small histories recalled in the season of rain

In dreams, my people say, they see the rain mother sitting on the treetops, laughing in the mist.

Her silver ornaments clink as she rides the wind, brandishing her sword.

Every time she twirls her skirt, the storm clouds edged with black rush up to cover her.

‘We’re close to the season of floods,’ I said to Mona. ‘I should take you back to Gurdum.’

Every day I saw clouds dropping lower and lower like ominous waves. The hills were blue, their outline rimmed in black, and the trees were still. Soon, the first fat beads of water would tear the giant leaves of the wild yam. Then fierce, hissing rain would cover the land like the sea.

At such times it seems the heavens brush very close to the earth. The wild fruit born of this union is of unknown family, bittersweet, pungent, often misshapen and hardy, or swollen to an unnatural size. Hidden by mountains and covered by a charcoal sky the forest and rivers become battlefields ferocious with the struggle for survival. Astonishing plants with gills spring up in clumps. Delicate green shoots unfurl into monstrous fans and umbrellas with stinging hair. The wild berry covers itself with ants. Insects like miniature armadillos emerge out of nowhere and move about briskly until a flick of the broom transforms them into crumpled balls protected with green headlights.

It rains during the day, it rains all night. It can rain non-stop for sixty-two days at a time. Not a peep of sunshine. Not a breath of wind. Every summer the tangled undergrowth clinging to the hills is swept away by the downpour, causing landslides that cut off all communication and links.

‘What is wrong with these hills?’ the exasperated villagers ask.

‘They’re under a spell of diarrhoea!’

‘What weather! What a godforsaken place!’

Mona, however, seemed quite content. ‘It’s strange, but I feel drawn to this place,’ she said. ‘Can’t we stay longer?’

Perhaps it was the spirit of the place, I don’t know, but every time I came back I noticed that the village had this quality of absorbing visitors into a forgotten newness of things. It was a feeling of how things might have been, and a sudden revelation of why it was not so anymore. This was particularly the case in the company of men like Hoxo.

But it wasn’t as if change hadn’t touched our land, or had come only recently. The first white priests, surveyors and soldiers had begun arriving in the region almost two hundred years ago, in the early 1800s. Since then, people from other worlds had come and gone, though the only records of their journeys are the stories that the older men and women remember.

It was already a confused and haunted time of change when Hoxo was found. He pointed to a corner of the house where the old basket in which his father had brought him home hung on the wall. It was a man’s carrying basket, like a rucksack. It used to be the only thing a man took with him on any journey, and contained little more than a knife, a small parcel of salt and a piece of flint. This one, partially hidden by clothes and old swords, was smoke-blackened but still sturdy, and the original weave of the cane was polished with age but unbroken. I imagined Hoxo as a baby being carried through the forest in it. How could a baby fit in there? Had he slept all the way? Didn’t he cry? Where had he come from?

‘He fell from the sky,’ Rakut’s father used to say. People believed him because he was old, and because he had been with Hoxo’s father in the lands from where the latter had returned with the boy on his back.

The villagers at that time had only a vague idea of the places the two men had been to. They knew that far in the east, where there were big caves in an evergreen forest, a road was being carved out of the mountainside. Reports reaching the villages said that the migluns were digging a tunnel right across the world. They wanted help in this work and a labour corps was being recruited from the various hill tribes.

‘It was the duty of the village elders to persuade able-bodied men from our villages to join the work force,’ Hoxo explained. ‘The general feeling at the time was that the elders had been brainwashed by the migluns: What! Ask our own boys to go off into an unknown land and dig earth and die like worms? Everyone had heard the fearful stories of war. The migluns were fighting the Japans, and fires raged on earth and in the sky.’

It was said that there were different types of migluns, and that some of them had wings. Those from a big country called America shouted a lot and they were more frightening than the original migluns who were the Bee-ree-tiss. But when it came to building the great road for their armies to march against the enemy, they were one.

The men recruited from the hills were given rations and bedding but the work was the work of the devil. Those who went and returned said the forest and the skies were like nothing they had seen before. The migluns were terrifying in their energy and determination. In the lashing rain and the wet earth that buried men up to their waists they drove elephants to cross rivers, remove logs and trample the jungle. The elephants strained and quivered to the shouts of their mahouts, slipped, struggled, knelt, struggled on, and many of the poor animals lost their footing and hurtled off the mountainside bellowing like mythical beasts with their eyes rolled up skywards. It was unimaginable, what the migluns were trying to achieve. In the swampy valleys men died like flies, shivering with fever and fear. Sometimes, a miglun died too, wheezing and panting as he struggled like an animal possessed through the foetid mud.

Hoxo’s father had initially opposed the recruitment and most people were on his side. Resentment had flared up against Rakut’s father, who, as the local interpreter for the British sahibs, had been instructed that at least three men from his village be sent to work on the road. However, in the end both the men had gone off together to represent their village, which even at that time had fewer young men than women. They were gone for three years. When they returned, Rakut’s father was wearing hunting boots and a camouflage outfit. The first thing he did on entering the village was to salute and smiling broadly, shout, ‘A! B! C!’ It was a happy day and the villagers turned out in a swarm to welcome them home. There was also great excitement about the baby in the basket, but Hoxo’s father said nothing. When the villagers asked Rakut’s father, he only said, ‘It is a child. There was great noise and fire in the sky and then our son fell to earth.’

Even years later when those days were remembered, Rakut’s father would talk animatedly of the thunder of cargo trucks and bulldozers, the shouts of men and how the jungle burst into flame as the mountain tops were blown off and the labour force struggled to claw their way through the rubble and drag the wretched road across the mutilated hills.

From what I had read in the library, I knew that this was the famous and mysterious Stillwell road that wound through Asia like a giant serpent, meandering more than a thousand miles across three countries. It started in Ledo in Assam, cut through our territory to the pass over the Patkoi hills into Myanmar, and then into the Chinese province of Yunan. The road followed the alignment of the ancient trails used by Marco Polo and Ghenghis Khan. It went up mountains, plunged into gorges and spanned ten rivers and hundreds of streams. No other road in the world had taken as high a toll of human lives as this one; it had been dubbed ‘a-man-a-mile road’.

‘You know, there is a wish-fulfilling stupa and a temple of the golden eye on this route,’ I told Mona. I even began to wonder if I could not get her to organize a trek into these lands, just so I could tag along. The road was still there, I knew, and it was not very far from where we lived. One only had to cross the big river and drive for a day to reach it. The road would take us past the Lake of No Return, where so many airmen had lost their lives flying the ‘Himalayan Hump’ during the war. It would take us over remote and serene pine mountains to the teeming cities of prosperity all across Southeast Asia.

Hoxo, however, said that the road I was thinking about was now quite obsolete, it would take me nowhere. ‘It is a forgotten path. There is only jungle and mosquitoes,’ he said. ‘There are no villages. It is a no man’s land and the only people living there now are the men with guns.’ He meant the terrorist camps and roving bands of insurgents who were reported to be using this route as a safe corridor between India and Myanmar. I wondered how he knew all this. But Hoxo was like that. He never offered anything conclusive, but suddenly, like he had done now, he made you realize that he was aware of everything and thinking deeply about what you had said.

I told Mona this. He was a mystery, I said, and sometimes I wished he would tell me things he knew and how he knew them. Where had he come from, for instance. Mona surprised me by saying, ‘But why should you want to understand everything? Stranger things have happened in the world. Let it be.’

Jules arrived. He came in a hired jeep, marvelling at his own enterprise in having found this deep bowl of a place in the hills where a few lights glowed in the night like stray fireflies. It was in none of the maps he had consulted. But then, Jules knew his way around even in the jungles of the Amazon, from where he emerged with data to address conferences in the great cities of the West.

He had brought tents and canned food with him, and he whisked Mona away to a patch of hard-packed white sand by the river. The best way to enjoy nature was to become part of it, he said. So I spent a couple of evenings with them in their camp. The driftwood fire was a small point of light in the darkness. We could not see the river but we heard it like a familiar and permanent song echoing in our heads. It was cool and still. Jules uncorked his special wine and we ate pâté and cheese and vinegary olives out of a can.

‘This is paradise,’ Jules said. ‘We should do this more often.’

Mona stretched out and glowed by the fire.

When we went into the village to meet Hoxo the following morning, Jules spoke about how important it was to work out grass-root strategies for forest management. He said he did not buy all the talk about innocent, guileless forest dwellers. He was concerned that we didn’t value what we had and that our people seemed too eager to sell out everything to anyone who came with a little money and with designs to decimate our forests.

Hoxo then told us that once upon a time there had existed a green and virgin land under a gracious and just rule. The old chieftains received obeisance because they were akin to the gods. No one stole or killed and any man who could find his way into the compound of a chief’s dwelling was automatically protected from all danger. In a dispute the chiefs would look up to the sky, consult the sacred fire, speak to the spirits and there would be justice. Food was sown, harvested, stored and dispensed fairly. It was a clan. Fathers and sons followed in the footsteps of their ancestors.

But the big trees were brought down. The spirits of our ancestors who dwelt in these high and secret places fell with the trees. They were homeless, and so they went away. And everything had changed since then. The canopy of shelter and tradition had fallen. The wind and the sun burned our faces. We saw a strange new glimmer in the distance. Our footsteps led us down unknown paths. We wanted more. Suddenly we knew more. There was more beyond our poor huts and cracked hearths where we once eased our dreams with murmured words and a good draft of home brew.

Hoxo was calm as he said this. He agreed with Jules about what was happening, but life, he said, had its own pace. Everything, good and bad, was inevitable. ‘We need courage and faith in the face of change. That is all we can do.’

Jules shook his head. But he was thinking.

Out of the corner of my eye now, I saw Rakut making his way towards us. A crowd had gathered to meet Jules, as they always did to meet any newcomer. The village kids ran back and forth brandishing their catapults and making meaningless sounds just to attract attention. Rakut was walking up with his sideways gait and swinging one arm vigorously while the other was clasped stiffly to his side.

‘Hmm, ahem!’ he said, and pulled out a bottle of rum from under his arm. Then he said, ‘Hello brother! Hello friend!’ He said this to everyone, of course, and the women and widows and aging crones all laughed. Jules laughed too. He was relaxed and friendly. He shared the rum with Rakut and Hoxo and ate everything that was offered to him.

‘I think Jules is a hit,’ I said to Mona.

‘Oh, him! He can get on with anyone. Send him anywhere and he’ll be at home. He’s like that,’ she laughed, in love with him all over again.

The sun had set and all the stars were out, drawing anyone who would look up into dizzying thoughts of infinity and the permanence of things. Watching Hoxo and Rakut talking to Jules, I felt that they, too, would get on with anyone, no matter where in the world you put them. They were like that.