Legends of Pensam Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE LEGENDS OF PENSAM

  A journalist and former civil servant, Mamang Dai was born in Pasighat in the East Siang district of Arunachal Pradesh. Her published works include Arunachal Pradesh: The Hidden Land and River Poems.

  Mamang Dai lives in Itanagar.

  the legends of pensam

  mamang dai

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  For my parents

  Odi & Matin Dai

  In our language, the language of the Adis, the word ‘pensam’ means ‘in-between’. It suggests the middle, or middle ground, but it may also be interpreted as the hidden spaces of the heart where a secret garden grows. It is the small world where anything can happen and everything can be lived; where the narrow boat that we call life sails along somehow in calm or stormy weather; where the life of a man can be measured in the span of a song.

  contents

  author’s note

  prologue

  a diary of the world

  the boy who fell from the sky

  the strange case of kalen, the hunter

  the silence of adela and kepi

  pinyar, the widow

  small histories recalled in the season of rain

  songs of the rhapsodist

  travel the road

  the heart of the insect

  the case of the travelling vessel

  farewell to jules and mona

  daughters of the village

  the words of women

  a homecoming

  river woman

  the scent of orange blossom

  rites of love

  a matter of time

  old man and fires

  the road

  a portrait of sirsiri of gurdum

  the golden chance

  on stage

  acknowledgements

  author’s note

  Arunachal Pradesh in North East India, bordering Bhutan, China and Myanmar, is one of the largest states of the country, and also one of its greenest. It is the homeland of twenty-six tribes with over one hundred and ten sub-clans, each with a different language or dialect. Part of the Eastern Himalaya, the land is criss-crossed by rivers and high mountain ranges running north-south that divide it into five river valleys. The mightiest of its rivers is the Siang, known as the Tsangpo in Tibet, and the Siang valley, stretching northwards to the Tsangpo gorge where the river enters India, is the territory of the Adi tribe who are the subject of this book.

  Like the majority of tribes inhabiting the central belt of Arunachal, the Adis practice an animistic faith that is woven around forest ecology and co-existence with the natural world. There are few road links in their territory. Travel to the distant villages still entails cumbersome river crossings, elephant rides, and long foot marches through dense forest or over high mountain passes.

  But the old villagers who walk miles every day say: ‘When you look at the land you forget your aches and pains.’ And it really is a beautiful landscape. So far, isolation has been the best protection for the pristine forests and rich bio-diversity of Arunachal Pradesh. Though a number of tourist circuits have been opened since 1992, the state still maintains entry formalities of an Inner Line and Restricted Areas Permit for visitors.

  prologue

  The helicopter ploughs through the clouds. For a moment it lifts, then seems to take a nose dive as a current of air hits it. I wrap my arms around the empty seat in front of me.

  There are six of us in the ageing, struggling machine and everyone is silent or pretending to be asleep. Below us, the big river is calm, frozen between shoals and sandy flats as if locked in a trance.

  All the river systems, in fact, are calm; streams of glass spread across the earth like lost pieces of a shining ocean. The first line of hills beyond the plains of Assam is a strip of dark green jungle. Here, the narrowest, deepest ravines have wedged themselves in between each twisted and pitted hill. Higher mountains loom ahead, where the earth has been pushed up and folded into a knot of jagged peaks.

  Soon, the flat lands disappear. There are no more roads. We gather speed. The clouds race with us. They race past and ahead of us, drawing us into the hidden valleys of my home.

  I was born in the mountains, in a village where boys kicked rocks around pretending at football. Every time a vehicle drove up to the schoolhouse, there was great excitement, and we flew over the warm stones, thundering down to the edge of the field where we skidded to a halt and stood trembling with curiosity under the old jackfruit tree.

  The years circled us as if in a dream. Very few strangers crossed our paths. Every evening we sat on the bamboo veranda, my clan sisters and brothers and I, and gazed at the stars whose names we made up according to their configurations. The root of light was the plough, I remember. Or was it the lady who competed with the gods to weave a tapestry? Now it matters little, except that in those days when we looked at the stars we felt that they were very close and that their fire shone directly on us.

  Back then, the village heaved with life, and I expected a great welling up of revelations, a web of magic through which we would step lightly like glittering spirits crowned with speech and thought. The years stretched before us like a singing forest; we were always poised to spread wings and float through the cool bamboo.

  We make no comparisons now. The river cuts through our land as before in its long journey to the sea. In spring the red flowers still blaze against our sky. But the old people now, the few of them alive, turn slowly in their sleep as the fires burn down to a heap of ash. In the middle of the night a bird swoops low and calls out in a wild, staccato note. The thatch rustles. The bamboo creaks. The darkness is full of breath and sighs.

  The rain comes gently, bathing the night. And sometimes, behind the curtain of rain, I see names and faces rising up like obscure jewels, shining again in their singular paths and destinies.

  a diary of the world

  We have long journeys in our blood

  the boy who fell from the sky

  When Hoxo first opened his eyes to the world, he saw green. A green wall of trees and bamboo, and a green waterfall that sprayed his cheek and washed the giant fern that seemed to be waving to him.

  They were moving very fast. He was being carried on the back of a man whom he was later to call his father. All he knew at this moment was that he was strapped in a basket that was hard and scented with sweat. He could feel the strength of the man; with his head pressed against the wide back, he listened to the sound of a big heart thumping as they trotted silently through an unknown land.

  Hoxo would never recall the events before that journey through the great trees. When he spoke about the world, about men and forests, he thought he could taste salt and blood and sense the terror of free fall, but he was not certain why this was so. In his dreams he saw a blazing sun that spun earthwards and exploded in a burst of red fire, blinding him with blood and ash, and that was why, he thought, maybe, his eyes had been shut tight, as though he preferred the darkness to that terrifying light.

  The colour green always soothed him. It was the colour of escape and solitude. He could not tell what it was that he had escaped or when, nor could he understand his need to trek into the forest sometimes to be alone.

  When they reached the house on the hill, a woman had run out to greet them. He instantly recognized her as someone kind and good. She was tall and young and her face was vivid with love and anxiety.

  ‘Oh, my!’ she had said. ‘A baby boy!’

  She lifted him out of the basket. Even today Hoxo could not remember any happiness greater than the moment of that touch he had known more than half a century ago.

  Hoxo immediately sensed there were no other children in the house. He had no idea how ol
d he was, no one said anything, and no one ever asked him if he loved his father more or his mother, like he heard all the other children being asked. When he joined school, the children there stared at him. No one greeted him and he remembered his own tentative smile full of hope and eagerness. Rakut was his first friend.

  ‘Here, catch!’ Rakut threw him a stone that arced through the distance between them. It was a flat river-stone that Rakut had specially chosen for them to play with. Theirs was a wonderful friendship. When Hoxo’s mother made rice cakes and called his friends, Rakut would be the first to arrive, grinning like an idiot, while Hoxo could hardly eat anything because he was so happy and full of pride for his parents’ generosity. Once, when his father brought home a red squirrel, Hoxo ran all the way to Rakut’s house shouting at the top of his voice for him to come and see it. Every day the boys found something new. Every day they explored the hills further and further away from the village, and every day, for many years, they climbed to the flat top of their favourite hill and flung themselves down on the open ground just talking and speaking their thoughts to the trees, the cane bushes and the sharp summer light.

  One day Hoxo ran all the way again to call Rakut to come and hear something strange. The two boys tiptoed around the house and lifted themselves at full stretch to peer through the cracks in the bamboo posts.

  ‘It was real, I tell you,’ Hoxo’s father was saying. ‘I heard a splash and when I turned I saw the edge of the river lifted up and the waters falling off the back of this long shining fish… or snake…whatever it was! Then immediately it was gone. But I saw it, I tell you!’

  ‘Tah! How can it be!’

  ‘I tell you, I saw it!’

  ‘What did it look like?’

  ‘I thought I saw a head with horns.’

  ‘What!’

  Everyone present knew the story of Biribik, the water serpent. No one, for generations now, remembered the name of the first person who had seen it, but the event was fixed in their collective memory. It had happened on a night of heavy rain when a fisherman was alone with his nets by the river. He heard a rushing sound as the waters parted and then suddenly, when he looked up at the tree he was sheltering under, he saw a serpent coiled up in the branches looking down at him with ancient eyes. What shocked him the most was the fact that the serpent had a head with horns. The fisherman ran for his life, all the way back to the village, but as everyone could have predicted he never recovered from the effects of that terrible vision. Within a year, he had died of a wasting illness.

  Anyone studying the signs could understand that something unnatural was bound to happen again, now that Hoxo’s father had seen the serpent. In these small clearings in the middle of the forest, people have premonitions. Women dream dreams. Babies are born who grow up unnaturally fast, like deer or lion cubs. Infant mortality is high. Old women still braid threads of vine and pray for safe passage.

  So no one was surprised when Hoxo’s father was killed in a hunting accident shortly afterwards. A tragedy was expected. Ever since the arrival of firearms into these hills, hunting had become a passion. Suddenly, on any given day, a man would stand up, stretch himself, pick up his gun and walk off into the forest. Many of the hunters disappeared for days, huddled in a machan or perched, alert, on a broad branch. In the forests beyond the village where the hunters fanned out to go their separate ways, Hoxo’s father was mistaken for prey. Deer? Bear? The distraught man who shot him could not say. He only remembered a movement, a dark shape that he swore was definitely not human. He had heard a piercing scream of shock and rage afterwards and had rushed headlong into the thorny undergrowth to find his friend shot through the tender point just below the jaw. He was spilling blood and his eyes were staring wide.

  ‘Hai…I am killed!’ He was crouched low and his gun was pointing into the ground. It was propped against his shoulder because his right hand had also been shot away.

  His friend shouted and cried, running through the forest like a madman. ‘Help me! Help me!’ The cries sent a shudder through the village. Everyone rushed out. ‘Help me carry his body!’

  They worked all night, lifting the dead man and carrying him through the forest, dragging the body, pushing it, cursing and crying, sliding down the hill over the wet leaves and oozing mud. By the time they reached the village the men were torn and bruised and splattered with mud and the blood of the dead man. It was a frightening sight. Hoxo’s mother ran out screaming. Dazed out of sleep, the young Hoxo had a vision of her flashing through the air like an incandescent flame. He understood everything, and the secret of love revealed itself to him in that one instant when he saw her embrace the inert body and press her cheek against the shattered head.

  Then she said, ‘Cover him. Carry him in.’

  The punishment for killing a man is death, unless a meeting can be called immediately and the aggrieved party is convinced that the matter is negotiable. In this case the poor friend was banished to live like an animal in the forest for a whole month. His closest kin could take him cooked food but there were so many taboos on the type of food he could eat that it was simpler to let him fend for himself. No one opposed the exile, least of all the man whose fate it had been to mistake a man for prey.

  The one thing no one could explain at the time, or at any time later, was the small fish that was found in the dead man’s shirt pocket. It was slippery and mashed and the scales stuck to his skin even when they ripped open the shirt and tried to wipe away the blood. Maybe it was a fish he had caught in one of the small streams. Maybe it was something he was bringing back for Hoxo. Or maybe it was the spirit manifestation of something else. Who could tell about these things?

  And so it was. The death of Lutor, famous chief of the Ida clan, father of the boy who fell from the sky, was mourned far and wide. And Hoxo’s mother became one more widow in the village where so many young women had lost their men in hunting accidents.

  the strange case of kalen, the hunter

  On one of my visits to the big city, I mentioned this village in passing to my friend Mona. She is a magazine editor, always looking for an interesting story, and she decided immediately to come with me to Gurdum town, where I lived. From there we would travel together to the village of widows.

  It was early summer when Mona and I arrived in Duyang, which is also my late mother’s ancestral village. We climbed up the hill to meet Hoxo and his family. Hoxo’s house was as I remembered it, always full of people. There were his two sons and their wives—and now, their five children—as well as friends, brothers, sisters and relatives who came and went at any time, just to talk, gossip or to sit on the veranda sipping black tea and rice beer. Day or night, the fire was always burning and the enormous pots and pans with heavy lids were full of food or contained enough leftovers to feed another ten people. There were always visitors who appeared out of the blue, dusty and full of stories about the journey: the rutted roads, the boat crossing, the thinning jungle.

  When we had climbed the hill to the house, a woman came out to greet us. It was Losi. My late mother had told me stories about Hoxo and her, and how they had met and finally got married—the boy who fell to earth, and the girl born to the river woman. Everything about Losi’s manner, her smile, her eyes, suggested warmth and innocence. Then Hoxo’s mother emerged, squinting in the strong sun, and like Hoxo when he first saw her, and like me, Mona too fell under her spell. She was very old now but her mind was sharp and alert. She was quiet when I told her about Mona’s interest in the stories of the village. Then she nodded and said that if this was what our guest wanted, maybe we would be interested in hearing a story her grandson Bodak had to tell.

  In this way, we heard the strange tale of Kalen.

  It had happened quite recently and was still spoken of only in hushed tones. Kalen had been ill with malaria for weeks. Every time the fever seized him he would cry out in rage and shout that he would find a medicine to beat the fever, just you wait. Then he would huddle up in bed, shaking and
sweating until the fever eased and he looked around him with calm eyes again. One morning a group of men decided to set out on a hunt. For many days they had been staking out an area where the deer came to feed on the wild fruit that littered the forest floor. It was a mild summer morning, and Kalen started out with them saying that he needed the exercise and the fresh air.

  The men were following the rules of the kiruk, a chosen number beating an area to drive out animals while others waited in ambush, guns at the ready. Towards noon the men saw a group of screeching, chattering monkeys shaking the branches of the trees across the stream that marked the boundaries of their hunting area. It was an unusual sight, as if the monkeys, moving upstream, jumping from tree to tree, were waving and calling out to the men. The hunting party decided to fan out and follow the arboreal band. It was not clear exactly who had decided to go or stay, but Bodak recalled that everyone had begun moving upstream along the right bank almost at the same moment. So he was quite surprised to see Kalen suddenly emerge from the undergrowth of the opposite bank, where the monkeys were.

  Bodak started back, but Kalen signalled for him to be quiet. Bodak noticed that Kalen was wearing his old fur cap— maybe because he had only just recovered from the fits of fever—and that he had a peculiar, challenging sort of smile, as if he dared anyone to try and stop him. Bodak guessed that he must be thinking of how monkey meat was good for the blood and how it was believed to cure malaria. So he said nothing at the time but urged Kalen to cross the stream quickly so that they could move up together. Kalen motioned for him to go ahead, indicating that he would be right behind him. Shortly after this, the bright afternoon suddenly faded. The band of monkeys disappeared. And Bodak felt the jungle starting to steam with buried warmth as an oppressive silence settled on it.

  Every member of that ill-fated group said later that they had all been astonished when a thunderclap broke the silence and rain began to pelt down. The skies had been clear only a moment ago! As they ran for cover they heard a loud shriek and immediately knew that something unfortunate had befallen them. Bodak remembered that he had shouted loudly, calling out to everyone to be careful and to disclose their positions. Everyone was there except Kalen. The man called Loma stood stock still with his gun and said that he had just fired at a monkey on the opposite bank. Without a word Bodak rushed back down the stream and all the men ran after him. As they splashed across madly, they saw Kalen slumped against a tree. It was raining heavily and blood was pouring out of him. His body had been ripped almost to shreds by the bullet that had exploded inside him. The men did what they could, which was not much, and while one runner was sent to inform the village, the others lifted Kalen and headed towards the cane bridge further downstream so that they could bring the body home in a somewhat intact condition.