Legends of Pensam

by Mamang Dai

  Now he looked closely at the old widow and remembered her anger and anguish during the period of Abo’s illness. ‘There is no need for him to be taken to the town,’ she had said. ‘It will be of no use.’ The hard words had surprised and hurt him. But the wife had said, ‘He’s been talking like he’s never talked to me before. Every morning he tells me a story of his past.’

  And so it had been as she wanted. In the village they lit big fires for Abo, and in a small shack that marked the grave a fire would be kept burning all day and night for up to a year as a ritual of cleansing and farewell. He himself had been too old and weak to attend the funeral of his friend. But in his heart he knew the true reason: he was afraid. Everyone in the village had gone away one by one, and now he was the oldest of a generation that had opened up the land and had sat in the hot sun talking to unknown men and their tribes in small villages unmarked on any map.

  There, he could see the line of porters slipping and straining up the steep slope with their packs of salt, rice and tobacco. He was back in time again, forty years, may be fifty, when he had left his home village and joined the new frontier service whose officers were opening up the land for administration. He saw one man carrying his tin trunk proudly emblazoned with his name in bold white letters and this filled him with a determination to reach the post buried in the wilderness of hills that stretched before him like endless waves. He had thought then, ‘If men from the distant cities can come so far to live and serve in these remote outposts, why should we not do better, being natives of this land?’

  They had trekked into the deepest mountains, lit big campfires in the middle of the forests to keep wild animals away during their night halt. One night he had awoken with an unimaginable fear clutching at his heart. The fire was almost burning out. The dogs were awake but they were crouched in absolute silence. It was eerie. Everyone felt the presence of something enormous, and the instinctive reaction of every man in the camp was to signal for silence in the face of this heavy, looming presence that was equally silent. It was a herd of elephants standing stock still against their shack of bamboo and caked mud. He shifted his eyes slowly and saw the slow swinging movement of a grey pendant trunk through the wide crack pressed against his face. The creatures were barely an inch away from where he lay. Any movement now, a cough or a sigh, might turn them on him. He didn’t know for how long he lay like that. Just before the sun touched the treetops, they vanished. The camp men did not speak as they looked at the footprints and the droppings still steaming in the early light.

  Now he could look back and say, ‘Yes, we were brave. We obeyed orders carried to us by runners from one end of the world, and we marched into the other, wild corner. We did our duty.’

  His memory moved back and forth like this, shifting, remembering and forgetting. In between he remembered the words of the young men when they told him about Abo’s ill health.

  ‘We have decided not to send him to the hospital in the big town. There is no point. We will watch over him here and perform the rituals. If he recovers, well and good, otherwise it is better he stays here and gives us his final blessings and words of advice.’

  At the time he had thought that no effort should be spared to save a life, but now he felt relieved that his friend had not died in a strange place surrounded by strangers. When the end comes it is better not to be alone. It is not a time for individuals. It is better for fathers and sons to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors.

  ‘He was so talkative,’ his friend’s wife kept saying. Now that the crisis of illness and death was over the old widow was also eager to talk and talk. ‘God knows, he spoke about the trees, and the placement of stones, and the ferry boats across the river.’

  The ferry used to take them across to the town where the two friends attended school, and from where he later took an overnight bus and then a train to the city where he studied to become an officer. The ferryboat owners were sharp businessmen already and the two friends winced each time they had to part with four annas to pay for the crossing. Once a storm had swept the boat downstream and they had almost lost their lives. Abo had flung away his bag of rice and bundles of dried fish. ‘Hurry up! Hurry up!’ he had shouted. ‘Quick! Throw everything away!’

  He saw the small basket of oranges he had carried from the village float away. Then they had clutched their books and jumped into the water to reach the first sand bar. A thick plank from here reached the bank and they landed there before the boatmen and crew herded the rest of the shouting, screaming passengers into smaller boats.

  ‘If you have a mind you can live!’ Abo had shouted, gleaming wet like an otter and shaking his books in the air. They were both so skinny at the time that they had a joke about themselves carrying salt in the hollow of their collarbones for the lemons they ate on their way to school. He was almost laughing out now. It was a glory to remember such things!

  Perhaps old Abo was sitting on that rock now and squinting at him with a sly smile.

  ‘Hey! What have you got to eat today?’

  ‘Dried fish!’

  ‘Hmm. Lets eat now!’

  And on other days: ‘Hey! What have you got to eat today?’

  ‘Only rice.’

  ‘Hmm. We can eat later!’

  The afternoon turned to gold and the house was quiet and peaceful. When the sun sank behind the big hill a pale, translucent light flooded the western sky. It is the same wherever we go, the old man thought. Time impresses us when it is past. The clouds are always searching. The stars send their signals. Ah! If everything could be clear before the sun goes down.

  The old woman had fallen into a heavy slumber and woke suddenly, wondering if it was morning. She eased out of bed with effort and was surprised to see her husband walking briskly past the window carrying a long bamboo pole. Slowly the aroma of burning leaves scented the evening. A big fire was crackling in the garden. A cloud of smoke billowed out across the shrubs and the sugar cane stalks and fanned out upwards as if to clear the air of bugs and insects. The bamboo pole was propped up against the tree and the old man was bending low and throwing in twigs and branches with the firelight aglow on his concentrated face.

  the road

  From the houses furthest up the hill in Duyang, the town of Pigo, the oldest settlement in the region, is a few scattered rooftops seen through patches of dense vegetation. The first men and women who came here had started their journey from the mountains and walked through the forests carrying bamboo flares. They followed the green-and-silver vein of the river, convinced that it was the only road that would lead them to a destination. At a point opposite the spot that would later become Pigo, they stopped. They stared across the water and saw how the land was level and fertile. They cut plantain stems and lashed them together into rafts to get across. This was the origin of Pigo as a small landing stage on the right bank of the river.

  It was a magical place. To the south the hills flattened and sank into the land of unknown strangers; but to the north and east the hills sloped gently and ranged themselves row upon row as if to shield the fertile valley from the wild mountains from where they had come. Orange trees grew here, the bamboo was young and rainwashed, and all the families who arrived moved in a daze of wonderment, exploring the streams and rocks, memorizing the green stillness and walking through the forest, following the same paths where the elephants wandered remembering their ancient routes.

  Much later, Pigo became the first choice of the British officers in the area, and for a while it was the only town in the region with tarred roads and concrete buildings and electricity and daily bazaars.

  The villages at the far edge of the Duyang cluster, however, from where the domain of the tallest hills and the most secret mountains began, had little connection with Pigo. They remained mysterious and remote even long after the British left. They were beyond time. Till the road came.

  The village had never heard of anything like it before. Their granary doors had been broken and all their prec
ious beads and jewels stolen. It had happened at night. The thunderstruck victims could not imagine how anyone could have done such a thing.

  ‘It is like the work of spirits.’

  ‘Maybe it was the spirits.’

  ‘Who else would do such a thing?’

  ‘Don’t blame the spirits. Only men do such things!’

  In these villages, the granaries were grouped together and built on stilts with a heavy circular piece of wood, like a wheel, attached to every post. This was to keep the rats out. All the grain for the year was stored here. The wealth of a family in the form of old beads, brass bracelets, marriage gifts and huge urns of beaten metal was also stashed away among the mounds of rice, millet and maize. Never in living memory had anyone tampered with these houses. The granary was sacred property and it was taboo to enter one without the consent of the owner. Doors were simply jammed shut with a bamboo stick, and only recently had a few families taken to locking them.

  ‘If not the spirits, then who?’

  ‘It could be anyone.’

  The village seemed to stop breathing. The clear air shimmered and the longhouses shone like crouched monoliths with their fringe of wild plantain neatly trimmed over the narrow doorways. From her dark door Issam jangled a bunch of iron keys.

  ‘Everything is gone,’ she called out, ‘but they didn’t break the lock. They pulled out the planks! What is happening to our village!’

  This was the last village on the administrative map. Anyone looking at the hills from the highest point in it would see the river coiled like a shimmering snake in the still, green jungle, beyond which rose a forbidding knot of mountains. It was a landscape out of a dream, and though an onlooker might pause and get his bearings, sooner or later the impenetrable vastness would trouble his thoughts. Across the river the white sand banks stretched and narrowed, before they were swallowed by the darkness where spiked bamboo stood in silent columns.

  The village had moved to its own quiet rhythm for centuries, with old certainties and beliefs, but the road was changing all that. It had been over a year now, and the road was still being built. It ran up the mountain like a broken ladder of crumbling earth stained with iron ore. The red gash turned in great loops and bends and plunged into the heart of the far mountains, trying to reach the scattered villages buried deep in the land of mist and wild chestnut.

  Very few locals took this ragged road. People had heard of the mad woman who appeared by the stream made red by the gouged-out earth and threw bits of shale and rock at travellers. There were also whispers that the road was inauspicious. Everyone believed in the story of the red pool, the colour of blood, where ghostly fish swam round and round wearing bells that tinkled and drove strong men to acts of murderous violence. In the summer rains the road was crushed under falling rocks and boulders. The villagers clambered over them and laughed loudly, wading through the sticky red mud: ‘What a place! At this rate we will never see progress!’

  ‘I promise you a road by the end of the year!’ Duan, son of Kedu, had said. He was a young man whose name had brought recognition to the village as the home of the youngest elected member to the state assembly. There was no doubt about his sincerity to serve his people. He had spoken with conviction and the villagers had listened, eager and happy in his victory, for it was true that till now their village had exerted its presence only in rather dubious ways, like the time when eight children had died of measles (brought, the villagers were convinced, by visitors from the town).

  Another distinction of the place was the old school, acknowledged by one and all as the first school established in the region. But that was long ago, and since then the building had stood unchanged high up on the open plain above the village. And higher up there were fields of opium poppy aglow with flowers and milky sap. Apart from this, there was little to recommend the village.

  So the villagers had heard Duan mesmerized by images of a road, vehicles and long rows of electric poles linked by taut black transmission wires. There would be progress. There would be new schools and their children would learn about the world in the new brightness that would pierce their dim homes like a sharp ray of light. Everyone had applauded and stepped forward to help.

  Duan had led the way and now, every day, the hills echoed with the sound of heavy trucks bumping and screeching up the hillside carrying iron and cement. They scraped the riverbed for sand and blew up rocks that hung over the cut earth, threatening to smash the bulldozers and workmen who blew whistles and ran like ants on the edge of the mountain. New faces appeared among the foliage. They came from far away. Rows of bamboo shacks sprang up along the opened earth and smoke billowed out in dense plumes as the labour force settled in. A bamboo tube drew the perennial moisture trickling down the crevices into a source of water better than any tap in the towns. Big boulders strewn about served as laundry stones where naked children played in rain or sun, and women bathed and smiled at passing men who stared at the wet clothes that clung to their bodies.

  A seductive new challenge emanated from these shacks. As the road stretched further with the oil and sweat of black fires and coal tar, the worker-women distilled the dregs of carbide and mountain rice into a witches’ brew that turned the men of the village into feverish addicts roaming the nights with a yellow light glinting in their eyes.

  Every night Issam lit the kerosene lamp and hung it on the wooden pole fixed securely over the door. She tried to sleep. But the night was unnaturally still. She wondered if someone was standing near the door waiting to break in. She strained to catch any unusual sounds and coughed loudly to deter imagined assailants. Sometimes a gecko cried and she jumped.

  ‘It’s agreeing with me! I should check the lock.’ She stumbled out of bed.

  ‘What is it?’ her husband looked up irritably.

  ‘I thought I heard a sound.’

  ‘What sound?’

  ‘Someone…something…did you hear someone coughing?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But listen…’

  ‘Then go and see. Take the torch.’

  Haaah! At such times she wished she were a man. Then she would show him what it was to be a real man, instead of lazing under the covers not knowing whether there were robbers or an earthquake. Their houses were not safe anymore, everyone knew that. Why, she had heard that young boys were robbing the supermarkets in town and teenagers were extorting money and riding away on stolen motorcycles. In the plains, migrant workers prowled at night planning burglaries and murder. Now they were here. Houses were marked.

  And she was the one, she alone, who had to be on the lookout to defend their homes, hearth and property!

  So every night, unable to sleep well for the anxiety, she cleared her throat loudly and shuddered with resentment as her husband slept peacefully. The thin line of lamplight under the door comforted her. She turned her head so that she could watch it properly. If a shadow fell across that beam she would know someone was standing there, outside their door, waiting to hear if they were asleep. She glanced around quickly and was reassured to see the stout stick in the corner, ready for use.

  ‘Better to be prepared,’ she thought bitterly, as her eyelids began to droop.

  After the theft in the granary buildings, it was evident to Issam that her fears were not unfounded. The road was bad news.

  ‘I knew something would happen,’ she said to the villagers gathered by the road. ‘But of course no one listened. Now we have burglars among us! And who are we to blame?’

  Everyone looked at each other. News had already reached Duan, and he was to come to the village by the afternoon to address the distressed people.

  In her father’s house Mayum pulled out her green velvet blouse and held it up. It was her one piece of fancy clothing that she kept folded under the mat so that it would not crease. ‘I’ll wear this,’ she thought.

  A brief meeting at the district town centre had convinced her that Duan had not forgotten what had passed between them before he was elected a
nd work called him away to the capital. They had grown up together, seen each other walking to the fields almost every day and performed all the rites of the seasons like the other young men and women of the village. Even when Duan left to study in the town they were never far apart because he would come back to the village every weekend. He would move around with his friends then, and she with hers, and they would exchange words and looks that kept them laughing and happy all through the long summers before he contested the elections and became famous and the crowds pressed in on him and escorted him away.

  And now he was coming back!

  She had heard Issam’s angry, mocking words and recognized the spite in them. She had felt a rush of anger towards Issam and others like her who were intent on harming and ridiculing Duan. She had said a prayer for him.

  This morning, she had heard old Luda saying that they should press for an inquiry and catch the culprits. Everyone had cheered. But first someone must draft a letter to Duan,

  Luda had added, so that their misfortune would be on record. At this point all eyes had turned to Yomin, the schoolteacher. He was the only one in the village who could read and write more than a few sentences.

  ‘What shall I write?’

  ‘Write that all our jewels were stolen and that we want action!’

  ‘Whom shall I address it to?’

  ‘To Duan, who else?’

  ‘No, no! Send it to the minister.’

  ‘No, it will get lost.’