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  At first, a single grove of bamboos flowered; it must have done so under the cover of the night. Then like a forest fire, spreading fast and furious, it started flowering everywhere on the hills, wherever there was a grove, turning Aizawl the colour of gold, announcing its impending death. Damn! Damn! Damn! People cursed in anxiety. Damn!

  Rita was reflecting over the skirmish she had had with Andrews the previous night—just another episode from the long battle. The fight was always over the house they owned in their homeland, in a beautiful neighbourhood of simple people. It had been sixteen years since they had left the place. Rita always wanted to go back, and settle down in that lovely house, and live the way civilized people lived, talking their mother tongue, eating the rice of their choice, visiting friends and family, and living the life of a priest’s wife. Andrews had given the house out on rent and now he was having trouble getting his tenants to leave. His brother-in-law was fighting the case for him, and though he had had to go three or four times to make the necessary arrangements, he hadn’t taken Rita with him, not even once. She hadn’t seen her family since her wedding, after they settled in Aizawl. Andrews had finally won the case and the previous night, while he was having supper he had said, ‘Now we can sell the house.’

  Shaly marvelled at the speed with which the spatula flew from Rita Mama’s hand in the kitchen and landed with a big thud in the porridge bowl in front of Andrews Papa. Even Rita was taken aback; she couldn’t believe the force with which it happened.

  Maybe a desire for the ancestral roots, maybe hatred for the forest? Andrews pondered over his wife’s interest in that house where she had lived not more than seven or eight months. Then he said, ‘God is great, no harm done,’ and left the table without finishing his supper.

  But on Sunday, when Rita returned from Mass and saw the flowered bamboos in the backyard, she forgot the skirmishes and called out proudly, ‘Hey look! Even our bamboos have flowered.’

  Andrews, who was watering the vegetable garden, was shocked to hear this. Fear was etched on his face. Half-asleep, Shaly came out of the house to see the bamboos in bloom.

  In the forest, mautam had started its dance of death. Mautam means death of the bamboos. Inviting the rodents, luring them with the bittersweet smell of their fruit, the bamboo groves were getting ready for their final call. This, the forest knew, would be a magnificent spectacle, splendorous golden beauty to chill the bones, a dazzling vision—one unlikely to be forgotten. But after that, what would be left in that forest? The forest, it was sure, would soon be wreathed in the burnt-out smoke rising from the pyre. What was meant to happen would happen for sure.

  Shaly parked her cycle on the roadside and lifted her eyes to the splendid benevolence of the golden bamboos. It was spectacular, more glorious than what she had imagined, in fact, her imagination came nowhere near. Bamboos were swaying in the wind, but with a speed that exceeded their usual rhythm. The strange scent of flowers made her uneasy, slightly nauseated, but still she couldn’t take her eyes off the sight. Suddenly, her eyes caught something funny, something incredibly out of tune with the contours of the vision. ‘Not the bamboo fruit,’ she said to herself. They were there on almost all the clusters. ‘Oh my God!’ She squinted hard to see better and saw what resembled black balls of yarn hanging on the stems, or rather, wriggling along. It was not easy to get to the bamboos on her cycle, the ground was not even, and the loose stones could be treacherous. Nor could she risk leaving the cycle unattended—it might get stolen. She decided to walk. Cautiously she walked, rolling the cycle gently beside her, watchful not to step on the dog droppings. She knew some pigs must be moving around not so far away, and decided to face it. She felt that something was holding her back, some sort of uneasiness, a hollowness, making her break out in a cold sweat. She moved forward.

  Now she could see the balls of yarn clearly. For a second, the day appeared like a pitch-black night at home: rats ran all over, scurrying down the entrance hall, the corridors, and the bedrooms, making purple blotches on the skin, and sitting on bedsteads. For a second, she saw herself inside a rat hole. She looked up. Each inflorescence carried three or four rats. Gripped by fear, she looked down, ‘God, help!’

  In the bamboo groves, on the ground, over the faded and yellow leaves and the bamboo rice falling down from the blossoms, rats ran amok, hundreds of them, all in a wild rush. When something cold moved around her feet, or rather, started to climb up, she looked down—was it fear creeping up, or a snake crawling over her to devour the rats? The ground beneath was packed with thousands of rats. Pitch-black! She saw their white, chisel-like incisors laughing at her; she thought they would run all over her, and forgot how to ride back home.

  At first she tried to run while grabbing the handlebar, but then she left her cycle behind and took to her heels. Chaotically, she thought, the rats were more frightened than her, that they would be moving faster than her. In this gregarious flowering of the botanical enigma, rats, bamboo and humans were all caught on the wheel of suffering.

  Though the old generation had experienced it before, though their nerves were still not free of psychosis, though they knew their paddy and crops would be eaten after the bamboo fruit, they hoped that mautam would never return; it would never happen again, it was an adolescent nightmare, people and rats running amok, famine and death ruling over them, digging holes for both human beings and rats. But, like pestilent birds, they came in large groups and attacked the bhupui vegetation. They needed something to gnaw at every other second, to keep their incisors from curling up, touching their hard palates, becoming useless. Peasants, with their children crying after them, ran for help, famine chasing them. It seemed the gods were playful or sleepy, watching people run as if in a video game. The thai harvest of the months of September and October had already been destroyed by wild boars, pushing the farmers into pits of despair. The smell of swine then marked the death of dreams; it had been hardly a month and now like dessert after a sumptuous meal came the rats. Were there any gods in the sky? Through the newspapers and television channels, the whole of India came to know, the whole of the world came to know, how the little black rats pirouetted through the jungles of Mizoram, to the rhythms of death.

  Kamala was on her way back from her office. She strained to concentrate on the radio news aired by AIR Bangalore, to deviate her attention from the rumble of the motor roars around her. She was tired, as usual, after a busy day in the office, and she couldn’t concentrate. She wanted to be immersed in a bathtub that was full to the brim, or float over the ancestral pond, dead and supine—either sleep or die.

  The radio announced:

  ‘The gregarious flowering of bamboo that takes place every forty-eight years has brought famine and death yet again to Mizoram, the only place on earth where history is intertwined with such an event. The hills are witnessing the phenomenon of bamboo flowering and the subsequent increase in the rat population, which has devastated the crops, resulting in famine. This also caused an outbreak of various pests, insects and other organisms. Guarding the fields for several nights, the farmers become exhausted and suffer from irreparable health issues. There is no food to buy and the external supply is not enough. The government and NGOs have attempted many remedial measures. In 1959, when the bamboo flowered, it brought with it famine, migration and twenty years of insurgency against India, finally leading to the creation of Mizoram in 1987. Now it is 2007, and once again . . .’

  Kamala parked her car in the garage. She was late. Inside, she found her children sleeping in their room, and she heard her maid snoring, Madhavan was not home yet; these days he came only once or twice a week. Bamboo and rats were not her issues. Farmers were dying all over India. The newspapers said ‘suicide’, ‘famine’, ‘debts’, but it was clear that they were being massacred brutally by the policies of governments in some way or other. It had become everyday news, nothing remarkable, just something readers sighed over for two seconds.

  On the table, Kamala chec
ked the growth of the lucky feng shui bamboo in the glass vase. Well, it had grown some inches, though it was hardly noticeable. The vendor had said it would bring her abundance, prosperity. Wait and see, what the bamboo brings, she thought. After a quick shower, she went to her room where the weariness and boredom of the big double bed yawned at her, making a gruelling grinder turn restlessly in her head, a grave hope in her bosom. As she sank into the soft down pillows, she said to herself, ‘Wait till the bamboos bring me someone.’

  In the forest, plague showed its white incisors and laughed at people. In the nights, farmers waited with rat traps. What the government had given them in plenty was poison—not for them, for the rats. To give away, experiment with and exchange, poison was the best thing on earth.

  They killed the rats that got caught at the end of their long trap poles and smashed their tiny heads to death, for the farmers were not just hungry but vengeful and rat was the only meat available—at times, the only food apart from the leftovers of what the rodents had eaten. The children of the farmers watched the massacre with rapturous energy, for they were hungry and their bones had started protruding from their skins recently. The children threaded roasted or fried rats onto large skewers and waited on their doorsteps or pavements to sell them, their now prominent ribs proud under their naked skin. The prospect of commerce gleamed in their eyes, and part of their childhood games lingered in their business as they wrapped up burnt meat in mahur leaves with professional expertise. The rhythm of hunger, the percussions of poverty and the cabaret of death waited their turn backstage.

  ‘The wrath of gods,’ said the old men and women who didn’t die. They muttered in despair, ‘It is the wrath of some god that cuts the roots of man’s desires, his crops and his food. His wrath is raining over us in the form of rats. Black Death.’ Sometimes, to their surprise, it also rained food packets and clothes from the skies; they looked with wonder at the spaceships in which the gods flew.

  Youths turned into insurgent groups, schools were closed down; no offices, no entertainment, no food. Filthy and hopeless, they looked at each other. ‘Something has to be done,’ they chanted like a non-stop prayer. They were worried about their dear departed. People were dying like termite flies.

  Rita couldn’t believe how those wonderful blossoms had paved the way for death squares. Andrews too was at a loss. At one point he thought of abandoning the place, but later, as always he decided to stay back, to face the inevitable. They didn’t open their doors and windows to the streets that reeked of death, they were frightened that they would catch the same disease. A cry or a wail always lingered in the air, and even the foliage gave off the smoke of death. Even in an emergency Rita was not willing to step out of the house. Shaly, on the other hand, was not ready to step in. She wanted to spend her time with the miserable people; she was not afraid of rats or death.

  ‘Beware! You will die of plague, you rotten, disobedient girl!’ Rita, poisoned by fear, warned Shaly every so often.

  Each curse weighed heavily on Andrews’s mind, he grew weak. He thought Shaly had the same beautiful face of Joseph, her father. ‘Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault . . .’ he whispered in his mind, looking at Shaly. ‘This girl, this daughter, who was fated to be raised in this forest, has taught me life,’ he said to himself. ‘I have sinned through my own fault. I should have taken better care of this poor child.’ He imagined Shaly going to church with her true mother in their Sunday finery, and sighed in distress—the course of events cannot be altered by the fantasies of the mind.

  Death hid inside the houses, under the bed sheets, over the porridge pots. No piper at the gates of dawn came that way. People in distress set the bamboo groves on fire. They had been their means of livelihood some months back. The rats that devoured fire lay dead and flat among the half-burnt stalks, and children came running to search for flesh. The smell of death suffocated the patients waiting in the primary health centres and the single local hospital; they twisted and turned in their own faeces and urine. Collecting everything they could, people migrated down the hills, leaving their houses to the rats that multiplied. Church bells rang continuously; priests were busy praying for the dead and for those who remained. They asked the stricken multitude to trust in God, but people no longer believed in Him. They shouted at the church, they rebuked and retorted with an anger that was strange. It has always been like this. Plague was a big poison that made a beast out of a man—history had witnessed this, many times. People blamed each other; Jews, missionaries, foreigners, beggars and prostitutes were stoned to death. ‘It is all happening because of them!’ the masses shouted. ‘They are the reason . . . Eliminate the reason!’ People spent whatever was left on black magic. Missionaries, standing in the middle of the rats that rained from the heavens, shouted, ‘Love your neighbour, like you love yourself.’

  The man who had shaved Mimi’s head was dead this morning; Mimi had climbed down the hills with her family the other day.

  Shaly gave the children money, not because she was hungry or she wanted to help them, nor out of hatred and fear, but because she felt she was a part of the hills, like the other Mizos, or rather, she felt the hills were in her veins, a part of her. Death squares were frozen; no one bothered to shed tears any longer. If you lose your mother, you better be the one to weep, we have something else to do. They went to the forest in search of food and returned with the bitter frown lines of self-mockery. They should have been there crying beside the corpse of the poor woman.

  When Shaly reached home, she placed the packet of mahur leaves on the table. She didn’t say what it was or from where she had bought it. When Rita made black coffee and they all sat down to drink it, Shaly opened the packet. The coffee cup fell out of Andrews’s grip while Rita looked at Shaly as if she had seen a ghost and made the sign of the cross.

  That night, Andrews said to Rita, ‘Get ready; it is time to return to our land.’

  Rita couldn’t believe what she had heard. ‘Thank God! Thank the plague!’ she said thoughtlessly. In fact she expressed her gratitude to all the rats and all the bamboo of the world; she forgot the dead children on the pavement, the dead cattle in the fields. Visibly, a smile, a halo spread around her. She remembered each and every house in the street, in the neighbourhood, the cross-shaped roads of her adolescence, her dreams, her roots.

  ‘It’s a good thing that I couldn’t sell the house. Collect the keys from my brother-in-law. I want both of you to live in peace, do you understand, without making any problems for each other.’

  ‘What do you mean by that? Aren’t you coming?’

  ‘No, I can’t come. I can’t leave my school, my mission.’

  ‘In that case, we will not go anywhere either. Let us all rot in here.’

  ‘I am afraid things are getting out of hand. Didn’t you see what she brought home today? This isn’t safe for Shaly any more. Please go.’

  On a piece of paper he laid out a detailed plan for their journey, where to get down, how to travel and about the people they should meet once they reached. He said they were lucky as the railway was going to ban the migration of people in three days’ time. He was not sure of the news, but he thought the sooner, the better. Both of them had bank accounts; he handed over their passbooks and other necessary papers to her.

  ‘There is plenty of money, you will be thankful to this forest for this at least,’ he sighed.

  Rita couldn’t control her sobs—she couldn’t understand what was happening. In the train they sat like two abandoned, broken shadows. Leaving the death squares behind, the train sped forth.

  Andrews could feel the thud of his heart when he said, ‘O God, please save my child. She is the spitting image of her father, blessed with her mother’s benevolent curves.’

  Four or five black rodents dropped to the ground from the ceiling of the school building.

  20

  Like Kamala and Madhavan, Shaly couldn’t sleep that night. Even their mattresses ha
d been packed and taken away by the movers and packers. The house looked bleak and desolate. The spaces had lost their meaning; the dining room, where they used to sit around the table on their respective chairs, where they always had a jar of cookies on the top of the side table, was no longer a dining room. There was nothing in the house except the floor tiles and the bare walls and the bedrooms and the bathrooms. It hurt to see a kitchen without a gas stove, utensils and jars. Now she remembered how dear that refrigerator was, how, even when it had nothing inside it, she opened it many times a day, as if the opening itself had given her the pleasure of it. Just like the body, there should be something in a house to open and close. The vacant, empty spaces upset her. Why should I accompany them, she asked herself, what will be my role in such a house? What if I say outright that I am not going? Friends, Kamala used to say, would turn down everything in the last minute. If you go seeking help, most often money, they would say, ‘If only you’d come just half an hour earlier’ and that settled it.

  I can’t abandon Kamala, she thought, particularly in this condition. I have to fix her appointment with the doctor once again and make her undergo the treatments. I have responsibilities, in a way; I have responsibilities to the children too. I cannot let her go all by herself. The fire she is devouring now is the consequence of my mistakes.

  There had been a huge peepal tree in front of their house in Aizawl. Rita Mama used to say that the tree was miles away from their home, back when they started the school. The school expanded in length, width and height faster than they had imagined. It took only four or five years for the school building to grow from having six rooms to eighteen. When Mimi had been attacked there were only seven rooms, that too in pathetic shape.

  In no time the school was big enough to accommodate a lot of students, and teachers came from all parts of India in search of work. Keralites were, of course, given preference. The teachers came with their families, and they enrolled their children in the same school; their children in turn learned the language and the bamboo pole dance of the Mizos. They sang English songs in church, learned to walk on high, pointed heels and wear lipstick, some of the women even cut their hair short and some men, funny though they appeared, started wearing ties—they did everything that they were ashamed of doing in their motherland. The forest made them fashionable.