by Mamang Dai
The crowd screamed. And then he came out of his stupor. He sang at the top of his voice, not meaning to. He tried to caress the microphone and was awkward. His voice echoed back, unfamiliar and unhappy. He closed his eyes.
‘But I want the old days back,’ he had said to me. ‘The days when I was poor and unknown. It was the time my soul sang at its loudest and saddest. It was also the time my soul sang in elation, for the love of a woman… Oh, the days of my youth, the bittersweet kernel of my days! Give me back my gift! Give me back my soul!’
He was crying now, gasping and choking. The crowd saw none of this, and was going wild, a constant wave of noise in which his voice was lost. What was he singing? What did they hear? He spread his legs wide, thinking perhaps that he must posture, use the tricks of stance, gait, a hand across his brow, one foot stamping. Maybe his vision was blurred and he did not actually see the crowd, and only imagined them all sitting there, in the depths of the big field, staring at him, aghast. He had lost it. The gift was gone! Was that what he was feeling again? The crowd was hardly listening, but seemed to be enjoying the experience anyway. I saw Menga X nod softly, taking in his band, the musicians, all of whom were concentrating on their instruments and struggling with the notes. It would never end. They were a team. They had written their names in the wind, and that was it.
The texture and speed of change was visible in strange ways all across the land. A visitor coming to the town for the first time would still see the green hills, the green bamboo and the green river flowing in all directions, but now there were young men on motorcycles roaring across the stones while young picnickers wearing fake fur and woollen caps waved at passers-by. In the run up to the volleyball tourney this year, I heard that the Motum village team had been disqualified because one of their players tried to play holding a bottle of beer in one hand.
While I pondered all this, I noticed there was another stir of excitement in the front rows. Rakut was presenting something to the visiting dignitaries. It looked like a sheaf of papers. He was moving smartly and bowing and smiling. I knew his daughter would be singing next and sure enough the curtain promptly lifted again on four young girls who began singing a sweet, catchy rhyme in chorus.
Rakut passed close by me just then and I asked him quickly what his papers were about.
‘Oh, it is a list of all the illustrious sons of this land from British times!’
Rakut had listed the names of his father and his father’s father; he had listed Hoxo, his father, and all the other legendary forefathers, and the bloodline of all the men of the Duyang group right down to the present times.
‘He believes that if a person forgets, he loses his soul,’ Hoxo had said, laughing, when Rakut had performed this recitation for Jules when we were all sitting on the veranda the other day.
‘Well, it’s a list of names. Maybe it will be interesting, hah, hah!’ Rakut said now and moved on.
The girls were still singing in high, clear voices:
Keep the candle burning
Keep one steady light
In the world that’s turning
Keep the candle burning…
How strange and moving my corner of the world appeared to me at this moment! There was nothing that I or anyone else could do to keep or change anything. It would all just carry on, for better or worse, and nothing anyone said or wrote would convey that unstoppable process of the mind by which people, simple, old, clever or unknown, will suddenly come up with an expression of their deepest beliefs. And though I was like a stranger to my village, because I didn’t live here, I felt certain that no matter what happened to it, if I were granted a visit after an absence of a hundred years, I would recognize it again even if no record of it had survived.
When my phone rang, and I heard my friends from distant cities, their voices sometimes wavered and faded away. At other times the line was so clear, it was as if nothing separated us, and it was easy to believe in the global village. I heard a friend say sternly to her children, or whoever it was that was making so much noise in the background, ‘Hey! Keep the volume down! I’m talking to the land of elephants!’ and I thought, Yes, this land of elephants, of jungle and river and hard stones. Here the children still stand back and stick their fingers in their mouths. Here Hoxo and Rakut live and remember on a piece of green earth wedged between high mountains and big rivers. Here live people who walk home under the wheeling sky dreaming dreams and waiting to be awakened by the one great passion—nothing else will do…
And in the end what is there, really, to tell? Men and women, the destiny of a race, villages, some symbols, a few people running amuck, a fire, a river, maybe a land of fish and stars…And elsewhere—what is there elsewhere? Men and women, and cities and streets and airports, and a playground for children flanked by high-rises. And perhaps that is all there is, and it is enough.
Everywhere, people like us, we turned with the world. Our lives turned, and in the circle who could tell where was the beginning and where the end? As Rakut often said, ‘We are peripheral people. We are not politicians, scientists or builders of empires. Not even the well-known citizen or the outrageous one. Just peripheral people, thinking out our thoughts!’
When I made my way back to Duyang again to hear what the villagers had to say about the festivities, I found it was bustling with people. Smoke floated out of the homes and there was Losi smiling at me and calling me in. Many visitors and relatives had arrived from across the river and it was refreshing to look at their faces and listen to their voices speaking in familiar accents. I pulled up a stool and sat on the veranda.
‘Why should we be afraid of change?’ Rakut was arguing. ‘Change is a wonderful thing! It is a simple matter of rearrangement, a moment of great possibilities! Why should we be so afraid? We all want to be happy, but happiness eludes us as we keep thinking about it all the time. Sleepless nights. Sad, bereft mornings. Then suddenly, for no reason, the blood hums and a feeling of elation carries us through another day! This is how it has always been. We have nothing to fear.’
When Rakut wanted to, he could speak poetry. He was a lover of words, and though he exaggerated wildly sometimes, everyone agreed with him when he said that the divine spirit had given man words to create loveliness. Now he lifted his hands and said, ‘Look! Look! The most beautiful thing is that we are all bunched up together on oceans and cities, and deserts and valleys, far apart from each other in so many ways, but we have words, and the right words open our minds and hearts and help us to recognize one another.’ Here he clutched his heart and began to mimic again, ‘Hello brother! Hello friend! Hello! Hello!’
Everyone laughed merrily and I saw the women of the next house pause in their work to look across at Rakut’s performance. They were laying out thread for new cloth and the loom was already stretched out. They were passing the balls of thread back and forth, the blue and the green and the red, back and forth, back and forth.
Hoxo pointed out the green engot plant growing wild near the house from which a green dye could be extracted.
‘Everything is available here,’ he said.
His little granddaughter peered at us shyly.
‘Go and ask grandmother for the big glasses,’ he said.
The little girl skipped off and came out almost dragging the big copper-coloured binoculars. I knew Hoxo and his granddaughter often sat together on the veranda and peered through the glasses. ‘Guess what I can see,’ Hoxo would say, and she would jump up and down and shout, ‘What! What!’ And he would make up stories and say he could see giraffes and a polar bear, and there, a beautiful snow bird flying over the river towards their house.
Now Hoxo smiled and handed me the glasses.
‘Look, isn’t it beautiful?’ he said, waving his arms across the treetops towards the river.
I held up the old binoculars and peered into the glass. It was a smoky dimness I saw at first. Then I twisted the focus a little and the old lens began to clear and suddenly I saw, yes, a canop
y of trees and a river stretching like an ocean with a trembling sliver of light polishing its flat surface. Then, turning the ring a little bit more, I saw, in the distance, narrow apartment blocks, grubby streets, and bamboo scaffolding. I held my breath, mystified, and as I continued to peer intently my sight travelled the horizon and I saw a blue, smoky evening through a window, and through cement walls and through the hills, suddenly, I saw a view of a bright harbour, and sail boats!
acknowledgements
I am indebted, as always, to the encouragement and support of my family and friends, and the goodwill of people I have met everywhere whose generosity made every meeting a happy occasion of discovery. I am also indebted to Ravi Singh, who persuaded me to write this book and who, undeterred by my unruly shorthand, coerced me into greater clarity.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
This collection published 2006
First published by Penguin Books India 2006
Copyright © Mamang Dai 2006
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket images © Ananth Padmanabhan
ISBN: 978-0-143-06211-0
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
This digital edition published in 2016.
e-ISBN: 978-9-386-05783-9
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Table of Contents
BrandPage
Penguin Books
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
A diary of the world
The boy who fell from the sky
The strange case of kalen, the hunter
The silence of adela and kepi
Pinyar, the widow
Small histories recalled in the season of rain
Songs of the rhapsodist
Travel the road
The heart of the insect
The case of the travelling vessel
Farewell to jules and mona
Daughters of the village
The words of women
A homecoming
River woman
The scent of orange blossom
A matter of time
Daughters of the village
Old man and fires
The road
A portrait of sirsiri of gurdum
The golden chance
On stage
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
