Written in Tears Read online

  While passing her the ground mustard for the fish curry, Arunima asked, ‘Ma, didn’t anyone try to make him understand?’

  ‘When the hills call a man, when the water beckons him, or when the magical power of fire dances in the distance, a man loses his reason, my dear! Who will be able to make him understand?’

  ‘Ma, shall I try?’

  ‘His father and siblings couldn’t do that. How can you?’

  ‘Let me ask him what he wants, what he is looking for.’

  ‘What will you ask? He is enamoured of a fire guarding the treasure buried by Yama, the god of death,’ she said. Streams of tears flowed down her shrunken cheeks, ‘I’m afraid for you. Let not that fire engulf you as well.’

  ‘Please don’t talk like that, Ma.’

  He stormed out of the house again. This time it was not the jacket but the airbag slung on his shoulder that bulged at the seams.

  She felt the hair on her skin stand on end. Some unknown fear made her body go cold.

  Yes, sometimes the hills beckon, the water calls, and in the dark night a magical fire beckons. People die in that fire, like moths drawn inevitably to the flame.

  The second son of the house went away with the fat airbag, and it seemed to be for good. At first when the family laid the table, one plate was always kept ready for him, but after sometime, two bowls of curry, fried vegetable and a container with rice and dal were kept so that they could be warmed quickly. After sometime they stopped that too. The blood pressures of both the parents went up; the mother could hardly sleep at night. Whenever there was a sound at night she got up to check; her regular fasts thinned her down.

  Her mother-in-law did not want pregnant Arunima to cook, but her health was not permitting her to do all the cooking. Often when the young sisters-in-law were in college and she tried to finish the chores, her head reeled. After putting a little oil and cold water on her head, she would call Arunima, breathing heavily, ‘My dear, only the fish curry is left. Can you …?’

  That day was 6th or 7th of August. Only Arunima and her mother-in-law were at home. It was cloudy but not raining. For the last two days, it had been like this, sultry without a leaf stirring. The clothes were clammy with sweat and clung to the body. As her mother-in-law was frying the banana flower for the vegetable curry, she felt her head reel. Arunima heard her calling out faintly and put her in bed. Just then a truck full of army men stopped by their gate. She went out to find what it was about. By that time, the soldiers were in the backyard. The men rudely asked the whereabouts of the son who had left home—where was he? Did he come home? and so on. Then they entered the house and swooped into his room like eagles plunging on a prey. They searched the room and threw out everything out—the clothes, papers, notebooks and then, collecting some papers and tying them into a bundle, went away. Now Arunima too put oil and water on her head which she had prepared for her mother-in-law. Her head seemed to reel as well; it felt as if her innards were ready to spill out. She left the curry uncooked and lay down beside her mother-in-law.

  The household had suddenly become very restive and filled with a sense of foreboding. The house had always been organized and disciplined. Now there seemed to be a certain listlessness. The members of the family did not seem to notice how things were lying about or the work remained half done. A sense of dread pervaded the atmosphere in the house. Not only their house, the whole town seemed to be overtaken by fear. The people were sure something was going to happen before the Independence Day on 15th of August. Some people had seen a few of them near the reserve forest; some said they saw a few near the oil pipeline. In front of the army camp, trucks and jeeps were assembling in droves. People also talked about an unusual vehicle; they heard that it was a bullet-proof, anti-mine vehicle. The atmosphere was like a dry grassland—just a little spark, and it would burst into flames. In this dryland, a whispered rumour was passing from mouth to mouth—that the son of this house was seen somewhere around; that he looked quite formidable with a luxurious growth of beard now.

  At home, Arunima’s mother-in-law now had taken to bed permanently with a constant headache and weakness. There was only one month left for her father-in-law’s retirement. The man who had considered the school his life’s main inspiration now ceased going there. He did not dare leave the house. People had seen his son around. If he visited the house, or those who invaded the house from time to time came, what would people at home do—his sick wife, his pregnant daughter-in-law? His eldest son had to go to office, the girls had to go to school and college, the younger son had been sent away to his maternal uncle’s house. So he stayed put, but at home, too, the old man could not find any peace; he went to check the front gate from time to time. Suppose his son returned suddenly from the jungle? So at night, too, he walked up and down the veranda. No, nothing was certain, they could not depend on anything. Who knew if the calm water on the surface hid some unknown sharp thorns underneath? A grinding fear, an oppressive sense of dread, hung over them all.

  Her father-in-law had gone to sleep towards dawn after walking around the veranda almost the whole night. The members of the household fell asleep too. They were also awake all night through; who could sleep if the old man kept pacing up and down, restless like a kawoi fish cut into pieces but still jumping and waiting for life to drain out?

  At first the men could not wake them up even after banging on the door. Arunima woke up first. Newly pregnant, she slept fitfully. She shook her husband awake. When all of them went to the door and saw the four men who were their second son’s friends, they almost croaked with fear. The mud stuck on their heavy boots soiled the floor. They had guns on their shoulders and all of them carried heavy bags in their hands. They wanted to have some rice and curry. By that time, the mother-in-law with her sharp rabbit-like ears woke up and came to see what was happening.

  She almost screamed, ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘He’s fine. He has returned from Kachin twice by now. His rank is much higher than ours.’

  ‘His aim with the gun is admired even by the commander,‘

  ‘Once he had contracted malaria.’

  ‘Now we have to take permission to meet him.’

  They seemed to answer the query altogether.

  ‘Ma, we haven’t eaten for the last two days.’

  ‘Now if you give us some food we’ll eat and go to the hills before the day breaks.’

  ‘I am very hungry, Shalini!’ one of them said, looking at Baby. She left the room in a huff.

  ‘Does he go hungry too?’ her mother-in-law asked as if she were speaking from a sick bed.

  ‘It’s common to go hungry; so what?’

  ‘Sometimes we have to go on empty stomachs, but sometimes we eat very well too.’

  Her mother-in-law went to the kitchen to cook. Arunima and Baby followed too.

  They left after having a full meal before daylight broke. As they walked out of the house, Arunima’s family stared at their departing figures disappearing beyond the shaddock tree.

  Her father-in-law commented softly, ‘All of them grew up together.’

  ‘They have all been beckoned by a terrible fate,’ her mother-in-law said, wiping her eyes.

  ‘Oh, that guy asks me for rice! He hasn’t forgotten the name he had given me—Shalini or Falini, I don’t care. Am I his wife that he calls me like that?’

  Watching her younger sister-in-law let off steam, Arunima was about to smile but stopped as her husband’s desolate voice warned, ‘Baby! Never ever utter their names, never discuss them with anybody.’ Looking at his pale face, Arunima felt her heart swell with sadness. How long it had been since she had last seen him smile? Not only him, the whole household seemed to have forgotten how to smile from the time the second son left the house.

  She looked at the ou tree. Was the beehive still there? Yes, it was there, and it was getting bigger and hanging from the branches. It seemed to sway a little in the breeze.

  Following her eyes, everybody els
e looked at the beehive silently.

  ‘It looks like honey is forming,’ the elder sister-in-law commented.

  ‘Let it be; they go away when we try to collect the honey?’ said her mother-in-law, looking intently at the hive.

  ‘Forget it, let’s not smoke away the bees; so what if we don’t have the honey?’ said Baby. A few minutes ago, her soft face was contorted with anger, hatred and fear, but now it was back to her usual calmness.

  The day was 13th of August. These days the people in the house were not sticking to their usual habit of retiring to bed at ten in the night and getting up at dawn with the crows. In fact, they hardly slept at night; who knew who could visit at night? The feared, unwelcome one? Or his friends? Or those ‘others’? Only towards the dawn they could shut their eyes.

  That day, too, the family had retired after dinner after switching on all the 100 watt lights on the veranda, just like others in the town. The eldest daughter in the family sat with some embroidery work. Her marriage negotiation was almost in the final stage. The boy was a librarian in the college she studied in. He was quite good-looking and his family was well-known too. He had known her for four years and sent the proposal himself. It was Arunima who suggested that she buy the material and start readying the embroidered linen for her trousseau. She loved observing her rather quiet sister-in-law as she played with the skeins of coloured threads; in those many-coloured skeins many of her dreams were woven perhaps! Baby was busy with her books. After sometime she took out the book on flowers. Arunima looked at her. How intently she was reading the book! It was an illustrated book with pictures of many varieties of flowers. The day she got it for Baby, she was so happy that she jumped around like a goat’s kid. Was she reading the book or was she in a dream flying about like a butterfly in her garden? It was already August and soon it would be time to plant seasonal flowers for the winter; she had already marked out the patches—here would be the dahlia flowers, here would be the poppy flowers, there, in that corner, she would plant the marigolds, and then the sweet pea beds and over there the chrysanthemums. Baby consulted the book from time to time.

  Today it was the turn of Arunima’s husband to be on guard duty of the locality. The whole town was under army surveillance. Anything could happen any time. Already in three places in Assam, trains had been derailed by bombs; the radio news and the TV were reporting cases of unrest at different locations. As Abinash was not there at home, both her sisters-in-law came to sleep in her bedroom to give her company. Bandhs had been called by the rebels on both days preceding and following the Independence Day.

  Arunima got up at midnight to go to the toilet. Both the girls woke up instantly.

  ‘What happened, Bou? Are you feeling unwell?’ Baby asked her.

  ‘Bou, do you want to go to the toilet?’ Omi, the elder girl, asked and brought out an umbrella. The bathroom was outside in the courtyard and it was drizzling.

  The sharp ears of the mother-in-law caught the strain of the conversation from the other room and now she called out, ‘Omi, do you hear me? Take your Bou to the bathroom, no use taking her to the toilet outside. If she stumbles in the slippery courtyard it’ll be disastrous.’

  She was grumbling to herself: ‘I’ve told him so many times to build a toilet attached to the bathroom so that my Boari can use it at night, but he says he doesn’t have money. He has money for everything but this! It’s pure laziness; you can’t expect men to understand women’s problems.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Ma, I’m going to the bathroom here,’ Arunima assured her. She felt a bit shy with all the attention to her condition.

  Baby brought a bucket of water to the bathroom. ‘Bou, don’t worry, I’ll pour the water afterwards. Please don’t lift the bucket; Ma will scold me.’

  She heard her father-in-law telling his wife in the next room, ‘You don’t have to tell him. I’ll do it. How much money it will cost anyway? He is a young man, how will he understand these things?’ He cleared his throat and continued, ‘Listen, tomorrow ask Moneswar to sprinkle some sand and stone chips on the courtyard. It’s really slippery now.’

  The rain gathered momentum and the tin roof resounded with its force. She could not hear her in-laws any more. The electricity went off and the room was filled with a thick darkness. Omi got down from the bed immediately and lit the hurricane lamp kept on the right side of the room for such emergencies. A soft yellow light washed over the room, which still bore the fragrance of a new bride. Omi and Baby slept on both sides of her as if protecting her. Outside, rain was lashing and thunderbolts streaked down from time to time; they seemed to enter the room through the glass windows.

  ‘Bou, Dada and others with him must be taking shelter in somebody’s veranda,’ Omi wondered aloud.

  ‘Runjun’s father is also on guard duty today, they must be in their house,’ Baby rejoined, her voice betraying fear.

  ‘Runjun’s mother must be making tea for them,’ Arunima said smiling a little. She felt lonely without him by her side in the bed. He never went anywhere without her, these days more so. He often said he wanted a pretty little girl. Oh, the things he did sometimes! He put his ears on her belly and exclaimed, ‘I seem to hear a sound.’

  She fell into a light sleep. She dreamt of a garden full of flowers, and there were skeins of many colours too, hanging like spider webs in the air. They shone as if dewdrops had fallen on them. A little girl with red ribbon in her hair was running through the flower beds, disturbing them. The colourful threads touched her cheeks—Arunima extended her hands to hold the girl in her arms …

  Suddenly there was a huge sound tearing at their ear drums. She sat up, shocked. Omi and Baby screamed. An unfamiliar red light streamed into the room through the windows and the ventilators. Her in-laws ran to her room; her husband came in too. They watched dumbstruck from the veranda a huge fire to the east. The fire was going up and up. They coughed as the burnt smell invaded the air; a blanket of smoke spread over the town.

  ‘Go, take the torch and unfasten the cows in the shed,’ she heard her mother-in-law’s instruction to her husband without a tremor in her voice. ‘Omi,’ she continued, ‘Go unlatch the bird coop; don’t forget to open the gate of the goats’ shed too.‘

  Arunima ran to the room and tried to catch hold of a suitcase. ‘Boari, don’t worry about your possessions now, think about the child in your womb,’ her mother-in-law said as she looked up and joined her palms together in prayer. ‘What are you looking at?’ she said urgently to the family, ‘Let’s go! Can’t you see the fire is coming this way? We’ll be burnt to death.’

  They left the house hurriedly. The street was full of panic-stricken people. Someone shouted, ‘They have bombed the pipeline.’ Someone else screamed, ‘They haven’t been able to put out the fire; we’ll all die.’ The air was thick with the sound of people shouting, cows mooing in fear and cawing of crows. Arunima was only conscious of Baby holding her one hand and her husband the other.

  She was yet to come out from her dream world of the flower garden, the coloured threads and the little girl with a red bow in her hair. Her eyes smarted with the smoke and the feeling of unreality. A herd of cows joined the scared people aimlessly running around on the road. Freed from the sheds by their owners, they merged into the crowd of people. Arunima could feel the hair on her skin pricking up in fear. What would happen now? Would her dreams end up like these roaming cows losing their homestead? What about Baby’s dream? And Omi’s? And her husband’s? And the little dreams of her parents-in-law? The cows mooed. People were screaming—everywhere dreams were scattering like the cows disoriented without their familiar ropes.

  ‘Where shall we go, Dada?’ Baby’s voice was a whisper in fear.

  ‘Where the fire won’t get us,’ she said in a voice as if coming out in circles from a deep well.

  ‘What a big fire!’ Omi sounded as if her voice was slowly getting buried deep somewhere.

  ‘Where shall I go with my children?’ her father-in-law’
s voice was cracking as if he were weeping. He was looking back behind him every few minutes.

  ‘Deuta! Please hurry up. The other people have gone much ahead,’ her husband’s voice crumbled.

  ‘Dada, where will we go?’ Baby cried out.

  ‘Baby, however big a fire, it can never burn down the whole world,’ Arunima said almost in soliloquy.

  Her eyes were again hypnotized by the images of coloured threads spread in a spider web, vibrant flowers and a little girl with a red ribbon in her hair.

  She almost shouted, ‘Ma, please walk faster!’

  Birds fly out in the morning but return to their nests in the evening; animals too do not forget their own sheds and habitat. Eventually, the people too started returning to their abandoned houses.

  Her father-in-law stood stunned, holding on to the gate.

  ‘What’s happened, Deuta?’ Baby asked, smiling.

  ‘My house, my compound, they are still here …’ he uttered the words slowly, his voice trembling.

  ‘Come, Deuta!’ Arunima said as she led him to the house.

  She made a cup of tea, asked him to lie down and then with her mother-in-law, Omi and Baby went to the kitchen garden at the back to check its state. The cows had returned too and now they were munching on the grass in the shed. The new-born calf was suckling forcefully on the mother’s udders. Everything seemed to be the same; the only difference was that black particles floating in the air from burning objects covered everything. The green of the grass and leaves in the trees were lost. They all went to the bank of the pond. She screamed loudly and hearing her, the others ran to see what had frightened her. Now Baby, Omi, even her elderly mother-in-law screamed. The pond was white with the underbellies of dead fish. Hearing them, her father-in-law and husband came out running. They were silenced by the sight of the white, dead fish. Even Rupam who had come from the hostel that day came running, the suitcase still in hand. Looking at the floating fish, he sat down in shock on the ground. He had collected the Rohu fishlings from the fishery himself. The fish were getting big, weighing one to two kilograms by now.