Legends of Pensam

by Mamang Dai

  She looked quickly at Kao. He appeared imperturbable in his seat but he clapped and now looked at her as if to say, ‘Well, what about this, huh?’ And for some reason, looking at him, at the way he tilted his head towards her slightly, she understood why the song had seemed familiar. It was about loss, the kind that she had known when the man she had loved went away. It was the kind of loss she had understood long before she suffered it, listening as a little girl to an old ballad sung by the villagers to bless their warrior sons. Perhaps these women had been singing similar words:

  These were our arrows,

  This, our poison.

  This, the warrior’s art,

  These, our songs of love.

  This was her land. She had chosen it over love. She did not ask herself if she was happy.

  It was another summer. Clouds would swoop down over the hills, threatening rain, and then suddenly surrender, leaving the evening sky filled with a strange, wild glow. Kao came to visit her often. He came to Yelen from the village of Motum across the river to board the big ferry that took him further downstream to the distant town where he was completing his studies. He was the eldest son of the Poro family and was one of the first men of the area to be travelling out so far. Everyone spoke of him with affection and praise. Kao, however, never said much at all. This silence provoked Nenem, who began to talk and open up just so that she could tease him and extract a few words from him. How could she have known that the serious Kao was enchanted by her gossip, her trusting face, her lips, her eyes, and that he longed for the heat and musk of her woman’s body?

  It took a long time for him to break his silence. Nenem was shocked by his proposal and when he came again to speak to her father she hid herself by the granary buildings at the outskirts of the village. She saw that the clouds had drifted down low during the night, and without the sun they were cradled in the mountains and still clinging to the trees.

  ‘There are so many things to share,’ she thought wistfully.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ her old aunt had also told her when David had gone away. ‘Let him go. Don’t hurt yourself. You will see, there are so many other good people in the world. Give your love, share your life and make someone happy. These are enough gifts for one lifetime. Don’t sacrifice your life for a dream!’

  Oh! How long ago that seemed now. David! She would never forget him. As long as there was life and breath in her body he would be there with her. She had promised herself that. Yet her heart was beating wildly wondering what Kao and her father would be discussing. She knew intuitively that Kao would be a good husband.

  ‘Ah, what will happen?’ she asked herself, realizing now that the true sadness of love is the old, undying image being slowly replaced by the expectation of a new love.

  Nenem and Kao became man and wife amidst great joy and celebration. Rakut’s father was the one who worked day and night to see that everything was done according to custom. Old men and women whom no one had ever seen before arrived from villages no one had heard of, and the slaughter of mithuns and the consumption of food and drink was something that no one could ever forget. The ceremony was especially distinguished by the presence of Hoxo’s father, Lutor, who had come to wish the family. Old Sogong and his wife sat on the veranda and shouted and joked in great excitement, for they were relieved and happy for their daughter. She was going to a good home—Kao’s family had brought rich gifts of mithuns and old metal plates and dishes. There was even a road that the British had built which passed right at the edge of the village. Only one other village in all their hills had a road close to it.

  The marriage was also the cementing of wider ties with villages on the other side of the river, between the powerful Doying and Poro clans, and this was an important alliance for the kebang abus, the village elders, who would be travelling there on many future missions to resolve cases with their powers of oratory.

  Nenem’s childhood friends Yasam and Neyang wept when they came down to the ferry ghat. They were carrying enormous bundles and an old tin trunk that contained everything that Nenem would need to begin her new life in Motum.

  ‘Yes,’ Nenem said to herself, ‘tonight I will see everyone well fed and happy!’

  It was the festival of solung and the celebration of her first year of marriage. The conversation was loud and lively. Everyone had something to say. Old aches and pains were disclosed. Personal preferences revealed. In one corner some women spoke in hushed tones then burst into loud peals of laughter. The fire seemed to turn and twist as if trying to light up all the faces. A breeze gathered force and carried with it the scent of rain. Jebu said everyone should sing. No sooner had he said this than the company heard the rumbling entry of a lorry that had been hired to transport the ponung girls from the neighbouring villages who were going to sing and dance all night.

  ‘Whatever one may say, we all become like the ones before us,’ said Kinu. Then he turned to the women huddled in the corner and said, ‘Now you ladies there—don’t be so serious! Get ready to sing and drink!’

  ‘When you get to be like us you will also grow serious,’ retorted the oldest one of the group. ‘You just wait and see. But we will sing, of course! Why not?’

  ‘Hai, whatever one may say everyone of us follows in the footsteps of the ones before us!’ Kinu kept repeating to himself.

  The girls spilled out of the lorry, already making music with their long necklaces of silver coins. They were dressed in identical red ga-les with short black jackets. There were twenty girls in all and they looked fresh and eager, each one nudging her friend as they shuffled towards the fire.

  ‘What beauties! Hai, the young girls are here!’ shouted Kinu.

  The girls giggled.

  ‘Everyone must sing!’ Kinu shouted again, and almost spilling his drink he rushed across to Kao and began hauling him up. Kao was smiling and shaking his head. Then he washed his hands in the bucket of water and stood up. Nenem watched him closely and heard him clearing his throat. Everyone laughed and clapped. They laughed more when Kao started singing a very slow, serious song.

  ‘Hai! Hai! Stop him someone, this won’t do!’ shouted Kinu.

  There was great merriment while Kao continued to sing with his hands in his pocket. Nenem laughed and they looked at each other, Kao still grinning and singing, until Kinu cried out loudly that Kao should be exempted immediately or he would spoil the evening with his pitiful sobriety.

  Nenem looked up at the sky. The moon sailed brightly on a ragged black veil and a looming pillar of cloud began to cover half the sky. It seemed to her that heaven itself was sloping downwards in a shaft of light and it gave her a thrill to feel the evening deepening. This was her world now. A small village in the wilderness, the big clouds moving overhead and the faces of her family and friends shining in the firelight. Yes, a moment of happiness like this! She breathed in deeply, and felt the baby kicking in her womb.

  ‘The rains are not over yet,’ Kao had told her the other night when she had cried out about her flowers and seeds. Kao had staked the earth for her scented creepers and she was impatient for rain. ‘Wait a bit,’ he had said, and sure enough, the downpour had come one night hissing and splashing. Nenem had conceded defeat. Now she smiled, remembering this careful and attentive trait of Kao’s. A row of budding cassia trees in a straight row was his handiwork, and he had helped her plant her orange trees in a sheltered grove on the slope of the hill that overlooked the river.

  We remember things by little signposts that we have planted here and there, she thought. She had planted the orange trees thinking that she would never escape the scent of orange blossom. And now when she looked at the trees she recalled all the fragments of the past that no one but she could understand. Time had changed so many things.

  Nothing was complete. But there was comfort in looking at the green hills and the river that she had crossed to become Kao’s wife. Together, they would raise a family, guard their land and live among their people observing the ancient customs of
their clan. Surely these were enough gifts for one lifetime.

  rites of love

  Of all the stories I had heard from Hoxo, I could sense that he brought the most affection and imagination to incidents that concerned Nenem. To him she was like the river, constant, nurturing, self-possessed. Like the river, she was the soul of our land. He had never seen Nenem, only imagined her through the free spirit, good sense and warm eyes of her daughter Losi, who became his wife. It was fire that brought them together.

  In the old days, fire watching had been a sacred duty. All young men were expected to give their time, taking turns to stay together in the bango, the boys’ dormitory, and keep vigil through the night. The old men and women took up this duty during the day, when they also minded the young children while their parents were away in the fields. One night, a terrible fire broke out in Motum village. The people of Duyang were aroused by the sound of explosions. Running up to the highest point and looking across the river in the darkness they saw what appeared to be an island of fire dancing and sliding on the treetops. ‘It’s a fire!’ they shouted. They could almost hear the screams of men and animals and they stood for a long time shouting into the wind and calling on the gods to save the poor villagers.

  Twenty houses were completely gutted, one house leaping like a ball of flame on to the other until the villagers had moved boulders and trees with superhuman strength to erect a barricade against the angry fire spirit. The village had to perform special rituals to cleanse itself of the tragedy, and like in all other villages, clansmen from far away, on hearing the news, had hurried to help rebuild the destroyed houses. The new dwellings were ready within a week and except for the charred branches of some old trees a visitor to the place would not have seen any trace of the devastation.

  It was at this time that Hoxo had volunteered to join a band of youth who were setting out to keep the fire vigil in Motum village. This was a gesture of solidarity, and since Rakut was also going, the two friends made their first journey across the river together. The village of Motum was perched high on a plateau that overlooked the surrounding hills. Here, the land opened out into wide, rolling slopes while even taller mountains glistening with snow girdled the village itself. These were the mountains where the wild aconite grew.

  Hoxo recalled that this had been one of his happiest times. Every night the boys gathered in the bango and lolled around the fire. Sometimes, in a fit of exuberance, they would march though the village swinging the hurricane lamp and calling, ‘Watch your fires! Watch! Watch! Everybody, watch your fires!’

  One unforgettable night Hoxo and Rakut rushed into a house thinking the fire was burning too brightly for such a late hour. Because they had panicked—the memory of the great fire was still fresh in their minds—they did not call out or ask permission to enter. They leaped up onto the bamboo platform and peered in. Hoxo saw a young girl holding aloft what looked like a book, under a pole from which was hung a hurricane lamp, just like the one he was carrying. Someone grunted from the corner and the girl immediately dropped the book with a thud.

  ‘What! Who’s there?’

  Hoxo realized he was in the house of Kao and felt his face burning. What with all the new houses in the village they had failed to recognize the famous house of Nenem and Kao. This must be their daughter!

  ‘It’s the way things happen,’ Hoxo reminded me, laughing. He would not say any more but everyone knew the story— Hoxo and Rakut had mumbled something, and Kao had invited them in, since they had woken him up. But Losi, the daughter, had made no attempt to conceal her displeasure at their rude intrusion.

  Losi had had a solitary childhood. She grew up in a house that was built in the traditional style with a projecting bamboo veranda perched on stilts. A unique extension to the house was a long room made of solid wood that Kao had designed for Nenem. The room even contained some wicker chairs, and a tin trunk draped with cloth had been turned into another seat. This trunk was a treasure trove that Losi often explored avidly, and the book she had been staring at in the light of the hurricane lamp had come out of this.

  ‘Keep this, this is the box of stories,’ her mother had told her. ‘You can shape them, colour them, and pull them out anytime.’ She had showed the child Losi the small box with the pink jade lid that smelled sweet and comforting, and had held up the big copper-coloured binoculars for her to peer through. This was a gift that David had left for Nenem’s father. It was stamped: 1902, and for a long time it had hung on the high rafters along with the firewood and other household paraphernalia because Nenem had been too shy to touch it and Sogong, perhaps, too angry. It must have been her mother who had finally wrapped it up in newspaper and put it into the cane basket from where Nenem had retrieved it and put it into the tin trunk before she was married to Kao.

  Losi had very faint memories of her mother. She remembered her as being active and happy. She looked after the house and called out to the animals every evening in a particular tune that went something like ‘Yu, yu! Youuue!’ She swept the leaves and cleared the pineapple patch. She prodded the earth expertly and prepared it for planting ginger. That was what Losi remembered, though she also hinted that sometimes her mother appeared withdrawn, ‘somewhere far away’, but then she couldn’t really be sure, she said, because she was a little child then.

  In her heart, Nenem might have wondered sometimes at her own life, but she never spoke of the past before she met Kao. In the beginning there might have been a feeling of formality between husband and wife. Nenem, by nature, could be remote and unreachable, but Kao knew she was a passionate woman when she cried out and clutched at him. It was these moments that moved Kao. Sometimes their lovemaking was like molestation. He was tormented by thoughts of her past. He had seen her naked so many times and still she was shy. He watched her keenly, stripping her, exploring her, pulling her naked body up and she felt all his strength and passion entering her and expanding her womb. Yet when he spoke she closed her eyes to his pleading gaze and never told him what she wanted.

  It was after the birth of Losi that Nenem became really close to Kao. Now she talked more, and sometimes she sang loudly in the house. This made Kao truly happy. He stared at his baby daughter and worried about her and Nenem so much that in the end he called for Nenem’s mother to came and live with them for a while. The old woman was only too happy to oblige. She arrived, brisk and beaming, and spent every moment of her stay with her granddaughter. She fussed and suggested so many things that Kao began to be afraid until the old woman told him that nothing could happen to the child, for she was blessed, through her mother, by the great spirits. ‘Hush!’ she crooned, ‘Hush! A treasure, a treasure! Whose little baby are you? Your mother came from the land of fish and stars! Oh little baby, go to sleep. Hush…’

  Nenem, apparently, was a gift from the mythical land among the stars that was the dwelling place of a beautiful bride, also known as the celestial aunt, who came down to earth to bless the civilization of men with wisdom and grace. Nenem’s mother had already lost two siblings before her and she had been worried that she would have no children. A shaman had been called and during an elaborate ritual he had invoked the spirits of the celestial aunt to bless the couple with a beautiful child. Some time later, the girl Nenem had been born.

  Happy to be with her daughter and granddaughter now, the old woman showed no sign of wanting to return to her old man Sogong, who was shaky with drink but had enough strength and standing to call out to the village boys: ‘Hey! Come and pick me up at once! I am here, at the bottom of the hill. Hurry up and bring a blanket with you!’ She might have ignored him forever, so engrossed was she with the baby, had it not been for the earth silently sliding and shifting, preparing for an act of violence that was to change the lives and the landscape of the region for ever.

  Late one evening all the villages of the land were startled by the thunder of hooves crashing through the jungle. Hundreds of mithuns had been running wildly to reach their owners and now they stood b
efore the surprised villagers, snorting and trembling in a sweat of panic. ‘What! Hai, look at the poor creatures…’ the villagers were saying when the ground began to roll and tilt with a deep, angry rumble. The villagers peering out of their homes gasped to see the familiar outline of the hills tilting and swaying rapidly from side to side. The earth opened up and hills were swallowed as the savage quake shook the earth and tore apart huge chunks of forest.

  It was one of the biggest earthquakes of the century. It measured 8.6 on the Richter scale and it came late on 15 August 1950. The river that Nenem had so loved was thrown off its course as a mountain collapsed and blocked its path. In a furious battle the river rose in a mass of churning, heaving water and swung inland, swallowing half of Pigo town. All the houses and the tree-lined avenues of the miglun quarter were gone forever. Then it swung west and spreading wider still it tore away every sign and symbol of the past years, and the school that Nenem had hated and the town itself were sunk beneath the floodwaters. According to the old people the tremors continued for many months and the town and the market place were covered with dead fish.

  High in her new home Nenem heard the river roaring and might have imagined it was the sound of aeroplanes at war that David had described to her, or the waves of a sea. She became silent and Kao could see that she was shocked and saddened by this cruelty of nature. She clasped Losi and cried out every time the bed shook with the aftershock of the earthquake. Kao put a chain on the tin trunk and tied it to the thick wooden post so that it would not slip away. He stood by her and told her that a number of distant villages had been buried under massive landslides and that many people had lost their lives. In their vicinity the houses of so many villages had collapsed. But he assured her that because the buildings were so light, built only with bamboo and wooden posts, no one had died. The only injury was to old man Bukku, who had been hit on the head with a bamboo pole, but then everyone said he deserved it because he had been missing from his own house that night.