It was still a few hours before dawn. Biren slept with his mouth open letting out a few groans from some subterranean world, strands of wet hair pasted to his forehead. From the door, his twelve-year-old son watched till the moans faded and the frantic inflation and deflation of his chest stilled into barely detectable breathing. The medicine had put him to sleep. He would wake only after the boy returned from his errand. In the narrow threshold, the boy counted the newspapers, forty- three for the houses in the town this side of the river and thirty-six for the other side, as he put them in two separate plastic bags. He picked up one newspaper, glanced at the headlines skipping ahead to the last page where he read the report on sports. It would be a while before they could afford a television to watch cricket matches. He tied the plastic bags to the front of his bicycle near the handles, tugging at them twice to check if they were secure and won’t fall off on the way. Then he shut the front door and pushed his bicycle up the steep ascent to the dirt road.

Along the dirt road, a little beyond the thick groves of bamboos, the dark river flowed turning where his bicycle turned at its hairpin curves. A thick veil of mist blurred his vision and in the ghostly air above, a paper-thin moon bobbed. The wind bounced through the bamboos. The boy shivered. He had seen vicious gusts of wind from the river bend the tall bamboos so low, they touched the ground only to be catapulted into the sky. It reminded him of what Jiten Kai, who worked in the cinema hall in the town, had told him once. One night many years ago, before cinema halls were shut down by the organization and the late midnight show still ran full house, Jiten Kai was returning home on his bicycle. It was a dark moonless night and even stars had refused to appear. The only sound was that of the river howling like a widow and before he knew, a whole cluster of bamboos lay in front of him, like this, Jiten Kai had demonstrated with his hands to show how the bamboos lay horizontally in front of him. Jiten Kai had the good sense to wait and not step on the bamboos, for if he had, he would have been slingshot into the sky. So, he waited and counted the moments, recited the apod udhar and waited some more, and only then the bamboos lifted themselves up and stood so erect that you wouldn’t believe they were flat on the ground just moments ago.
The boy was glad the moon was there, pale but there. He paddled fast till he approached the first cluster of houses. Shrouded in fog they looked like men conspiring together. He began throwing the newspapers taking precise aim, so they fell inside the tin-roofed verandahs of the houses, safe from stray cows and the unpredictable rain. He was surprised that one of the houses had a light at this hour. Must be a student preparing for his exams. It reminded him of his own seventh grade exam which he flunked last year. 

When he delivered the last newspaper, the fog had lifted to reveal a soft glow in the east, though the sun was visible only as a smudged arc in a grey sky. He propped his cycle against a check-post abandoned by the soldiers a few months ago when they’d left the village and climbed down the rocky descent to the river. He sat on one of the rocks jutting out and watched the pale light shimmer leisurely on the still waters. Just the other day, the river was a wide stretch of sand with tiny swamps speckling its ribbon length; children played ball there. Now with the rains— torrential rains that poured for days, sometimes months- the river was swelling every day and there was no trace of that sand. “Fix the roof in the work-shed,” he made a mental note to himself.
A few bamboo poles marked places in the river which were the deepest. The boy threw a few stones into the water, waiting for the ripples to disappear before throwing a few more again. He spent the better part of the morning throwing pebbles into the river. The wind had now started to bellow through the thicket, exposing the paler underside of the leaves. By the time the boy climbed up to his bicycle, the weather had turned, the sky was overcast, zigzagged with lightning and the sound of thunder closing in. It occurred to him a storm was on the way and that it was bordoisila. Once his mother told him that bordoisila is a newly wedded woman on her way to her maternal home. She is in such hurry, his mother had said, that she wreaks havoc on all that stands in her way, houses, trees, cattle, crops. 

Cool fat drops of rain stippled his shirt. He was still a few miles from his home. He bent forward tightening his grip on the handle bars and began paddling faster, his shirt ballooning in the wind. Behind him, the rain thrashed the ground.

In the house, Biren looked out of the window by his bed puffing smoke into the rain. Despite the chill in the air, he was sweating profusely and could suffer only a cotton lungi secured around his waist. The purple mark of a sloppily stitched up wound that resembled an ill- constructed rail track, ran diagonally from his shoulder to a little above his lower back, splitting his back into two triangles. He was still dizzy from the medicine. The rain slapping on the wooden window shutters woke him before the sleeping pill had worn itself out. He groped under the mattress for another bidi.

When the boy returned soaked to the bone, his father was in the shed building the boat. He had been on it most part of the year. After changing into dry clothes, the boy put the tea to boil on the kerosene stove. A little later, he brought it into the shed. He pushed a cup towards his father. A hairline crack ran vertically along the stained cup that had once been white and shiny.

“Huh?  Tea,” Biren said. His upper body was bare and a tiny rivulet of perspiration trickled down his forehead and hung precariously on his nose. In a second the drop would fall into the tea, the boy mused, when his father wiped it off with the back of his hand. The boy asked if he slept well. “Yes,” his father replied before gulping down the tea in a hiss, the biscuits untouched. He had been eating very little.
“I will bring you some kumol saulor jalpan. The bananas have ripened and there is some gur too.” The boy offered.
“I am not hungry now, son.” Nevertheless, the boy prepared the jalpan and after covering the bowl with a steel plate, left for school.

****

That night, after his son went to bed, Biren brought out his opium pipe and walked down to the river till he felt the cool water brush against his shins. An agonized moon tried in vain to break through the dense layers of black clouds. The river was rising. He sat on a rock and for a while listened to the sounds of the night. The day his wife died, she had cooked his favorite fried duck and fish in elephant apple curry. He had plucked the elephant apples from this tree beside the river. That was the last hearty meal he had. Biren got started, laying the opium in the pipe and heating it with the flame from his lighter. At the first bubbles, he began to inhale, then he inhaled some more till his body felt light as a feather.  He could be a bird flying off the rock. He could be a fish swimming down the river.  Sprinkles of silver dust fell from above; tearing that silver haze was his wife walking towards him the way she had that night when she appeared at his shanty the first time. Lie with me she had told him that night. 

He sat on the rock a long time. Till the silver dust turned to rain and the rain turned to a squall. Then he staggered up the rocks, carrying the sluggishness in his legs. At pre-dawn, his son would find him lying on the dirt embankment, naked and sweating. It was a shame he endured every day. It was a shame he was prepared to endure every day for one glimpse of his wife from the other world. 

Next morning when he woke up in his bed, his son had already left to distribute the newspapers. It was still pouring. He spent the morning and most part of the day working on the boat. He had been to a few boat builders in the nearby river-town where they quoted him a price so high that he decided to build one himself. “If you lived by the river,” his wife had once told him, “you had to know how to swim, and if you didn’t, you had to at least own a boat, even if you did not know how to row one.” He had held her hand that evening as they walked by the river. Many years had passed since then and yet it was as if only yesterday her hand was clasped in his. She was with child. His wife was educated at the university which was why her decision to marry him, remained unfathomable to him even today— a school drop-out with no family and no heritage and working for her father in his grocery shop.  She had always maintained her silence about it and after the boy was born, he had stopped prying, although he often found himself thinking about it, like one repeatedly went over a sudden miraculous stroke of good fortune, accepted but always regarded with disbelief and incredulity. They had eloped and travelled one night in a red state transport bus to this tiny village by the river where she started working in the village primary school. They were safe here, she had told him. He took up odd jobs to keep them going. 

The thatch roof was leaking. Biren drained the overflowing bucket and kept it below the leak. But the roof was leaking at many places and there were not enough vessels to hold the rain water. The opium was making a sloth out of him. Fixing the roof was a daunting task for which he neither had energy nor will, so he let the rain trickle in. Many times in the year, he had given up working on the boat too. It was an effort to hammer the nails deep into the planks to keep them fixed. The hull was weak. He had little knowledge of boat building, its intricacies of balance, depth and arcs. He did not come from a riverside. He did not know how to swim. He did not know to row a boat. But he must own a boat for he lived by the river now, even if he did not know to row one. 

The boy came home early from school and ran to the work shed. “The flood is here before time this year. The headmaster says school will be closed as the classrooms are already packed with refugees from the lowlands,” the boy said. He knew if the lowlands were flooded, it wouldn’t be long before their village was flooded too. That happened last year. The flood occurred every year and every year people living in the river banks lost their crops and livestock and sought refuge in the school grounds. The low embankment running through their village was eroding at many places. The river was treacherous; the waterline rose swiftly at night when the villagers slept, seeping into their yards, dissolving the mud walls of their hovels, and filling their tiny homes. 

Unperturbed, Biren continued to measure the wood strips marking them with a piece of chalk, his slight muscles flexing as he sawed the logs into halves. His dhuti was folded up to his knees and he often removed the gamusa from his head to wipe off the sweat from his face and glistening body. The boy counted the bidi stubs scattered on the floor, then dragged the bamboo ladder and started working with a few plastic bags securing them to the thatch roof with a wire to rainproof the leaks. This would work for now, but the roof would need a good fix, not bandages. When the rain stopped, he would cut some tokou leaves and mend the roof.  
“I have seen cracks in the embankment. What if the flood water…” Biren dismissed his son with a wave of his hand after which he hammered a few more nails into the planks. 
“What do you think of the boat?” Biren asked in a voice so low that if he had not looked up to meet his son’s eyes, it would seem a question directed at himself and not his son. The boy turned to look at the middle of the cow shed where a wooden structure that barely resembled any boat, he had seen on the river, stood.
‘It’s coming out good.’ 
His father continued sawing the logs. Before it became his workplace, it was a cow shed. Sometimes when he worked on the boat, he would catch a tune his wife hummed when she’d milked the cows here. He got up for another smoke and looked out at the rain beating the tomato plants down.
That night when Biren stopped by the door of his son’s room, as he often did before commencing his nightly activity, the boy was working on his sums with his lips pressed hard as he scribbled on. He had bad handwriting and he wrote fast. His mother used to make him write regularly to improve his writing. On the table, lodged between the pages of a book was a photograph of his mother, taken when she was about the boy’s age, with other girls in school uniform. It was an old school photograph, worn out and faded at its edges, “Class of 71” written on its back. She was taller than the other girls. She was smiling. It was a good photograph. Once after they had got married, Biren had taken her to the town studio to get them clicked as husband and wife. She had clutched the end of her sador awkwardly. 

With his head bent low, the boy worked on his sums unaware of his father’s presence. It wrung Biren someplace in his chest watching his son like this. Sometimes in such moments, clear like a palmful of sparkling water, he saw his son, he saw his wife, he saw himself and what had befallen them- he saw how terribly he had failed them and continued to fail them.
Two years into their marriage, Biren had heard about a lover his wife had at the university. He never asked her about him, although he was sometimes proffered glimpses of this other life she led when she stood motionless before a pot of boiling milk spilling over, when she had once mindlessly chopped up all the vegetables he had bought for an entire week, or when she woke up perspiring from a certain dream in the night. He knew that dream like he was the one dreaming it. His wife convulsed and wept in her sleep, murmuring something unintelligible, chant like, and then woke up gasping for breath. He had measured the duration of the dream by counting his own breath, fifty- nine breaths. If his wife woke up middle of the dream, it would return to her again many times in the week, so he no longer shook her up mid-dream like he used to in their first year of marriage. It pained him watching her suffer, but he had continued to hope thinking he had time on his side.  After her death, it broke him that he did not own her as completely as she owned him, that she kept a part of herself from him, that that part of her was as unreachable when she was alive as the whole of her was now.  

****

Around midnight Biren went out on his nightly sojourn.  The rain had stopped, but it would only be a while before it started pouring again. Stagnant rain clouds thickened the air. The dirt road was soft, and he stumbled into the puddles every now and then. The river roared and the wind whacked his face. Last night’s storm uprooted a few electricity poles steeping the village in darkness. Just then somebody called out to him, “Go home kokai. Not a night for your smoke. The river is rising.” Only then did it occur to him that the kerosene lamps were still burning in the houses. It embarrassed him that his habit was known. He turned back. There was no pleasure smoking when the entire village behind him was awake. Not a quiet night. Not an opium night. Tonight, the men would take turns to guard the village. If the waters rose above the danger level, they would beat their utensils and hoot signaling the others to pile up their belongings on the roof of their huts – their cotton mattresses, utensils, clothes, their little children. On the roofs, they would wait for the water to drop, but if the river continued to rise, they would float on their banana-stem boats and seek shelter in the town school premises. Last year when the school had no room to spare, a few folks from the lowlands built shanties on the highway, and there in the wee hours, a drunken lorry driver rammed into an unsuspecting sleeping family killing them in an instant. Sometimes a few rescue trucks would be sent to the flood hit areas although they always arrived late, long after the cattle had died and starvation set in. Biren was reminded of his own unfinished boat and he hurried home. As he felt his way in the dark, there appeared at the other end of the road where the river took a long lazy twist, a caravan of trucks, jostling along, their amber headlights shining through the drizzle. He had to hold a tree to steady his swimming head as the trucks rumbled past him as if he were an indistinguishable piece of the night, a loudspeaker from one of the vehicles blaring something into the rain. Only when they passed by could he make out that they were rescue workers on their way to the next village which was already flooded. 

****

Still holding the tree, Biren found himself thinking about one windy February day, four years ago when a much bigger caravan of olive-green military trucks had thundered into the village. He remembered, because a giant borali fish took his bait that afternoon and he was skipping home, shouting out invitations for dinner to the few he’d met on the way. In his excitement, he hadn’t felt the ground shaking below him and when he did, he thought it was an earthquake. Swirling miles up into the sky was the dry February dust obstructing his vision and from that thick curtain of dust emerged a convoy of giant machines wounding the tranquil afternoon air, inching towards him. The fish slipped from his hand with a thud. He stood transfixed middle of the path right in front of the approaching trucks. If someone had not the good sense to push him out of the way in time, he would have been crushed under the enormous wheels much like the fish he watched flattened like an aluminum sheet, a sputter of blood soaked instantly into the dry earth. He got up biting dust between his teeth. The army stayed in the village for four years, and for four years the people lived in fear until a few months ago the soldiers rolled up their tents and thundered out in their trucks much like the way they had thundered in.  If the village was relieved, they did not celebrate. Four years of military rule had peeled them to their core, bared their insides, shaken them, and besides, there was no guarantee the army would not return. 

He remembered when the army had first arrived, they set up their camps at the edge of the village where the forests began. After that, they built check posts at the entry points to the village where everyone, children included, going in and coming out was routinely searched at gun point. At night, they patrolled pathways and trails into the woods. The village community center was sealed and gathering of any kind was prohibited. Once when it reached the Major that a few young boys circumnavigated the check points and entered the village from the hills at night, he rounded up the entire village for interrogation. After that, the village folks were summoned randomly to the camp. Sometimes though, a few friendly soldiers made small talks with him and he had responded by offering tea and food, believing in some uncertain way that this would buy him safety, believing that when his turn for interrogation came, he would be treated with kindness. Often standing before a check post with his wife, Biren had felt his chest expand with pride when his wife conversed with the soldiers in their tongue. His wife was highly educated unlike most women in the village. She could speak English as well. And the soldiers seemed to respect her. They called her Masterniji. That was at least a good enough reason to be less afraid of them. 

Days passed. Checks and interrogations had become routine. Then one night, he heard boots approaching his house. So frightened was he that he could feel his heart beating out of his chest. He tip-toed from his bed, took his sickle out and stood behind the door. More murmurs and boot thumps. He traced a finger down the sickle and gripped its handle, his palms moist. After a while the footsteps retreated, a few moments passed and when he could summon enough courage to peep through a chink in the door, he watched with horror, men with their heads and faces covered in black cloth, waiting outside his neighbor’s house. A few torturous minutes passed and then as if he were a wayward cow in the fields, his neighbor was forced out of his house and shoved into the jeep waiting outside by the two gunmen who kept poking at his back with the muzzles of their black guns. They had covered his face with a sack. The jeep disappeared into the night. That was the last Biren saw his neighbor. His neighbor’s wife approached the military camp, lodged a complaint at the magistrate’s office, even wrote to a few ministers (his wife had written the applications for her), but the army denied having anything to do with the incident. Later, Biren asked his wife if she didn’t think it was odd that the men who came to take their neighbor spoke the native tongue fluently, although they were supposed to be soldiers deputed from lands far away and who couldn’t have spoken the native language at least as effortlessly as these men did. His wife had told him then that something much deeper was going on, something bigger than what met the eyes. A few days later, a newspaper would bring out their worst fears— “Certain people were clinically targeted and killed by assassins whose identity remains a secret”— the headline would run. Appended at the end of the report would be a list of people killed by secret assassins. Not much later, the editor of that daily would be shot dead in broad daylight by unidentified gunmen.

The only danger Biren could envisage till then was from his wife’s father who had once threatened to saw him into halves for luring his daughter into marriage, and now a decade after, even that had ceased to trouble him. In these ten years, never once did any possibility of danger from any other quarter cross his mind and now it was gaping hard at him from his neighbor’s cottage, from the muttering bushes beyond his backyard, from the shadows that often appeared from nowhere on his mud walls. At night, the black ink of the newspaper assumed demonic shapes and haunted him. His wife told him that everywhere in the state the army was deployed to hunt down the militants from the secessionist group, that the Centre, the most powerful of all the organizations in the country, believed that the ethnic people in the villages sided with the outfit organization so their houses were routinely ransacked. The young boys were dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night, men were taken for interrogation to the camps from where they often did not return, and bodies were found washed up in the rivers and swamps. He had asked her if someday the entire village would be rounded up in the community ground and be asked to pick sides like they picked sides in a game of kabbadi. A shadow like the shadow of a bird in flight flitted across her face. There is no side to be picked, there never was, she said. As days slipped into months and months into years, he watched the nights assuming a life of their own. The echoing trails and paths, hushed stealthy movements in the woods beyond his backyard, gunshots ringing through the forests dead at night, and a sudden flight of birds in its aftermath became daily life. They often heard a smothered wail from his neighbor’s hut and afterwards boots receding into the darkness and if a certain night was quiet, there would a silence so piercing he had to put fingers into his ears block it out. 

****

Biren must have reclined against the tree for a long time for he opened his eyes to the bickering of early dawn birds. He moved without thinking towards his hut. Leaning against the bamboo gate of his front yard was the boy. He averted his son’s gaze. The boy had eyes like his mother. After his wife died, he could not bring himself to look into his son’s eyes, could not bring himself to talk to him like a father would to his son, could not allow himself to mourn together with his son his mother’s death, fearing at all times that the questions that throttled in his own heart would erupt from the boy’s mouth. And now with every passing day, he was becoming aware of the fracture between them, when every rehearsed thought fell short of words, when their brief conversations consisted mainly of trivial pleasantries- “Had your food? How was school? Need anything?” Sometimes all he wanted to ask was- “son, why don’t I see you play ball with the other kids? What are you doing holed up in your room? Have you fixed the dhol? Not yet? You are going to participate in the Bihu competition or not?” 
At twelve, maybe thirteen, the boy was cooking, cleaning, bringing in supplies and carrying him home from the river side at the wee hours. This last detail Biren recollected with shame. He raised his hand to place it on the boy’s shoulder to reassure him, to tell him it would all be fine, but like most of his thoughts, his hand felt heavy, so he let it hover momentarily in the air before dropping it weakly by his side, as if by ever so slightly letting his guard down, he would be drowned in a sluice of feelings from which he could never surface. He walked slowly towards his boat. But his mind was not in it, instead he smoked opium and lay on his bed the entire day, and the entire day the boy ran to and fro, gathering news of the flood, and when the last of the evening light drove him home, he did what others in the village had already done— secured the valuables on to the roof, a few pots and pans, a few of his father’s belongings, a bunch of ripe bananas to stave off hunger,  his chair and books, and his mother’s photograph he put inside his shirt pocket, where his heart beat the fastest.

At night the boy lay on his bed wondering if the rescue trucks would arrive on time in case the river rose above the embankment. The thunder was rumbling over the roof. He was still afraid of lightning and was used to sleeping with his mother at night till he was ten years old, and would have continued doing so if she had not sent him away to the city to live with her brother, the only relative he knew of. He wondered now if his mother had known all along that she would die, if she had sent him away so she could die. The day his mother died he was called back from the city, but before he had reached, she was cremated at the far end of the village reserved for unusual deaths. When he arrived at the crematory grounds, she had transformed into grey ash strewn in the wind. He had looked among her belongings for something he believed she had left for him, a letter, a diary. There was none, and yet he had not stopped looking; even now when sometimes he dug the ground to plant a sapling, his heart would beat in anticipation of a secret box from his mother— much like in the treasure hunt stories his mother had read to him from books written in English— that would surface from the soil with a letter, a guidebook, some directions, perhaps a piece of blank paper where words appeared magically when held against the candle light. How could his mother not have anything to tell him? He fingered the photograph in his breast pocket and slid into a deep slumber.

******

In his room as Biren continued to smoke, images darted in his mind, so many of them and with such clarity that he could not tell if he was hallucinating or living once again a life he had lived before. 

A dimly-lit room. An oscillating light- bulb. Giant shadows on the walls.  A wooden table in the middle. Two men on one side and on the other a woman. He cannot see her face for he stands at the door flanked by uniformed guards, but he can hear her speak. They are asking her about some man. She shakes her head. There is nothing she knows. It has been so many years since she saw him last, almost a decade. Doesn’t she know he’s behind the bombing? Hasn’t he been her lover at the university she studied? Of course, there’s something she must know, something vital that can fetch them his head. There’s nothing she knows she repeats. Voices become louder, questions verge on obscenity, and then the woman gets up and slaps the table hard. He is pushed into the room by the two guards and the woman turns to look at him. Their eyes tangle rapidly like two strings. He is still looking into her eyes when they slice up his back and when she lets out a shriek, he only thinks of how much he loves her.

Biren woke up in a delirium, hot tears burning his cheeks and began mumbling. His wife was in the river drowning. So what if he could not swim, he had a boat now, just like his wife had once said...”if you lived by the river, you must know to swim, or you must own a boat even if you did not know to row one.” He paddled through the flood water that had gathered in his room and waded into the shed. The storm gained momentum. He had dwindled and the immense size of the boat staggered him. But his wife was in the river and because she could swim like a fish, she had tied two gigantic rocks to her ankles. He yanked out a few pieces of plank hanging loose from the sides and pulled the boat into the water in his front yard. He hadn’t considered an oar, so he used his hands to propel the boat ahead. Several times the boat tipped and several times he tried to steady it until the strong currents of the river pulled it into its foamy middle, when at last he let it go and himself on it. Rain fell on his face. 

He wondered why the sky was jammed with stars tonight. He had never seen so many stars clustered like this before. Just as he watched, the stars rearranged themselves against the night sky and became the face of the woman he loved. He raised a hand to touch that face.

****

At midday, the boy woke up to waist-deep water in his room. It was no longer raining, and the bright day stung his eyes. He splashed through the water to look for his father and when he didn’t find him in his room, he went to the work-shed. The boat was not there. Everywhere the boy turned, there was flood water. Houses and trees half-submerged. Women and children wailing.  He climbed up the ladder and sat on a patch of warm sunlight on the straw roof still damp from last night’s rain and waited for the rescue trucks to arrive.

*****