Written in Tears

By Arupa Patangia Kalita

A half-burnt bus passes through a city charring everything alive and beautiful in its wake. The newly wed Arunima watches helplessly as the aftermath of her insurgent brother-in-law's absence engulfs her husband's large, loving family. Ayengla secretly supplies food to the insurgents until, one day, a horrible act of violence changes her life irrevocably. A bold and sensitive witness to her times, Arupa Patangia Kalita is one of the most powerful voices in contemporary Assamese literature. Written in Tears brings together some of her best novellas and stories set against a surreally beautiful landscape torn and scarred by conflict. This is a mighty chronicle of the disturbing and searing history of aggression and hate that has plagued Assam for decades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper Perennial India
• Release date: Jan 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9789353026660

Arupa Patangia Kalita

Arupa Patangia Kalita has been reckoned as one of the mostpowerful voices in contemporary Assamese literature. She isa bold and acutely aware chronicler of her time. A teacher ofEnglish literature, she has also translated Toni Morrison's Th eBluest Eye into Assamese. She has published more than fi ft eenbooks besides numerous works in vernacular magazines andmany of them have been translated into diff erent Indian languagesand English. Th e English translation of her novel Felanee wasshortlisted for the Crossword Book Award. She has received theBharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award (1995), KATHA award (1998),Sahitya Sanskriti Award (2009), Lekhika Samaroh Sahitya award(2011) and most recently, the Sahitya Akademi award(2014). Ranjita Biswas is an award-winning translator of fi ction, ajournalist and travel writer. Her recent books include As theRiver Flows, a collection of Assamese stories published by HarperPerennial, Brahmaputra and the Assam Valley, a coff ee table book,and a collection of retold folktales from the North East for children.

Book preview

Arunima’s Motherland

T

he day had dawned; Arunima was still in a daze. Abinash rolled down the car’s window. Outside, a gentle breeze blew. The perfume they had sprayed all over her last night still clung to her now-crumpled bridal mekhela chador; the lengths of jasmine and tuberose coiled around her hair seemed to perk up again in the morning breeze. Their fragrances mingled with hints of other smells—the turmeric-and-black-gram scrub of her ritual bath, the sandalwood paste, the spanking new jewellery, the streak of oil in the parting of her hair over which her mother-in-law had applied vermilion during the joran ceremony, and the smoky hom, the wedding fire fuelled by ghee and mango-wood. In a heartbeat, she could breathe it all even now.

Over and above all these stood out a heady new scent. When the handsome man who sat next to her in his dhoti-kurta smoothed his silk chador, a few wilted basil leaves and marigold petals from his wedding garland dropped onto her lap. Awash in its fragrance, like a kandhuli fish rippling in a pond and making liquid motifs of rings and bangles, her head grew giddier and her heart beat faster.

Arunima’s eyes were downcast, but she knew Abinash’s gaze was on her. From the time she had climbed into the car with him, after throwing three fistfuls of rice-grain behind her to symbolize that all her debts to her parental home had been paid, his big dark eyes hovered over her constantly, like a bumblebee on a ridge-gourd flower. As she looked up into his smiling eyes, she sensed that like the bumblebee which eventually takes on the colour of the yellow ridge-gourd flower, her man too was overwhelmed by her nearness and the fragrant jumble of vermilion, sandalwood, turmeric, black-gram and rustling new clothes.

He moved closer, and the heady scent grew stronger. A few grains of rice fell from his thick mop of hair onto her lap. Her palms, decorated with jetuka, picked up the grains. She looked at them and smiled shyly. Yesterday, her cousins, nephews and nieces were ready with fistfuls of rice collected from the brass bowl of dunori long before the groom was to arrive. Even the umbrella of the groom’s best man could not save him from the showers of grain that had ushered him into his bride’s home. Now he looked at the grains and laughed, saying, ‘Look, all that rice showered at your doorstep yesterday is still clinging to my hair.’ He bent closer, and the kandhuli fish in her heart swam in the turbulent water, going up and down; the water bubbled with the patterns it created and she felt like an enamoured mermaid. She retired into a world of dreams; there was nothing else in that world—only the bumblebee’s hum in her breast, its body yellow in the tone of the ridge-gourd flowers blooming in the evening, the heady smell of dried basil leaves and marigold, a silk kurta to which the aroma of burnt ghee and mango tree wood clung like a film, a mop of dark hair with a few rice grains, the thick hair of his chest peeping from behind two open buttons of the kurta where the gold chain showed off a little blob of dried turmeric and gram paste … Ah, there was nothing else, only this.

‘Munu!’

She woke up with a start. Her uroni had slipped from her head, the floral-patterned chador was a little awry, one end of the garland entwined on her bun lay on the seat. The garland was in his hand and now he smiled at her, ‘You were asleep, weren’t you? We are almost there. Look, that’s my school; they celebrated a hundred years last year.’ She looked outside; the little town was waking up slowly. Some people were already on the street; a few men were drinking tea on the veranda of a tea-stall. It was slightly chilly on this morning of the month of Ahin. She wrapped the chador round her body. The bus with the groom’s bridal party passed by. Some of the cars in the cavalcade had already arrived. From the windows of the bus, several smiling faces peeped out and shouted out, waving, ‘Bou, Mami, Khuri …’ addressing her, the new bride, according to their relationship with her husband. She giggled; it was as if the bus had left behind a shower of coloured holi powder in the air, it clung to her cheeks, her clothes. He also laughed aloud.

‘Munu, do you want tea?’ She did not answer immediately. He called her again, ‘Munu!’ It was so common a name, her parents, uncles, aunts often called her with this nickname. But now the word from this special person made it sound so meaningful, the two letters hid so many expressions of endearment, she mused. Caught in the web of the hidden meaning in those letters, she felt lost in an unknown jungle.

‘Munu!’ Hearing his voice, the hair on her skin stood up. ‘We have still some time before we reach. I feel like having a cup of tea. Munu, are you still sleepy?’ The faint smell of basil and marigold assailed her.

‘Yes,’ she said. She dropped the uroni from her head. She felt her body warm up.

‘There is a good tea stall close by. They make good samosas, the tea is good too. But there is no place to sit down. We usually have it standing up, but I’ll bring the tea for you in the car,’ he said.

‘Where’s the tea?’ her aunt who had been fast asleep in the front seat woke up and asked.

‘Here we are.’ He told the driver to stop. Her aunt got down from the car and came to her and asked ‘Are you okay? Why don’t you get down from the car as well; you can stretch your limbs a bit.’ Her aunt went across to the rear end of the stall looking for a toilet.

‘Munu, do you want to get down?’ he asked. The shadows of dawn had disappeared by now. Soft mist clung to the trees and grass like pearls. Her husband was telling the shopkeeper to make some tea. She walked to that place gingerly. The stall owner became busy instantly. The big chula was bright with the simmering coal; the gas stove had a pan of milk boiling. As she sipped the tea brewed with cardamom and bay leaf, she exclaimed in appreciation, ‘Excellent tea!’ The stall keeper offered them hot jalebis on a sal leaf. Despite herself, she took two jalebis.

‘Quite good, aren’t they, Munu?’ he asked. She nodded her head. She felt like teasing, ‘Ah, you behave as if you yourself have made it!’ She did not say it of course, but smiled and went to sit in the car. Now her aunt came to sit with her in the back seat next to her following social protocol before reaching the in-laws’ house. He took his handkerchief to wipe the smudged vermilion on her forehead and arranged the locks of her dishevelled hair.

Outside, the world had woken up to a new day. ‘We’ll reach soon, just after passing that turning,’ he said. Then he asked her aunt, ‘After her ghar-gochoka, she will stay at your place, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, she will stay in our house tonight after her ritual entry to the house is over. Now I’ll help Munu to do the man-dhora; she has brought clothes to present to the elders in your family,’ her aunt said as she fixed the veil with a hairclip on her hair so that it would not slip. Then she said, ‘You know, Munu, your in-laws’ house is known as the house of flowers around here. There are so many plants in their garden!’

‘Who does all the gardening?’ Her question was to her husband.

He smiled and replied, ‘You know, Munu, our house is rather ordinary, a traditional Assamese house that my father has built. We have just changed it a bit here and there and painted it.’

But she wanted to hear about the flowers and asked softly, ‘My aunt was talking about the flowers in your compound.’

‘Oh, flowers! It’s an obsession with my father. If he hears about some plant or cut branch of a rare plant available somewhere which is not there in our garden, he brings out the bicycle and sets out in search; he doesn’t bother even if he is not well.’

He laughed aloud. She noticed that he lifted his face and closed his eyes when he laughed like this. She hid her smile of amusement with her handkerchief.

He was saying, ‘My sisters too have inherited his love of flowers. They are mad about it, actually. As soon as winter arrives, even if I have to take a day’s leave from office, I have to accompany them to collect cuttings of dahlia, black and yellow marigold seedlings etcetera. They won’t mind foregoing new clothes if they can buy plants instead.’

He seemed to remember something and smiled. He told them about how they were cheated once by a garrulous vendor; they spent their savings collected meticulously in piggy banks made of hollow pumpkins. The plants turned out to be jungle plants without any use. Munu felt sorry thinking about their money wasted, but felt amused too by the story.

He tried to arrange his dhoti and kurta and addressed her aunt, ‘You know, mahi, this time in anticipation of the Na-bou, the new bride, they started planting in advance; I think some of them are already flowering.’

Soon the car stopped in front of the house. Her aunt led her to the chalpira, a big wooden stool on stands. Wedding songs welcomed her. There were giggles and laughter, kisses on her cheeks from her mother-in-law, earthen lamp in a basket, laddoos of ground rice thrown in four directions indicating four corners of the earth—amidst all this, she was led to her new house through the red brick path lined by brindabon plants. Without lifting her head, she could make out that the compound was full of flowering plants. From behind her veil, she saw yellow and chocolate-coloured marigolds peeping out between the brindabon plant rows. Lifting her head a little, she saw the grass speckled with a carpet of sewali flowers in their white and orange glory; the aroma of white jasmine and kamini-kanchan flowers assailed her nose, in her chador rested a madhoi-malati flower, its petals now closed in the morning light. She was surrounded by young girls and women from the neighbourhood and family. A group of women who were following her were singing a biyanaam:

Sewali flowers will bloom, and falling, will decorate the grass below

Our bride will first go to the shrine to pray

Sewali flowers will bloom, and falling, will decorate the grass

She will first touch the feet of her father-in-law

The sewali will bloom, falling, will decorate the grass below.

As soon as she entered the courtyard, she was led to the shrine in the corner. She walked over the carpet of sewali flowers and kneeled down on the courtyard swabbed neatly with red earth in front of the shrine of wood and bamboo.

Now the song had a strain of sadness, memories of the house left behind by the bride interwoven into it:

O Sita shanti!

I have left behind my mother, my father

And my beloved brother

O Sita shanti!

I have left behind my home where I grew up.

She was now led to the house. While going there, she saw that the veranda was hung with a creeper of beautiful red flowers.

The strains of the biyanaam ‘O Sita shanti’ followed her too, and now she could feel her eyes filling with tears. Scenes of her mother crying her heart out as her daughter was leaving, the house she decorated lovingly with her own embroidered linen, the flowering plants she collected from different sources—all these scenes floated in her mind. She wanted to run there, but she was not able to; her chador’s end was tied to the chador wrapped around the shoulders of this new man in her life. A storm blew over her heart. So she had really left behind her house forever!

She started weeping uncontrollably. Instantly, she was surrounded and consoled—unknown faces, unknown voices, saying, ‘Khuri, please don’t cry,’ ‘Bou! We are all here, don’t worry,’ ‘Mami! If you cry we’ll feel bad,’ and so on.

After sometime, another biyanaam was sung softly, ‘I rested at your house … temporarily … my beloved parents’.

Within three months, Arunima was already an old member of the family. The day she completed the third month of her marriage, they all heard a hullabaloo early in the morning. It was her younger sister-in-law, Baby, who was shouting. It was her habit to go out to the garden with a pair of shears first thing in the morning to chop off the stems of the flowers after they had wilted.

Everybody came out of the house. They found a beehive hanging in the fork of the ou tree, and Baby was jumping up and down, calling everybody: ‘Come, come, Bou, Petai! See, we have a beehive again in our tree; the bees have come back!’

Her mother-in-law smiled. ‘The bees will now build their home,’ she said.

Her father-in-law, whom Baby called ‘Petai’, smiled too and said, ‘The bees are building a hive. It’s a very auspicious sign,’ he said. Looking at Arunima, he said ‘Our house is blessed with a Lakshmi now, we are fortunate.’

The turmoil in the house even woke up their neighbours. Behind their house was a small stream. In front was the main road. To its east was government officer Jayanta Saikia’s shining modern house; on its west was the wood and bamboo cottage with a thatched roof. Ever since she had arrived as a bride she had observed that the relations between these two neighbours and their household were not cordial. In fact, the house in the west was isolated because nobody liked its owners. She had heard from her sister-in-law that the householder was known as a seasoned burglar. These days he was associated with a gang of dacoits. His father had been a good man. She had heard from Baby that their grandfather had himself set him up here by giving him land to build the house because formerly he used to work as a farmer in their paddy fields. He had given the man responsibility to look after the house when he was absent from home on work. The grandfather died, the man too expired. Somehow the son became involved in nefarious activities. But his fortune was turning these days. The rumour was that he was cutting down on his activities as a dacoit and was involved in the some black marketeering activities. Arunima sometimes saw him; that fair-skinned, thin man was said to have murdered quite a few men. However, her in-laws’ family disliked the government official even more than the dacoit. Her father-in-law especially made no bones about his displeasure over mixing with that family. He had been the head master of a school. He thought that the real-time dacoit was the officer. She remembered the officer’s wife’s comment when she came to meet the new bride: ‘Ah! How could you put her in this room? Couldn’t you build at least one additional room?’ In reply, her sister-in-law said something, but she could not hear it in the noise around.

Arunima’s new abode was like the beehive in the ou tree—tidy, orderly, with everything in place. The people in the house who rose with the birds were soon busy with their own work, much like the bees in a hive. Her mother-in-law who entered the kitchen after a bath early in the morning looked meek, but there was a streak of steel behind the timid façade; her father-in-law who did not mind cycling miles to get hold of a rare plant was well-regarded in the community; the two fresh-faced sisters-in-law; the ever joking young brother-in-law Rupam. And her man? The one who lifted his head and closed his eyes when laughing? In her heart the beehive was collecting honey in every nook—precise, neat, without any aberration. This was her beloved new family.

The only person who did not seem to belong to this neat little beehive was her elder brother-in-law. Looking at him, she felt as if a black crow had bitten off a part of the precisely constructed beehive. Without doubt he was intelligent; she understood that immediately after a few exchanges. She noticed that he was in this house, but his mind was somewhere else. He had not noticed the new beehive at all; to him perhaps the bright flowers in the compound were like everyday stars in the sky; what was the big deal after all? The day the newborn kittens in the house died, nobody had the desire to have a proper dinner; he was the only one who had a hearty meal. He was not even aware that the house cat had given birth to two milk-white kittens. He was not aware of anything around the house. The officer’s wife employed a daily labourer to cut a canal to let the dirty water flow into their kitchen garden; early in the morning old and young from Subhas Pally tried to invade their garden wielding sticks with pegs to steal flowers; his mother was suffering from a swollen vein in her left leg; his father had only one year left for retirement and then the whole household would have to depend on the elder son’s income; the elder sister’s marriage had to be arranged within the next two years. But he seemed least concerned about these. It was as if he was a guest in the house. He had passed the Previous exam of the post-graduation course with quite good marks, but he did not appear for the final exam. His father was banking on his becoming a professor. He still regretted making his elder son, her husband, take up a job early as a rain check against the future. Sometimes when the brother-in-law disappeared for two to three days, he locked the door of his room. When his name came up in a discussion everybody seemed to stop talking. One day her mother-in-law had told her while cooking in the kitchen: ‘My dear! I am very worried about him, you know!’

She was going to cut the fish and had rubbed ash on the fish to make it easier to hold, but putting it aside, she cried silently. Looking as restless like the kawoi fish rubbed with salt and kept on the bamboo sieve, she gripped Arunima’s hands even though her palms were full of fish scales and told her, ‘He is chasing a dhanguloi, a will-o’-the wisp. One day that elusive flame will consume him, I tell you.’ Her mother-in-law’s voice had trembled with an unknown fear as she continued, ‘You know, my dear, the day he was born an ominous horned black owl was sitting on the roof. We will have to leave our old home of three generations, his horoscope says …’ Just then he entered his room passing by the veranda of the kitchen. He had returned home after a week. Both of them noticed that one side of his jacket was bulging unusually. Her mother-in-law looked like the fish lying still, dead, and wept silently, saying, ‘Boari, his horoscope says he could be the cause of his mother’s and father’s death.’ As she fried the fish, she said sotto voce, ‘I have done whatever I could. I have offered a gold flower at the naamghar; to the temple I have offered a trident. I always fast on the day of the week of his birth; I always light a lamp in his name at the shrine at home. What else can I do?’

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