Blogger's Note: Mizo writers in English tend to write more poetry than prose, particularly among the younger generation, so I was frankly euphoric to come across this short novel last week. A very recently published YA book, written in impeccable English with a fairly authentic Mizo setting and entirely plausible characterization. It took a while to track down the writer but it's a relatively small world around here so here we go :)
One
It
was in September that Puia somehow decided that he was tired of his life. It
wasn’t a decision that he took because of some major mishap. It was rather a
series of unfortunate events that somehow ended in a death wish. He stopped
coming to school, rarely attended classes, and when he did he often got kicked
out for doodling or daydreaming. He drank. A lot. And I guess a seventeen-year-old
is not supposed to have all these bottles of alcohol in his room, but he did
and he knew where to fill up his stock. Presumably from his dad’s.
I wanted him to stop. I tried almost all
the behavioural modification techniques that they have come up with to stop
addictions. I talked to him about repressed feelings and childhood trauma and
everything I could find on the internet. It just didn’t work. He wouldn’t stop,
and I couldn’t force it upon him either.
Puia didn’t get any better than he was
when all of this first started. It didn’t help matters much that Anu and Apa
were extremely cautious about my hanging out with him, so we met up for nothing
more than a few hours every week just to catch up on things. There are a lot of
things to catch up on when you’ve known someone for ten years and they sort of
evaporate into thin air, like their whole presence in your life was all just
this hazy dream or something.
Puia was the “got his nose in my business
but also both hands on my back” friend. The substitute for a big brother, my
fellow treasure-hunter and mystery-seeker. A stargazer and moon-watcher every
now and then when he fancied becoming one, and always, always a
story-appreciator. Now he was light acid rain sprinkling its cold mist on your
skin, on the verge of exploding into a downpour.
A usual day in our lives was now markedly
different. We talked less, possibly because of the fact that he disliked
company (but I constantly imposed it upon him anyway).
I supposedly had Borderline Personality
Disorder as a psychiatrist had concluded that I did, so I had to take
medication for my supposed depression which I was sure was only sleeplessness
disguised as a monster lurking in the dark, but then no one really listened.
Anu and Apa insisted that I chit chat with my therapist Pa Terema every week,
braving the storm. Because I was a warrior, we come from warrior stock, don’t
you ever forget that, young woman, that you are a fighter of the greatest
physical-and-mental-strength kind, and you should never let that memory slip like
a cartoon character slipping on banana peel. Pa Terema would ask me all these
questions about emotions and feelings and all sorts of mumbo jumbo. Then,
seeing that I wasn’t cooperating, he would sigh and go into a long lecture on
the juicy site-of-origin-of-all-rumours that was teenage depression and how I
must never give in to the big bad monster of mood disorders and brain chemicals
gone awry, some racing at the speed of F1 vehicles while some preferred to laze
about in the vacuity of my brain. He was okay, except that I didn’t want to
tell any strange-looking man that I had dreamt about big gnarly hands clawing
at me, nails digging into me, or that I had panic attacks whenever I left for school.
These secrets were better left unsaid, leaving them as thoughts that come before
words do, before language can expose them.
And then there were the people whom you
could share the most amazingly embarrassing secrets with but who won’t ever
judge you. Puia was one of those very few and fine people. And I knew for sure
he would never betray my trust.
It was on a frost-bitten Monday morning in
November that Puia came into my room, microscopically thin red lines in his
eyes, hair a mess, like he had been caught in a storm and had just narrowly
escaped with only his Iron Maiden hoodie to give him what little protection it
could. He stank of stale alcohol. Like it would ever surprise me. He crouched by
my bed, his head buried in his hands, and I could hear the tick-tock of the
clock as the seconds passed by, then a whole minute. I thought his hoodie was
black when he came in. When I looked closer, I noticed it had the faint grey of
twilight, the colour of a nesting place where birds would flock for food and
company, the shade of a safe hiding place. I stepped in on his daydreaming.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah. Just drowsy."
“Let’s go up to the tower.”
“Right now? It’s too cold up there.”
“All the better. Besides, there’s
something I’ve been meaning to show you.”
We took a ten-minute walk to the water tower,
which had an indubitably rich and colourful history, needless to say, what with
the badly painted graffiti of Bon Jovi lyrics symbolic of the coming of age of half
the town’s teen population. We climbed up the ladder and upon reaching the top,
took a seat at the same spot where we usually sat, right at the edge of the
tower overlooking a large part of the Falkland area, at the point where the cold
wind coming from the south hits your face. We were guarded only by a few widely
spaced bars. Aizawl in all its splendid entirety of wooden houses on stilts and
large concrete buildings rose up on the hills opposite ours. A concrete mass
built on the humble bamboo of its ancestors.
From where I sat, I could see them. The
family of pigeons that nested in the tin water collector of the building next
to the tower. The parents were feeding their young, bringing them worms and
insects. I nudged Puia and pointed in their direction, and he mumbled something
and I can’t remember what he had said, but when I look back on that day, I
always remember how I wanted to be like those birds, to be so free that nothing
in the known physical world would ever stop me from taking flight to whatever
destination I wanted to reach. A shackle-free existence surrounded by white
morning mist and jasmine petals that grew right next door lulling me to sleep
and below me tall grass, making the sound of drizzle when the wind blew at it.
I wanted freedom, and not of the kind
where you’re free to wear make-up. Something more, something long-lasting.
I told Puia that this family of birds was
the closest thing to perfection that I had ever seen, and he agreed. It was terribly
windy that day. Dust collected on my lips and my cheeks. Temperatures had
dropped a few days before and still hadn’t risen.
He sat beside me, staring into the vast
expanse ahead, his face unreadable, his eyes a deep dark black.
“Puia.”
He turned in my direction.
“What’s going on? You’re not yourself. You
haven’t been yourself for a while now.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, I mean, you’ve changed.”
“Oh? I didn’t realise.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
He let out a long heavy sigh.
“Amawi, I don’t know about anything
anymore. I’m so tired of everything. I’m so wasted most of the time, it doesn’t
matter what I try to do. I can’t get anything done and it doesn’t make any
difference to my family because they’re never around anyway. It’s just U Seni,
and she’s away in college now. Tell me, what can I do? What should I do?”
“You can’t just waste away like this,
Puia.”
“Yeah, that’s news.”
“You just, I don’t know, you need to try.
You just try, and it doesn’t matter if things don’t work out. You just need to
try a bit.”
“I do try my best to survive, alright? So
hard sometimes. You don’t know how hard.”
He picked up a pebble and flung it to the
field below us. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs, to the furthest
corner that my voice would carry me, and yell at whatever obtrusive pesky
little thing lay in my path.
Puia and I walked home and I went to church
in the evening with my friends, but I couldn’t get him out of my mind, and
through all the hymns that we sang and all through the sermon, I kept going
back to him and the sun falling on his dark brown hair as he spoke to me and how
his hoodie was a sinister black, and his eyes sad and lonely, and it made me so
sad inside to think about it. I tried to suppress it, but there’s something
about feelings that won’t let themselves be suppressed and they will fight
their way out to be seen, and felt, and heard, and I just couldn’t take it any
longer. I shouted inside, the loudest scream that I could have allowed myself
to scream, like a sound that hasn’t materialised into measurable decibels, and
screamed some more in pure emotion, untainted by the acoustics of physical
space and away from nosy pesky acquaintances that spread drama like it was the
news, and it was such a sad thing to think about.
That was the first time Puia told me about
how he really felt, although I’d always sensed it, and whenever I look back on
that day, all I remember is the water tower and the heavy wind blowing at us as
our legs dangled over the ledge, and how his black eyes looked listless even in
the bright of the morning, and the family of pigeons chirping beneath us.
***
I escape to different places, new places,
when I need a break from things. So that night I went to the woods and walked
through the thick trees and into the hollows where I’d always go. There I found
white lilies, the kind that I love. I also found pink and red ones erupting out
of the ground from green bulbs. At the mouth of the spring was a white daisy
and I thought to myself how I wanted it to be of an altogether new shade,
something different, maybe the colour of ocean reefs, majestically blue, with
what looked like strips of verdant fields running through it.
I saw it in my mind's eye, a new world
filled with lilies and daisies that are of entirely new patterns and colours,
and fields that have what seem to be fountains of water gushing through them,
flowing upwards in defiance of gravity and spraying water on my face. I saw
myself catching droplets with my tongue, tiny droplets the colour of
rain-bearing clouds and some the shade of deep, majestic oceans. This was a
place where water had all sorts of different shades and flowers reinvented
themselves and transfigured into shapes with different hues and textures, and
where black earth is now the colour of fancy, iridescent gold dust.
I knew I had to come here again and again. It was a
necessity, almost.
I wanted to be there with only my thoughts to keep me
company, and maybe see if I could live for eternal time here, to explore the
possibilities that this new world held, and not keep myself chained up inside
this claustrophobic, damp pigeonhole, because that wouldn't do at all, not when
we had the whole world ahead of us.
And what I saw there was a drop of gold emanating from the
clouds. But the next instant I saw it again. My heart raced. My hand turned
cold and damp. I saw a strong calloused hand grabbing me by the wrist, and it tightened
its grip on me, pulling me towards a darkness I could not fathom, and I shouted
for it to let me go.
I blinked. The blue lights shone above my bed. Comforting, if
not in anything else, at least in their familiarity, and I let out a long sigh.
I couldn't erase the image from my mind's eye. It was so powerful and
consuming, and all I wanted was to feel safe and protected.
I climbed out of bed, slipped into a hoodie and walked
downstairs to the living room. Anu was still up watching a documentary on Nat
Geo.
"You're up late," she said.
"I couldn't sleep." She made space for me on the
sofa. I slipped in next to her.
"Well you're in luck because look what's airing. A
documentary on the food habits of sloths. If that doesn't make you sleepy, I
don't know what will."
"Why on earth are you watching this?"
She smiled. "Hey, it was either this or a video of a
hippopotamus bathing."
"Isn't there anything better?"
"Apparently the rest of the channels air only PG 13
shows past midnight."
"I'm sixteen."
"Just three years older than thirteen."
I rolled my eyes.
"Oi Anu, em em a. You’re too much."
She burst out laughing.
"I'm the parent here. No buts."
"Okay, okay. So I guess we'll just watch a sloth eating
his way through an insurmountable quantity of food. What more could I ask
for?"
"That's right."
After a moment's pause, I told her. "Nu, I saw it again.
It was only a hand that I saw this time, but I got so scared."
"Amawi, Amawi. I'm so sorry Bawihte. It’s gonna be
fine." She kissed me on my right cheek. I felt safe sitting there with
her, the monotonous music on TV giving calming rhythm to my flustered
breathing.
"Have I told you the story about the time I went to
Champhai for a youth congress?"
No she hadn't.
It had been a long trip, she said, some seven hours in a
rattling bus that broke down every hour sputtering and choking on its fumes.
When they’d finally reached it was already five in the evening. The service was
supposed to start at six. She and her friends were staying at the home of a
second cousin who was working at a school there with her husband. They’d washed
up and quickly gotten ready for church. On their way up a cobbled and rugged
path with no streetlights (their torchlight battery had run out), her friend had
lost her balance when she stepped on a log lying in the middle of the road and had
fallen into a pig trough. She was drenched in mouldy pig feed that was days
old. The second church bell was ringing. Someone would already be at the pulpit
welcoming the congregation, reading a Bible verse, and praying for blessings.
They had no time to go back and change. She grumbled and rained curses on the
frightened pigs, now snorting because they’d smelled food, and this angered her
all the more. She was supposed to sing in a trio with Anu and another friend,
but it had ended up being a duet where Anu’s friend sang way off key in front
of thousands of people, because apparently the friend who had had the mishap was
the best singer among them. They’d been careful to carry an extra pair of
batteries from that night on.
Anu always had the most embarrassing anecdotes up her
sleeve, stories revolving around her days in college. They must have been
infuriating in the heat of the moment, but they brought a smile to our faces
when seen in retrospect. She could have filled quite a large library with them,
I reckon.
“What’s wrong?” I asked in
characteristically tactless fashion.
“It’s my dad. He comes home drunk every
night…What on earth is wrong with him? And my mom couldn’t care less about him.”
“I hope things get better, Puia.”
“Yeah. It feels pointless sometimes.”
I nodded that I understood. I didn’t
really, although I wanted to.
“What’s the point, Amawi. It doesn’t get
better. It has not gotten better in years now,” he said, playing with his now
melted ice cream, making circles in his bowl. “It would be easier to just let
go of it all, because whatever I try, I don’t know if it’s going to work. And
you know something else? It always gets worse. Yeah. Every time.”
“Puia,” I said. I was silent for a long
time before I finally managed to say something. Words get stuck somewhere in
your thoughts and decide to abandon you when you need them the most. “I think
of the same things that you think about. The truth is, I don’t know if it gets
better or if it just falls apart all the time. But maybe this is just one small
fraction of your life—the things that weigh you down. Your life is so much
bigger than that. And maybe you’re stuck in a terrible situation now, but it
won’t always be like that, right? I mean, there’s always so much to live for.”
I hated my sentimentality. I sounded like
I was trying to inject some concoction labelled “happiness” in gaudy yellow
lettering into the dark nihilistic veins of a seventeen-year-old without so
much as an attempt at empathy. Stupid stupid stupid.
He sat back in his chair and gazed at the
empty space in front of him. His eyes were full of distant places and lonely
people. I could not discern what or who even after years of secrets being
shared between us. He was a distant nebula, and I was a dull meteor that
wandered aimlessly. I couldn’t help him, try as I may. I couldn’t even help
myself.
“Yeah, you’re right. You say the smartest
things every once in a while, though not very often,” he said, coming back to
the situation at hand.
“Yeah, and this is one of those times,
apparently,” I said.
“Most of the time, you speak the most
nonsensical things. I have to remind myself that you are Lalnunmawii My Best
Friend and not an Extra-Terrestrial who is having a hard time adjusting to life
here on Earth.”
***
The night of the farewell party we had
planned for our seniors arrived. It was at this eighties themed retro club in
Chanmari, with glaring disco lights hanging from the ceiling and party music
booming everywhere. All our seniors were pretty wasted and so were my
classmates. I was getting tired of all the noise and went to the balcony and sat
there, the breeze blowing softly on my face and my neck. The rich warm scent of
jasmines floated across the heavy night air, and it was so soothing, so
heavenly, after all that cigarette smoke. And I turned off every thought in my
head and took a deep breath and all around me were miles upon miles of flowing
grey grass, almost the colour of hay. When I opened my eyes, the sky had
darkened. It was twilight. I saw Anu’s face in the expanse of the darkening
sky. She was smiling at me, and her eyes were the stars. Apa had his arms wrapped
around her, and he was gazing at me, almost in a frown, like he was concerned.
At the end of the hallway a guy was
running to the toilet, trying to keep himself from puking in front of everyone,
and another guy was supporting his girlfriend who could barely walk, and I felt
the tall grass brush against my hands as I ran across the field and flew up to
the sky to be where my parents were, like I had wings or something. I felt the
cold air rush into my lungs and I breathed out warmth the next second. I saw a
silhouetted figure approaching me and sit down next to me. It was Puia.
“Mind if I join you?”
“Not at all.”
“What a waste of time, isn’t it? They’re
all idiots,” he muttered.
“At least the party is a success.”
“Yeah, we threw them one helluva going
away party, you know, just to celebrate them not bullying us anymore.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But you’ve got to admit, they’re so bent
on sucking all the juice out of this, I kinda admire them. The way I see it,
Amawi, there are two kinds of people in this world. The ones who go after what
they want, no matter the cost. They will fight till their very last breath to
see that they get what they truly want in life,” he said as a matter-of-factly.
“Even if that something is getting drunk till you can’t even stand straight
anymore and you puke all over the car. Then there are people who are too afraid
to go after their dreams. They’re scared.”
“And in which category do you fall?” I
asked him.
“The first one, obviously. No questions
asked. I don’t want to deny myself the pleasure of living every moment to the
fullest.”
“Yeah. That’s an awful cliché. Live every
moment to the fullest and everything will be swell and jolly. It’s not even
possible.”
I just didn’t believe in it because I had
tried to do that every single day and I had always failed. Good and bad must
co-exist in this world and so on. Like yin and yang.
“It’s not cliché if it’s true.”
“You’re an awful excuse for Hedonism,
Puia.”
“Aaah I get you. I get you.”
“It’s just, when you try to escape all of
this, your life, everything… I don’t know. Don’t you think you should confront
it, maybe? Can’t you try? I mean, at least try.” He looked pained and I bit my
tongue. “Yeah. Never mind. I’m sorry. What was I thinking?”
“It’s alright, I get you loud and clear.
Everything is so clear in my head and what you’re saying is just so little of
what I tell myself.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Hey, no worries. You’re good.” He tousled
my hair and I felt like an idiot. My mind was in a whirlpool with thoughts from
here and there swinging in confusion and making a ruckus.
I told him about the field that I saw and
how the colours were changed and lilies were brand new colours. The drive home
felt magical—I saw pretty lights everywhere. As I sat on my bed, I remembered
how great it felt to be there, and decided to write down a survival plan. I got
up, walked over to my desk, and rummaged through my drawer for a notebook, one with
a floral cover, which Anu had given me on my fifteenth birthday, and grabbed a
pen. I turned on the LED lights above my bed, opened the door to the balcony to
let the breeze in, and I turned to the first page.
This is my guide to survival. Immerse
yourself in the world of nature overflowing with green and serene beauty, one
which is far removed from its man-made counterpart, the universe of brick and
concrete jungles and stone walls.
Step
One of the Nature Lover's Guide to Survival: The Marshes
Go
to the marshes at dusk and you will find glowworms there, fireflies floating
above the swamps, turning the scene into something beautiful. Forget everything
you’ve been told about how ferocious the animal kingdom can be. Relearn what it
means to be human, so you can live in harmony with nature.
While
you're there, breathe in the scent of everything else that is around you, all that
is not affected by the stench of the rotting vegetation. As you explore
whatever there is to explore, be on the lookout for flowers, especially sea
lavenders and marsh rosemary (lilac blue water lilies will do if you can't find
anything else), and let them be, a crown on their stems, but bend towards them,
go nearer, lean into the petals and take in a breath of their perfume. Think
about what it does to you and how you feel light-headed with just one breath,
and take a step back to consider if it arouses in you any glimmer of whatever
God-given hope you still may have. Take in the sound of the waters breathing
with life. Of waters filled to saturation with algae and ferns and detritus, of
green terrestrial matter turning into atmospheric matter and breathing new
life. Taste
the electrifying scent of pure marsh air, undiluted and pungent, as it pulses
around you and spills into your eyes, your hair. Breathe it in, allow it to
seep into your skin and revitalise all that is dry and dying.
Shirley Lalrinfeli grew up in Aizawl and Bengaluru and has an MA in English from the University of Hyderabad. She enjoys painting, writing long-form fiction and daydreaming. Her first poetry collection, Sigma, is forthcoming from Writers Workshop.
