by the stream with the iron bridge. It was the home of the Doying clans and was counted as one of the prettiest villages around because it was midway up a hill, sheltered from the winds that swirled and screamed down the river gorge. In summer it was cool and shaded by old jackfruit trees. But how was she to communicate all this to him?

  ‘Aie… Ai…’ Yasam and Neyang were muttering slyly and giggling.

  ‘My name is D-a-v-i-d,’ the man said, pointing to himself.

  Nenem felt like covering her face with her hands. It was funny to hear a foreign name and she did not want to utter it, nor did she want to disclose hers.

  The two guards returned with a large canvas bag and Yasam and Neyang quickly scooped up their oranges and piled them into the bag. In the excitement they might have lost count of the exact amount, but it hardly mattered now because the bodyguards placed a handful of bright coins before them. The miglun waited while Nenem put hers away into her small pouch. Then he picked up a small piece of ginger and looking at her mischievously he popped it into his pocket and left, followed by the guards hauling the bag full of oranges.

  ‘Aiee! Why did he do that?’ Neyang exclaimed.

  Ginger was for protection. The wild ginger was a potent medicine against evil spirits. A piece of it was tied round the necks of young children to ward off illness and always carried, out of sheer habit, when a person was travelling.

  ‘He must know our customs, then,’ Neyang continued. ‘These people, they know everything!’

  Nenem barely heard her. She was thinking about the look he had thrown her when he dropped the ginger into his pocket. He was funny. Why had he done that? She also felt a little unnerved by the stir his visit had caused. Everyone in the market was looking their way. She had to pretend as if it was routine business, though she knew that it was unheard of for a British officer to walk into the market and start eating oranges with the tribeswomen.

  Nenem was the only child of Sogong, the senior headman of the village of Yelen. She was nineteen years old at the time, but this is a guess, because in those days there were no official records of births and deaths. What can be confirmed is that she was one of the few women of the region to gain admission into a proper school.

  A few years earlier, her father had taken it into his head to send her to the first mission school for girls that had opened in the town across the river. He wanted her to learn to read and write and become famous because he thought she was as capable of doing so as any son. For Nenem it had been an unimaginable prospect. From her happy days of intermittent attendance in the village school she was thrown into a cold, closed space and she hated it. She hated the text books and the prayer books, she hated the teachers with their flowery dresses and thin lips, and most of all she hated the room where all the girls slept in long rows like dead fish. After a year, she fell ill and would not recover. It was a great triumph for her when her father gave in and took her back home. She faced the mountains again and felt the river breeze as the ferry strained upstream, and was immediately restored.

  All she wanted was freedom, she later told her friends. The thing she had been most frightened of in school was that her soul might shrink, or be altered forever, and that she might never see the river again.

  Now, walking back from the Pigo market, Nenem was reminded of the light hair and blue eyes of the matron at the mission school. The miglun’s hair and eyes were the same colour. But in his eyes there was a smile, and a promise of something rash and tender.

  That evening, the air was heavy with the thick, sweet scent of the sap of the jackfruit trees. Nenem prepared the evening meal humming all the time. Her father was sitting out on the veranda with the other men of the village, and her mother was poking the fire.

  ‘Waah! What is this?’ her father said when she brought out the rice beer along with small portions of chopped egg mixed with grated ginger. She laughed happily. ‘I made it,’ she said, handing out the mugs of brew and placing a packet of eggginger beside each one. This was one of the few days that her father was at home. Most other days Sogong would walk for miles into the forest tracking his mithuns sent out every morning to graze. Or simply fall by the wayside and drink all night with his friends. He was a well-known orator and had brokered peace among men and villages through the force of his words in many kebangs, but more than that, he was recognized far and wide as an honest man with a good heart. His only weakness was the drink.

  ‘There he is, your father, look!’ her mother would say, hissing with irritation, and sure enough, Nenem would see him draped in his white shawl, negotiating the stones of the village in a happy state of drunkenness.

  ‘In the old days life was very hard,’ he would say. ‘We crept out of the rocks and called to each other because we were afraid to be alone in the wilderness. Now the ayings are taking our land and we have to creep back into the boulders and stones. Waah! But I can still feel my way through these stones. I know everyone of them, by shape, by size and feel,’ and then he would actually bend down and pat them lovingly.

  He was talking about the rocks and stones again, and Nenem knew that the men would be sitting up till cockcrow, whispering and consulting amongst themselves. Her mother had already wrapped herself up like a cocoon with the white homespun and was fast asleep in the corner. She sat for a while, appreciating the evening, her parents, her village, and all her friends and her own life that, at this moment, seemed to be brimming with an unaccountable feeling of happiness.

  The green jeep began to appear regularly after that day. As if by accident the officer called David met her on the road, offered to drive her—an offer she always refused—and skirted the market place like a determined policeman in search of someone. Yasam and Neyang watched her closely.

  ‘Hai, you better hide from him!’ they said and laughed every time David appeared. ‘What! Is he going to buy more oranges? How many oranges does he eat!’

  But David was undeterred. He stalked and surrounded her and willed her attention. He had no fea
r and Nenem knew in her heart that this strange man was calling her into an unknown zone that could only bring disaster. What was more frightening was her own agitation when the familiar vehicle failed to appear, sometimes for days together. Then there he would be, suddenly, as if by magic, looking sunburned and full of joy to see her again. She felt drawn to him. For no reason that she could think of she felt as if she knew him, the kind of man he was. ‘How can it be?’ she asked herself in bewilderment, thinking how they couldn’t even understand each other’s language. David was doggedly trying to master her language, using local words with a funny accent that made her and Neyang and Yasam burst into giggles, but she, Nenem, had learned nothing and could not even understand the sounds of his!

  One evening, after he had been gone a few days, she saw him down by the small new cinema hall, just walking past. Watching from the road above she wondered how she had begun to recognize his gait, and she rushed away, unnerved by her own feelings. She had no need to sell oranges or even visit the marketplace, she was the daughter of a revered village elder, she should go back. But she liked going to the market with her friends and she had no desire now to study or be married. She walked quickly along the road breathing in the evening air, feeling the sweat evaporating from her body as the wind began to blow. Then she heard the sound of a vehicle and knew it was him.

  She was walking alone. He was driving beside her. He stopped and motioned for her to get in. When he saw her hesitate he made a sign that he would only drive her up to the bridge. She clambered in to the seat and nearly died when the jeep lurched and she was flung forward. He put out his hand to steady her and she held her breath. They whizzed past pedestrians and she caught a glimpse of startled faces. When they reached the bridge David got out and opened the door for her. Their bodies brushed against each other. He stood still and quiet and she turned uncertainly. He touched her hair very gently and placed a finger on her lips. Then he smiled, went round to the other side and drove away.

  That summer the sun in the east narrowed the world into silent afternoons and long, slow burning nights. She had lost her fear of him and allowed him to walk a short distance with her. Sometimes he stood with her by the bridge. They continued to see each other like this, and six months passed. Small details captured their attention. One day she saw a green moon rising on the shoulder of the hill. The river shone silver and on the pale road they felt their souls turn, lifting and doubting, attentive and tortured. Many people saw them together like this.

  From the sketchy accounts available of that time, captain David Ferguson was apparently an intelligence officer who had been recruited from the Bengal provinces to serve in the hills district and assist the new political officer in his duties. Everyone knew him as David sahib. He was about twenty-eight years old, an open and friendly man who spoke fluent Hindustani and seemed to have a knack for picking up languages because he was already quite conversant with many of the hill languages. He played volleyball with the police boys. Sometimes he stopped his jeep if he saw a group of village kids, and they would let out a great shout as he skittered into the field and let them examine the vehicle inside out.

  He told Nenem, haltingly, struggling with the newly learned words, that his father had also been a frontiersman who had travelled widely in India and had even sailed up to this region in the days of the steamer ships of the East India Company. He told her that beyond the line of hills the river that they were looking at now curved in a great loop of water and thundered through a deep gorge that only a few of his countrymen had seen, because the gorge was always covered in clouds of mist and vapour. He made wide, arcing movements with his hands and Nenem listened and tried to understand every word.

  It was an enigma how two strangers could be so unaccountably drawn to one another in a little town in the hills from where even the rest of the country was remote and unknown. With her very rudimentary knowledge of letters and books David might have been totally alien to Nenem, but deep within her she felt she understood his life. She sensed the big waves of the seas that he talked about, pointing to the river all the time. Through him she saw the world beyond. She saw cities and streets full of people and heard the skies reverberating with the sound of airplanes that filled her with a longing for far-off places.

  In secret he too stared at her, amazed. Why was he so drawn to this quiet, strange woman who was young and unlettered, but who conveyed to him through all her gestures and expressions that feelings were the evidence of god within? He pondered this all the time. It was as if they had come together again from a previous life. When he was with her he smiled and tried to hold her interest, afraid that she might suddenly disappear. He explained everything about himself to her very carefully so that she would know him and not be afraid of him. But when he was alone he listened to the sound of the wide river and knew that it was he who was searching for the meaning of his life, and he sensed that through this woman he was beginning to unveil the secrets of the earth, the stillness of the sky, and even the depths of an unaccountable, ageless sorrow that he had always carried inside but from which, he now knew, there could be rebirth.

  David’s senior, the political officer, or migom, as the tribesmen fondly called him, lived in a bungalow fenced off from the road by a painted white wooden fence. David occupied a smaller bungalow near by that was shielded simply by a hedge of hibiscus. The houses of the migluns were made of wood, with corrugated tin roofs, and stood a foot above the ground on concrete pillars to be above snakes and leeches. Both the bungalows had windows overlooking the river. David brought Nenem here once so that she could see the view of the river that he saw all the time. She peered over the hedge and stared at the swirling green river. The sunlight danced and bounced off the undulating water and she felt as if she were moving in that current, destined to go… where?—who knew, but she was young and wild, and open to all influences, believing that whatever was happening to her now would have future value.

  The longing for change came like a strong wind, echoing from the belly of the hills. It blew with such insistence that Nenem began to wonder if she would survive. It threw her into a panic and she questioned herself desperately: For what reason? And for whom? Why the longing to change everything, from the way she lived to the words she spoke to the thoughts that bound her? She was like a caged animal, crouched and listening to the voices of the wind, ready to sweep aside time and place when she became one with that fierce wind that called and sang louder and louder in her blood.

  One day Nenem came down from the village with Yasam and Neyang and David was waiting by the bridge. The plan was for her two friends to go to the cinema hall then meet her here again so that they could return to the village together. Nenem got into the jeep and David started the engine. Hardly had they gone a short distance when they hit a cow. There was a heavy thud, the vehicle veered sharply and then, crunching hard on the gravel, veered back to the road. She had flung out her arm to clutch at him. He had grinned at her. The cow bellowed and cantered off. Nenem laughed in relief, and then he sped on, recklessly. A light drizzle covered the land and the mountains turned greener against the backdrop of the grey, lowering sky. He reached out for her hand. She did not pull away, and he changed gears with his hand over hers. They were both laughing now and when they whizzed past the last fenced house at the boundary of the town, Nenem did not protest.

  The small rest house by the river was scruffy with peeling plaster and creaky wooden floors. It stood on a promontory jutting out over the river and was used by the sahibs on tour duty, or sometimes for a spot of fishing in the river, but for most of the time it was empty. A wild lemon tree shaded the house from the road and perfumed the air with its white blossoms.

  The surprised caretaker rushed out to greet the sahib and called loudly for his son to come and carry in the baggage. When he saw Nenem he was seized with a bout of coughing, but he opened one of the two rooms with a great flourish of keys and said he would make tea. He was holding a candle stuck into the neck of an
old bottle and shuffled to a drawer to pull out another stump of candle. He began to look around for a matchbox.

  ‘Just light it with the one you are holding,’ David said. ‘We won’t be needing anything else.’

  When they were alone they only heard the rain and it drowned out all other sound. Nenem dropped down the mosquito net and laughed, seeing it for the first time. Then she piled it back on top again. David looked at her, her limbs moving and glowing in the dim light, and a rush of terror and desire seized him. When she said something he could not answer.

  She looked at him and stopped speaking. He came up and sat on the bed beside her. The candle flame danced over his face and throat and she lowered her head so that he would not see her own agitation. A warm liquid was running through her body and she did not know when he grasped her hand. She tried to draw back, to say something to ease the tension, but she could not utter a word. She was drowsy, and his mouth was breathing against hers. She lifted her head and closed her eyes. David trembled like a child, almost lifting her in the tightness of his embrace. She shared his trembling. He opened her mouth with his, probing mercilessly, trying to erase her hesitation, pushing her head back until she gasped.

  ‘No, no…’ he murmured, afraid he would lose her, and clutched her hands, bruising her.

  Nenem had not expected this kind of love. She thrilled to the touch of this man who revealed himself so desperately. Who was he? Why had he become like this? His desire inflamed her.

  His mouth tore away and slid down her throat. She felt his hands moving to touch her breasts and expose them. A deep flush suffused her and she arched against him, pressing the hardness of her nipples against his cupped palm. It was too late now. She tried to hide her face on his shoulder as he lay her down. She could not protest, she had no will. It was strange to her that he seemed just as helpless. Her wrap opened and fell away and her nakedness made him groan. Her damp hair swept against his mouth when he came up, and he held her down by the wrists as he entered her in an anguish of tenderness and flame. He wanted to be gentle with her, to take her slowly and feel the growing ache as he made her love him back, but she was turning and twisting her head wildly and whimpering. He grabbed her face and made her look at him. He sank into her as their gaze locked. He hurt her when he raised her up, tearing her flesh, punishing her, loving her, consuming her until she dropped her gaze and her face quivered and broke as she cried out his name and the tears came to her eyes.