Malaka (© Biswapriya Purkayastha)
Page 2 "Can you move over a bit, girl," the fat old woman said. "I
need some space to breathe." Malaka tried to oblige and pushed against the coughing man
with the grizzled beard. He glared at her and pushed back at her with his bony
shoulder. His eyes were red-rimmed and there was purulent matter caked at the
corners. "Get away from me," he hissed and began coughing again, his body
shaking. After that, Malaka sat very still. Across from Malaka was a family she knew vaguely, the
parents, wife and children of a colleague of her father’s at the mine. The old
couple looked as though they were trying to sleep, while their daughter-in-law
glared at Malaka across the aisle for some reason with concentrated hatred. Her
lips moved, muttering something. Malaka tried not to look at her. Only once, as
the bus drove away from her little town, did she wipe the tears away. The road to Keke was bad, potholed in numerous places, with
deep ruts where the tyres of hundreds of passing vehicles had worn the exposed
earth away. On either side were sparse forests interrupted by scattered farms,
the fields mostly lying fallow in this, the dry season. The heat was
suffocating, and inside the bus, with the passengers crammed together, there
was so little air that Malaka began to feel dizzy. She leaned her head as far
back as she could in an effort to catch what little wind was coming in through
the window behind her, and closed her eyes, swaying back and forth as the
vehicle rattled and bounced. Suddenly the bus stopped, so suddenly that Malaka fell
forward into the aisle. For a moment she thought there had been an accident, as
there had been once when she had been riding a truck and it had tipped over.
Everyone seemed to be scrambling up from their seats at the same time, so that
Malaka was almost trampled on the floor before she could somehow get to her
feet. Someone outside was shouting, the voice all but drowned in the noise of
the bus engine. Then there was a sudden loud banging noise and the bus engine
stopped. "Everybody out!" the person outside shouted, in
heavily-accented Kudu, Malaka’s language, and then again in Sambar. "Everyone
out. At once!" Muttering and craning their necks, the passengers
disembarked. As she followed the others, Malaka saw the driver still sitting
behind the wheel, his hands held up by his ears. Then the people just in front
of Malaka stopped. Some of them tried to push back into the bus. "Out!" shouted the man outside again, his voice high and
angry, and fired again into the air. "Out, quickly." The passengers fell silent
at once. Slowly, one by one, they left the bus. Malaka was one of the last. She felt hands grab her and push her to one side. "Here’s
another." She was in a line of young people and children, both boys and girls.
Older people had been pushed into a second and larger line. The driver was now
getting down from the bus, in front of which the road had been blocked by a
barrier made of old boxes, oil drums, the branches of trees and piles of rubber
tyres. Around the bus and the barrier were a group of boys and young men, in
shorts and dirty T shirts, most of them carrying guns. A few carried machetes
with gleaming blades. One of these grabbed the driver by the scruff of the neck
and threw him to the ground, saying something in a language Malaka didn’t
recognise. A thin, very tall man came round the back of the bus. He was
dressed in a kind of military uniform, comprising dark green trousers with a
khaki shirt and a cap with a blue and red cockade on it. He had a pistol in his
hand and brandished it in the air and shouted. His voice was thin and high,
almost like a woman’s. "You lot," he was shouting, "were running away, were you?
Enemies of the revolution." Malaka could understand enough Sambar to recognise
how heavy his accent was. "You," the man shouted, kicking the driver, "you were
helping them. Traitor!" He shouted something else and suddenly shot the driver,
who shivered and lay flat on the ground. A dark red circle began to form round
his head. Malaka stared, fascinated with fear, at the driver’s body.
One of the boys laughed uproariously and scooped up some of the blood on his
fingers and licked them clean. Another pointed his gun at the line of older
people and fired. A woman screamed, lying on the ground and kicking with her
legs. It was Malaka’s father’s colleague’s wife, who had been glaring at her on
the bus. The boys laughed and a couple of them clapped. There was almost a
festive air. Then the man in the military uniform shouted and they fell silent,
except for the woman, who was still moaning. [ Continue to page 3 ] |