Fiction by Prabin Moktan.

The Watch
The moon loosened itself from the clouds and a soft light shone down on Min.A scar very precise and geometric ran underneath his left eye to disappear into a cross-stitch of other smaller scars that were concealed by a mop of jet-black hair.

Min and his two friends were on a mission. The three of them quiet, confident and almost feline stole into the darkness and positioned themselves below the broad leaves of the banana trees that flanked the dirt road leading to the cluster of huts. Slowly they began to work at the trunk of one of the trees, laboriously sawing away the wet tissues with a khukri. They worked quietly; the only sound was the muffled noise of the sawing and the patter of the waters of the dhara falling on the flat stones below. It wasn’t long before the upper half of the trunk was almost severed, held precariously by a few strands of stubborn fibre. They stopped and waited for the heavy drunken footfalls of Kaka to come dragging down the dark road. Presently the stooping figure of Kaka drunk as usual staggered along, swaying from one end of that narrow road to another. He had barely reached the dhara when Min and his friends let go of that unstable plant to make it fall at Kaka’s feet with a giant thud that disturbed the night and sent all the dogs of the hamlet nearby into a medley of very terrified barks. Kaka jumped out of his drunken stupor and in that sudden burst of uncoordinated, uncontrolled movement landed right into the slime pool with its cold sticky mess of soap water and mosquito larvae. Min and his friends jumped out of the darkness desperately trying to control their laughter. They pulled Kaka out of the mess and put him under the dhara to give that reluctant individual now reduced to a complaining bundle of flailing arms and gibberish, a swift and very undignified bath. They then carried that soft white naked mass of puffy flesh to his house and deposited it in his room so that he could regain both composure and dignity in the familiarity of his piss-stained double bed.

* * * * * * * * *
The dirty yellow light of a thibri danced in the draught that squeezed its way in from the chinks on the door and sent giant flickering shadows on the soot stained walls. The room was bare except for an almirah in the corner that bore the burden of giant vessels of dull aluminum, flat plates and heavy yellow goblets of bronze. Fit Bahadur Bal, his face furrowed by the million wrinkles of his eighty years, looked derisively at Min with his wet beady eyes. Min crouched on his haunches, his gangly legs almost brushing his ears. He dozed in the darkness, that brief episode at the dhara seemed almost a universe away. Fit Bahadur Bal poked at the fire, picked out a burning coal with a pair of tongs and lighted a bidi. His cheek- a bag of loose flesh pulsated with the rhythm of his pull. Satisfied that the bidi was burning he turned his wet beady eyes and sneering lips on Min who was now a somnolent heap in the semi darkness of that dank hut.

‘You good for nothing son of so and so what do you think you were doing to that poor old wretch?’ he growled. Min did not speak but regarded his father with a vacant, disinterested gaze.

‘Can’t we eat now?’ was all he could say.

A shrill sound emanating from one of the inner rooms of the house interrupted that rather reluctant interchange. A woman in a hysterical, plaintive voice began her invocations to an obscure pantheon of family gods and goddesses. The song was accompanied by the pulsating, careless beats of a madal. The cry reached a crescendo and then slowly gave way to a fading series of chants that continued for a long time till Fit Bahadur Bal brought her ardor to an end by randomly kicking at her assortment of devotional paraphernalia. Phoolmaya Bal nee Magar jolted out of her séance gathered around her, her lotas, her abirs and whatever shard of dignity that her husband’s sudden, unwelcome intrusion permitted and quietly made her way to the kitchen. She bore it with a quiet air of suffering, as if such disturbances were routine. She seemed reconciled to the hindrance that was posed to her spirituality by the demands made on a housewife by the household. An anemic woman, she was much younger than her husband. Even that pale light did not fail to reveal in patches of light and shade, the malnourished form of her miserable womanhood.

She lifted the pots out of the fireplace and raked out the glowing coals, breaking the glowing ends of the firewood to make some coals. In that small pile of smoky embers she put in a tomato. Min took out the plates and as if by routine got down to the silauto to grind a bunch of green chilies and salt. He then pulled out the tomato and blew the ashes and skinned it. That amorphous ball of naked pulp was ground to a paste along with the salt and the chilies and scooped out of the ancient stone into one of the bronze goblets. Min licked the remaining achar off his fingers. His mother meanwhile began serving a huge chunk of rice on to her husband’s plate. The dal was not yet warm, so Fit Bahadur Bal his patience once again running out, went out into the darkness to urinate noisily in the courtyard.

Later when Fit Bahadur Bal had retreated to his room to snore the night away, the mother and son found some freedom to engage in some prosaic banter.

Min reasoned with his mother,’……… but the forces may come here any moment and all that kaka can do is come home drunk late at night raising hell. This time we have taught him a lesson he will know better than to come home making all that noise.’ Inside, in one of the rooms Kaka ranted in a delirium concocted by that potent mix of raxi and rage. As the night grew quieter this sound transformed to an almost plaintive wail embellished in places with the most colorful invectives that Kaka could recall in his sleep. Min almost at the end of his tether shouted in muted rage,’ Should I go and snuff out the life of that son of a banned, the way he makes that noise attracting the attention of the forces…’

Indeed the times were already very hard. The air was charged with revolution. Boys disappeared for days and came back very sure shot individuals smoking joints, cracking comradely jokes and laughing in the darkness. They learned to make bombs, fashion guns out of pipes, dress in a military way and generally put on an attitude that was quietly menacing in their newfound militancy. The leaders, invariably cocksure, ex-army men, belted out speeches. The supreme leader himself from the army and a poet to boot invoked upon all the obscure gods and goddesses that seemed to reside in the hillsides and the ravines and all the trees and the forests. There was a call for rising up in arms. There was a sense of terrible foreboding for some and for others it was the promise of good things to come.

And late in the night when the village slept its uneasy sleep, feet pattered up and down, sometimes running sometimes being chased; even the dogs understanding the urgency of the times kept quiet. Bombs burst as night fell and with each blast the wicks of the kerosene lamps were lowered until they were all put out and the village plunged into a quiet, eerie darkness only made darker by the whispers and the empty houses.
And that was when they started eating their enemies.

In the beginning it was a fried ear or a small dab of blood nibbled with the bravado of drunken militant. But later they began to roast the heart and the liver. The cosmetic cannibalism of the earlier times was replaced by an all out savagery. For across the river and in the other villages there were others who listened to the other leaders saluted the other flags and wanted other futures for their children. There arose great tension and killings as one side tried to match the other in viciousness

It was in the light of these hostilities between the forces that Min had sought to discipline Kaka. For his village caught in the cross roads of the conflict, silence both real and ideological was the only guarantee for survival. Noise meant provocation that invited wrath. There were off course others sins to pay for. The one that all regretted was the night when they torched the village across the river, burning not just flags and pamphlets but also cows. Bovine beauties roasted in the fires of a hate that they could not rationalize.

There was a patter on the tin roof. There was a time when this was a welcome sound, for it reminded one of the benevolence of company construction, of how thatch had given way to the permanence of corrugated sheets made of high gauge steel. Today it was just noise and as the patter multiplied to the full ferocity of a torrential downpour so did the urgency in Min to run to his post. Min ran in with the lantern leaving behind his mother in the darkness with her utensils that still had to be done. Min felt for the bottle under the bed and catching hold of it downed a quick swig of a potent brew that set fire to his throat and sent a warm glow of life almost like a second wind in his weary sinews. He then set the wick of the lantern low and slunk out into the darkness to join Lakpa at their post on the hilltop. The rain beat down faster and thicker and even the familiar tea bushes seemed heavy and dark and forbidding.

By the time he reached the top the rain had dwindled, blown away by a sudden wind. Lakpa was dozing, his head lowered over the dying remains of charcoal that had turned a faint gray in the night. Their post was a weighing shed, its open sides surrounded in green polythene to keep out the wind.

‘Lakpa’, whispered Min and nudged at him gently to wake him up.

Lakpa woke up with a start and instinctively reached for the khukri slung at his waist. When he realized that it was Min he started to warm his hands over the dead coals. Min picked up a piece of bamboo and blew at the coals from its hollow till he got a few splinters glowing again. They took turns at emptying their lungs till they got a satisfactory flame going. The rain had stopped by now.

‘I saw Goray blowing flames out of his mouth a while ago ‘, said Lakpa.

‘That bastard he is a chaura, a boksha ‘, said Min,’someday I am going to give him a proper hiding with nettle and water and then he will forget all the evil spirits he plays around with to ruin our village’.

“You know they suspect even Rumtek to be a traitor now. They are almost sure now that it was he who was behind the disappearance of Parbat and his brother. They never got even a whiff of their bodies, must have eaten them, those bastards’.

‘But that raid was too bad. Shouldn’t have burnt all those cows. We will pay for it’, said Min.

The wind had also died down and the two made small talk by the fire to keep them awake till their relief arrived.
Below at the village Fit Bahadur Bal snored and farted and stretched, leaving precious little space for the coughing bundle of sleeplessness that was his wife.

Inside, Kaka tossed and turned, dehydrated by the raxi whose potency was slowly giving way to the nagging irritation of a hangover that would last till the next quenching of his throat.

Min and his friend continued their watch. The enemies could come anytime and their village had to be warned.