Echo In the Hill: An Anthology

By Sangboi K. Gangte

He looked into the darkness and tried to soak in the words. His apprehension was apparent, yet he continued his smoke, seeking in it the sedative for the ache of all the questions to which he seemed to possess no answers. echo in the hill is an appealingly simple collection of bittersweet short stories which offers a mirror into the rustic and homely sphere of countryside we gradually have left behind. In ‘Inheritance,’ Hengo Bhai contemplates the realities of his roots that he knew had never existed; a kid comes home for vacation to discover his parent’s deteriorating marriage in ‘A Syrup Story’; while Siem’s infatuation for a college senior pushes him further into self introspection and soul searching. Each of the stories aptly tries to capture and explore themes of love, faith, hatred, regret, identity, misfortune, freedom, among other things - almost all set in the backdrop of the picturesque disorder of Lamka Churachandpur, Manipur.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Point Six Technologies Pvt Ltd
• Release date: Nov 28, 2018
• ISBN: 9789388081993

Sangboi K. Gangte

Sangboi K. Gangte is a 23 year old from Churachandpur, Manipur. When he’s not writing or eating, he’s performing the drudgery of preparing for civil service examination which he hopes to crack someday. He’s a graduate from St. Stephens College, Delhi and did his schooling from JMS, Balrampur, Uttar Pradesh and Mt. Carmel, New Delhi. Meaningful conversations over coffee and long evening walks are among other things he enjoy.

Book preview

PREFACE

It feels like it was just yesterday, me sitting atop a bed somewhere in Nagaland House in Kolkata with my laptop, contemplation whether or not the start writing again, something I’d refrained from doing for long. And surely when I did, ‘It’s a small world after all’ was the immediate result, perhaps vaguely inspired by events of recent happenings in my own life then. Months later, having enough stories penned, I realized mere contemplation had given way to an absolute endeavour to raise a perception and way of looking at life I’d want the reader reading this anthology to perceive and look. Now years later, moving past countless rejections, past offers that were exorbitantly beyond my reach and liking, and when hope of getting it published stood at the bleakest, the book finally getting to see the light of the day, inadequately and ineptly as written as it might be, is a pleasant reward, come what may.

I don’t write as much as I’d like myself to do, but whenever it is that I find myself toying with the idea of scribing stories or thoughts, I often get devoured completely and almost instantaneously, and only do I overcome such entrapment on finishing the said work, not leaving it midway, when I’m rest assured my competence and capability has been stretched to its fullest and that I possibly can do no better. Literature, as people would naturally assume, is about flair and style so much so that readers are made to sweat and toil before finally deciphering the words and sentences, and such writers and their literature hope to be taken seriously. But for someone as amateur and lacking as me guided solely not by knack but rather penchant, my approach, despite wanting to be taken seriously, has been reasonably simple : it was about writing things which I otherwise couldn’t say or express, notwithstanding how plain and simple it got, and in the words of Ruskin Bond himself, ‘And those who think this is simple should try it for themselves.’

The stories and its characters, some inspired, some fabricated, is intended mainly for the entertainment of young adults, though I’d be more than happy to know of men and women not ignoring it for the same reason, for it was partially a part of my endeavour to remind them all of what they themselves were once, of what kind of years they had moved past, and how reading through these stories would in some way or the other rekindle what was lost within them.

Sangboi K. Gangte

Churachandpur, Manipur, 2018

THE HOUSE ON

BETHLEHEM STREET

I can make out, bring into memory every little facet of this ancient dwelling at Bethlehem Veng, with its vaulted roof that seem corroded with several holes through which are penetrating beams of slanting sunlight, its delicately embroidered bamboo walls adhered by blend of mud and wild straws which now are just about crumbling; the lingering eeriness of its empty rooms and sandy residues of its cemented flooring on which I am now standing, sadly, had remained mere echoes of my distant yesteryear. But I remember the time when uproars of my younger self running around the house resonated through its walls, eloping from a grandmother wanting to bathe me, completely inebriated with the chase that followed. I remember the time I turned ten, celebrating the occurrence in grandparent’s ever enjoyable presence in one of the smaller rooms here, partnered by some couple of my loite - ethnic term for friends. I remember the time spent growing up within the limited confines of this house, having no real existence independently from my grandparents. My world, as then, was delineated in these few things, yet I, nonetheless, loved it completely, perhaps more than anything else.

In those days I was young, too young, in fact, to deliberate over the implications behind occurrences that kept occurring in life right in front of my eyes; somewhat ignorantly, somehow mysteriously unreeling itself before my finite wisdom. The whys and hows of life never seriously occurred until I was old enough to derive meaning associated with it.

As far as my memory could tell me anything about myself, I remember being born in Churachandpur, Manipur but brought up faraway in Delhi where my parents and I originally lived. Early years of what seemed like a happily married couple was ultimately, rather untimely followed by the unavoidable. I don’t know what precisely it was that started, but soon I saw it happening. My parents marriage had failed, failed miserably like no other marriage had failed in the history of failed marriages. With time they could hardly speak to each, let alone bear the inevitable inconvenience of being inhabitants of a shared housing. They eventually broke up, bequeathing behind the wearisome task of rearing me unto the experience that grandparents were.

Truth be told, their break up, for me, was strangely relieving, for I had suffered my own dues of misery being the single most common and greatest link between them two. My father, who continued living in Delhi and whose presence I felt only during summer or winter holidays when he’d return home, was a lecturer by day and writer by night, while my mother, whose absence I severely felt the most, chose to go back to her ways of old life, spending days and nights in the company of her equally ageing parents-my other grandparents.

I was studying in second standard at Don Bosco. Our math teacher, Mr. Kampu, although friendly and gentle a person as one could possibly be, was someone I completely feared for who he exactly was – a teacher who taught the subject I detested more than anything. I hated mathematics, loathed the obligation of remembering numbers and tables which my memory was incapable of retaining. He had once written on the blackboard a set of unsolved multiplications and asked us to jot them down in our notebook, solve them individually, and take them to him for correction or whipping if necessary. I copied them one by one, in the slowest way I could, breaking in between to sharpen my pencil which in fact needed no sharpening. I, of course, was wasting time. I don’t know why but for some unexplained reason maths period always seemed longer than it had to be, as if time naturally would come to halt, except it’d start moving again during other period, especially during English. It was my favourite period and, I think, the shortest.

The boy in the seat next to me was the topper in class, but had notoriety for being too pompous, too arrogant and too indifferent to the qualms of mediocre students like myself. I asked for help, but my request went almost unnoticed.

‘Only one sum…please,’ I begged, in submissive whisper.

He then looked at me with puckered bow, judging me in all his pompousness probably and got back busy decoding the equations, concealing it condescendingly from my continuous peering while doing so. As one would’ve rightly guessed, he earned the teacher’s admiration while I, like many, his whipping. It wasn’t the first time though, and definitely was not the last.

The first thing I did on arriving home that day was to go out and play football in a field nearby, distracting myself only the way I knew how from the fact that I was frequently being undermined in an area I knew I was never going to excel at. If mathematics was a poison, thank heavens football was its antidote.

*******

All too young I was to appreciate the perks of leading life the way I did, of years surrounded with and by rustic simplicity that was Churachandpur, of times revelled in a world of wishful dreaming and thoughts, of a life that was long way away from superfluous intricateness a metropolitan typically like Delhi possessed and offered, of a boyhood entirely organized by my grandparents.

Every morning they both woke at six, just after the earliest light of dawn had dawned and roosters had crowed. The first thing in the day, under the brisk morning light, my grandfather, wrapped under a thin shawl, would stroll outside the house along its fringes, inspecting the nearby environs like he did the day before and the day before that, as if he preferred and rejoiced in doing the same thing thousands of times over and not be worn out by doing something new, something unknown, which in itself, given his age, was unnecessary. Grandmother, on the other hand, spent her early mornings praying to God at the Local Baptist Church located at the edge of the street. Her days were never complete in the absence of these formal prayers where she would pray with hands folded, motionlessly sitting on her knees, offering her thoughts and deeds to God, neither seeking judgment nor justifying them. Even with maturing years, she never, not even once, doubted the realism behind prayers. And what often came back as assurance was that she was not alone, but in the presence of something invisible, something beyond humanly reach, which she presumed was not God himself but something he could only send.

Consequentially, religion was a part of my growing: the blind belief that an omnipresent, omnipotent, divine power existed, that one should avoid being annihilated by it by accepting and believing it to be the creator, the alpha and omega, the master of our destiny. It was these values and principles that moulded me into the person I eventually became. And years later, I still found myself close to this God as I was then, when, on her persistence, would accompany grandmother for Sunday morning fellowship and attend the subsequent Sunday schools at the Synod Church located at Ell Street.

My life then, a cocoon as it was, was undoubtedly made enjoyable more by Kimboi’s presence, whose much kindness and selflessness reminded me of an elder sister I never actually had but desired. She was a girl of fifteen, who had no sense of family, or of being related to anyone she could call the same. She was not quiet my age when grandparents took upon themselves the assurance of offering her food, clothes and a roof over her head. They did so with the belief that she would become a hand supporting them in their final years. Her life had begun then, in doing household chores and assisting grandmother in whatever she did, be it watering the plants in the garden, cleaning up the house, drawing water from the well and then scrubbing unclean clothes, preparing food for us or the pigs that we reared. For her it was a world circumscribed by the boundaries of our little home in Bethlehem Veng, but that was not her complain. In fact, she remained grateful to God and my grandparents for the life she had, notwithstanding how confined it might had been.

‘Do not take more that what you cannot finish,’ grandfather would say every time I’d sit on the chair with a plate filled with food. ‘Wasting food is a bad habit. You should learn not to procure such habits.’

I’d slightly shake my head in compliance. Under the watchful eyes of him and grandmother who was seated beside, little did I began eating, she prevented me right away. ‘How ungrateful!’ she uttered in disbelief. ‘Did I not tell you what to do every time you’re about to eat?’

I looked at her with slight embarrassment as if asking what. ‘You say grace before a meal. Remember?’

So I sat before the table with head bowed, folded hands and thanked God in mind for the food, for the moment, for everything he had done. And then once over, I swallowed a mouthful after another, seizing grandfather’s concern every time I did. ‘Slowly, what’s the hurry?’

‘School!’ I said.

‘That can wait. Eat your food slowly, or else you’ll choke on it.’

After morning meals the next thing was to pass through Kimboi’s jurisdiction, who, having finished her own meal, would briskly go through my bag, scanning it book after book, making sure I had securely packed everything I was to need for the day at school. And when I’d emerge out from the room with bag full of books cling onto me, grandfather would be comfortably reclining on a foldaway wooden chair placed outside on the front veranda under the morning sun, skimming through the black and white pages of LAMKA POST via the oblong shaped photo-chromic specs that he often had on.

Every time just before I left he’d stop me for last minute lectures, as a sort of general philosophy. ‘Learn your lessons properly. Pay attention to what teachers say, and always sit at the front. If you don’t heed to what is being taught, you’ll never understand. And if you don’t understand, you’ll end up nowhere in life.’

I’d shake my head in agreement from time to time, hoping he’d return to reading and let me go. And then finally he’d end by saying rather assertively, ‘You are to become a civil servant one day. Study hard. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘Yes, Pu…’ I’d say and quickly, in long steps, run out of the house, though not precisely understanding what ‘civil servant’ meant.

The hours spent at school were long and tiring, coupled with the surprise tests our teachers were so devoted on taking. Tests on Tuesdays became a commonplace of our school life, and thus became my least favourite day among the remaining four. Saturdays were off, and thus was by far my favourite. But on other days there was nothing else but solely the rules and regulations of the school that were customarily taught to us as norms of living. Here knowledge had to be absorbed rather than learned. A single teacher to teach a class of more than forty roguish, daydreaming, and ignorant kids was by no means an even handed covenant, where one could offer to explain every other thing to us, one by one. While the curriculums were unexciting and perplexing, one thing that got me through my days there were my equally dispassionate classmates, with some of whom I often sat at the extreme last bench, isolated in our own thoughts and talks about almost everything on earth but our lessons.

The moment I’d come back from school, I would fling off my bag, put on home clothes and be gone, sprung off to the streets where a gang awaited my appearance. And from then onwards up till the sun had disappeared, oblivious to the casual observers and motorcycles that came and went, we’d gamble away our evenings playing football, hide and seek, marbles and sometimes ran along the streets with air guns and war cries and roars. A day’s play would typically come to halt when Kimboi would appear at the gate unannounced, and from there would shout, ‘Come home before it gets darker.’

And once the perfunctory goodbyes for the day were said and done, Kimboi would drag me all the way towards the well, draw a bucket full of water and