Marvellous stories of the soil retold

Author Image: 

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Karishma Attari

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By Janice Pariat [4]

Rs 399

Storytelling draws its water from a well that runs deeper than fiction. Janice Pariat’s debut collection of short stories, Boats on Land, does not feel ingenious and inventive as much as it rings true of stories of the soil.

A native of Shillong, Pariat’s writing resonates with the folklore of at least two generations before her. Her collection of 15 stories stretches from the 1850s to the present day and offers a palimpsest of Assam in perpetual transition.
She invokes compelling voices; they are believable in their mystical awe, political preoccupations, teenage ennui, marketplace tittle-tattle, schoolyard prejudices, or minority despair. The key to understanding them, however, lies in the opening quote by Alejo Carpentier that warns that this will be an engagement with the “marvellous”.
The marvellous is everywhere in the opening stories to the collection — stories like At Kut Madan, or Dream of the Golden Mahseer walk hand in hand with legend and superstition. In Echo Words, “Ancient charms and mantras” raised by “an old Khasi family, the Rynjahs, still unconverted to the light of Christianity”, have the power to cause untold harm to errant husbands and mysterious Europeans. The narrator is an unassuming, reluctant gossipmonger so his awe at the end unsettles the reader. “…Even now I still hear them (the drumbeats) sometimes, throbbing in the darkness, steady as a heartbeat, old as time.”
The colonial soldiers are dealt with more harshly in A Waterfall of Horses. The oldest dating story set in the 1850s, revolves around a “smudge” of 50 huts named Pomreng.
When the curse of the “Ka ktien” is invoked it is enough to dispatch the unit of “bilati men” or British soldiers. It is characteristic of Pariat’s poignant endings that the narrator, then a child, observes that the fallout of dark magic is often deadlier than the malady it cures.
Somewhere towards the middle of the collection the importance of folk stories recedes in the face of the unrest of the 1980s. Curfews are a letdown for the local Khasi teenagers who are kept away from their “immigrant” friends as seen in the story Laitlum. A 17-year-old Khasi girl, Grace, shuns curfew with her Chinese musician boyfriend Chris. “It (Laitlum) means where the hills are set free,” Grace explains but she cannot recall the story behind it. “Folk stories are rubbish.” She remarks, “Look at what’s going on… Is there time for folktales when people are shooting each other across their own town roads?” Chris replies, “Perhaps that’s when they need them the most.” The story moves on into sudden tragedy although Pariat’s touch is characteristically light. The narrator is Grace’s sister, no longer a fresh-eyed adolescent by the time the story ends. “Unlike the hills and mist, for us freedom doesn’t last a lifetime; it comes and goes on unexpected afternoons.”
The motif of freedom echoes in the story titled 19/87 through the narrative of a lottery-foretelling, kite-flying Muslim tailor whose doors rattle with stones thrown by regional party workers. It matters little to anyone but him that he’s lived here nearly all his life. In Hong Kong, a couple of childhood sweethearts who have grown apart strike up a conversation with a Chinese proprietor only to be firmly turned away as they pry into his family. The immigrant experience in Assam remains a cankerous paw even after the civil unrest has settled.
The later stories are current. The forests of Assam give way to a barren modernity and Shillong loses its picture-book sweetness. Nevertheless, the land retains some of its mysteries. In A Discovery of Flight a fog rises in a Sohra winter to blur the line between the path of men and the flight of birds in the valley. The young man’s disappearance off a steep road is reported in quasi-journalistic style that suggests that neither “suicide” nor “accident” fully explain the tragedy. Pariat is skilled in the power of suggestion. “Perhaps if someone else had searched Ezra’s room in Sohra they might have found a pencil sketch of a bird tucked into a book on the table. But Mama Kes and Kong Milly barely glanced at it, examining his suitcase instead…”
The short story in Pariat’s hands borrows from storytelling: It is written familiarly; it invokes a sense of shared culture, and maintains a casual reliance on the existing legends of the land. The collection lingers on in the memory as much for what is said as for what is left unsaid.
The story that gives the book its title, Boats on Land, touches on the shy and intrinsically lonely adolescent experience before opening out into a world of latent sexual exploration and tenderness that leaves a haunting aftertaste.
The collection Boats on Land reveals the nuances of dislocation — the characters that people it have lost their bearings, and cannot relate anymore either to their home, their lover, or their identity. The “marvellous” cannot be a cure, but in Pariat’s hands offers one way of being or at least seeing for a culture that before it was lettered “married” its words “to music, to mantras”.

Karishma Attari is a book critic and writer living in Mumbai. She is on her coming-of-novel I See You