Fun And Games (© Biswapriya Purkayastha) This contribution is part of a series:- 1. The Most Frightening Thing In The World (15-Dec-2010)
| Given the right circumstances, love can be the most frightening thing of all. | 2. Fun And Games (10-Jan-2011)
| Why are children the best soldiers one can imagine? This is Part Two of the Bisaria Quartet, and follows 'The Most Frightening Thing In The World.' | 3. Malaka (13-Feb-2011)
| A girl wanders alone through a land ravaged by civil war. | 4. The General (15-May-2011)
| The General made a mistake when he spared the woman, and a worse mistake when he let her bear his child. This is the concluding part of the Bisaria Quartet. |
Page 1 The
day the Karibu came to Jandu’s village, the crops had finally been harvested
from the fields and the preparations were being made for the annual harvest
feast. With the war and the drought, the crops had been poor and the feast
meagre, and nobody had the glow in their faces of former years. But they had
decided to hold the feast anyway. Komalo was the greatest storyteller of the tribe, so great
indeed that his name was known to all the clans this side of the Black River,
and even the Giro people of the Six Villages had occasionally invited him to go
and tell his stories in their gatherings, in their strange uncouth tongue.
Komalo had always come back from these occasions full of laughter and hilarious
anecdotes of the Giro and how he had intentionally mispronounced the Giro
language. Everyone thought Komalo was very funny, with his bald shiny head and
huge belly, and when he told his stories everyone knew when a laugh was coming from
the way his eyes would crinkle up and his double chin wobble. When Komalo walked the streets, the youngest children would
run after him, pleading for a story, and Komalo would turn round, if he weren’t
too busy, and tell them one of the old favourites, the tale of the hippo and
the elephant, or the hawk and the monkey, or the story of the tailor who had
not been paid. They would all laugh in the right places and everyone, Komalo
included, would go away satisfied afterwards. Jandu was getting too old to run with the young kids after
Komalo, but not so old that he could ignore the fat man altogether like the
teenagers with their football crazes and their radio sets and girlfriends. He
would, like the other eight-to-ten-year-olds, come "by accident" upon one of
Komalo’s impromptu storytelling sessions and find something to do within
earshot. Komalo would look at these children, busily rearranging pebbles and
scratching at tree bark, and grin broadly, and raise his voice just enough so
they could hear him clearly. It worked out fine for everyone. Today, however, Komalo was uneasy and worried about
something. It was so clear to see that it was itself a worrying thing, so clear
indeed that even Jandu, never the most observant of the boys, could see it. The
fat man walked with his usual heavy tread and smiled at the kids who followed
him, but he said nothing to them, and only frowned and shook his head when they
demanded a story. This had never happened before. The children fell back and
stood in the street, silent and dejected. Jandu watched the children and felt
more disturbed than he cared to admit. He was glad his sister Rakti wasn’t
there today. She was one year younger than he and still ran after the
storyteller, clutching her old doll. Today she was at home, because their
mother had told her to help with the preparations for the feast. Everyone was used to the other adults, the parents and
teachers and the others, being worried. Everyone was worried about something or
other, and the refugees who had passed through the village a few weeks earlier
had not helped things any, with their tales of mayhem that nobody wanted to
believe. One of the refugees was an albino woman who had stayed overnight in
Jandu’s parents’ house and had asked them to leave with her before it was too
late. Jandu’s mother had smiled and made promises to think about it, and the
woman had shrugged and shaken her head and gone on her way. Little else had
happened since then and the flow of refugees had thinned to a trickle and then
stopped altogether, so the children had almost forgotten them. Only the parents
looked strained and unhappy, and husbands quarrelled with wives more and more
often. Jandu stayed away from home more and more these days because of the
quarrels. Only yesterday – last night – his father and mother had
fought, rising voices that had turned to a couple of hard blows while Jandu and
his sister had crouched under the thin bedsheet and tried to sleep. After that
their father had stormed out of the house and their mother had spent the hours
crying softly, which they had never seen her do before. For once she had seemed
less like a domineering bully and more like someone who might actually be a
human being. In the end Rakti had crept out and tried to calm her down. She had
snapped at her daughter at first but in the end had allowed the girl to sit
with her and at last she had stopped crying. [ Continue to page 2 ] |