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58 pages

English

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Every May something extraordinary happens in the new cemetery of the sleepy little town – a laburnum tree, with buttery yellow blossoms, flowers over the spot where Lentina is buried. A brave hunter, Imchanok, totters when the ghost of his prey haunts him, till he offers it is a tuft of his hair as a prayer for forgiveness. Pokenmong, the servant boy, by dint of his wit, sells an airfield to unsuspecting villagers. A letter found on a dead insurgent blurs the boundaries between him and an innocent villager, both struggling to make ends meet. A woman’s terrible secret comes full circle, changing her daughter’s and granddaughter’s lives as well as her own. An illiterate village woman’s simple question rattles an army officer and forces him to set her husband free. A young girl loses her lover in his fight for the motherland, leaving her a frightful legacy. And a caterpillar finds wings.From the mythical to the modern, Laburnum for My Head is a collection of short stories that embrace a gamut of emotions. Heart-rending, witty and riddled with irony, the stories depict a deep understanding of the human condition.

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Publié par	Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd
Date de parution	30 octobre 2009
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9789352141616
Langue	English

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Temsula Ao

Laburnum for My Head
Stories
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Laburnum for My Head
Death of a Hunter
The Boy Who Sold an Airfield
The Letter
Three Women
A Simple Question
Sonny
Flight
Follow Penguin
Copyright
PENGUIN BOOKS INDIA
LABURNUM FOR MY HEAD
TEMSULA AO is a professor at the department of English, and the dean of School of Humanities and Education, North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong. She is the author of eight books, including five books of poetry and a collection of short stories, These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone , published by Zubaan-Penguin (2006).
A member of the General Council of the Sahitya Akademi, she was awarded the Padma Shree in 2007.
To all storytellers
Stories live in every heart; some get told, many others remain unheard-stories about individual experiences made universal by imagination; stories that are jokes, and sometimes prayers; and those that are not always a figment of the mind but are, at times, confessions.
Because stories live in every heart, some get told, like the ones on these pages . . .
Laburnum for My Head
Every May, something extraordinary happens in the new cemetery of the sleepy little town. Standing beyond the southernmost corner of the vast expanse of the old cemetery-dotted with concrete vanities, both ornate and simple-the humble Indian laburnum bush erupts in glory, with its blossoms of yellow mellow beauty. The first time it happened, some years ago, surprised visitors to the concrete memorials assumed that it was an accident of nature. But each year as the bush grew taller and the blossoms more plentiful, the phenomenon stood out as a magnificent incongruity, in the space where man tries to cling to a make-believe permanence, wrenched from him by death. His inheritors try to preserve his presence in concrete structures, erected in his homage, vying to out-do each other in size and style. This consecrated ground has thus become choked with the specimens of human conceit. More recently, photographs of the dead have begun to adorn the marble and granite headstones.
But nature has a way of upstaging even the hardest rock and granite edifices fabricated by man. Weeds and obstinate bramble sprout from every inch of soil uncovered by sand and cement. So every Easter week, the community comes together to spruce up headstones and get rid of the intruding natural growth. The names on individual gravesites are lovingly wiped clean of dust and bird-shit by loved ones; occasional strangers read them as incidental pastime.
But the laburnum bush will not or cannot reveal readily who or what lies beneath its drooping branches during its annual show of yellow splendour. That particular spot displays nothing that man has improvised; only nature, who does not possess any script, abides there: she only owns the seasons. And the seasons play out a pantomime of beauty and baldness on the tree standing on the edge of the lifeless opulence, spread over the remains of the assorted dead: rich and poor, young and old, and mourned and un-mourned. The headstones in the old cemetery bear mute testimony to duties performed by willing and unwilling offspring and relatives. The laburnum tree on the other hand is alive and ever unchanging in its seasonal cycles: it is resplendent in May; by summer-end the stalks holding its yellow blossoms turn into brown pods; by winter it begins to look scraggly and shorn. Springtime brings back pale green shoots and by May it is wearing its yellow wreaths again, to out-do all the vainglorious specimens erected in marble and granite.
But the story is running ahead of itself and must be told from the beginning. It all started with a woman named Lentina and her desire to have some laburnum bushes in her garden. She had always admired these yellow flowers for what she thought was their femininity; they were not brazen like the gulmohars with their orange and dark pink blossoms. The way the laburnum flowers hung their heads earthward appealed to her because she attributed humility to the gesture. So she decided to grow a couple of these trees in her own garden which, though not big, could accommodate them if they were planted in the corners, without affecting the growth and health of the other plants. She purchased saplings from a nursery and had them planted at the edge of her boundary wall. She followed the instructions faithfully and hoped that within two years, as the nursery man assured her, the bushes would flower.
That first year, her new gardener pulled out the small saplings along with the weeds growing around them. After loud recriminations, Lentina bought some more saplings and this time, planted three of them in three corners of the garden. She hoped that at least one of them would survive. But it was not to be. One day she heard loud barking and cows mooing very close to her compound. When she came out to investigate, she found that some stray cows on being pursued by her neighbour s dogs and finding her gate slightly ajar, had rushed into her garden and were blissfully munching on the plants they found there, including her precious laburnum saplings. She began to wonder about these accidents in her garden ever since she had planted the laburnum saplings. Nevertheless, she did not give up and the third year too, she planted some more saplings of her favourite flowering tree. Almost miraculously they survived the first few months and began to thrive.
Lentina was thrilled and could not wait to see them bear the magnificent yellow blooms she so admired. But before her wish could come true, another disaster struck. One day, a worker from the health department came while she was out visiting a friend, and sprayed a deadly DDT concoction on the edges of the garden. As ill luck would have it, it rained heavily that night flooding the entire garden. Except the full-grown trees, all her flowers including the laburnums, withered and died. Lentina was devastated and began to think that her efforts at bringing the strange beauty into her garden would never be successful. But whenever she saw these flowers in bloom, on highways and in gardens, the intense yearning to have them closer home began to overpower her. Her husband and children were convinced that she was developing an unhealthy fetish for laburnum and began to talk openly about this in close family gatherings. She could not understand their concern and was inwardly hurt by their seeming insensitivity to beauty around them. But she never gave up her hope of having a full-grown laburnum tree in her garden some day.
Lentina did not mention laburnum to any one any more; nor did she attempt to plant the tree she so ardently admired and wished to have in her garden. Meanwhile, her husband began to show signs of a strange disease and before any proper diagnosis could be made, he passed away quietly one night in his sleep. The funeral services were long and elaborate because the deceased was a respected and prominent member of society. On the burial day, while the hearse was about to leave for the cemetery, Lentina surprised everyone, including herself, by announcing that she was going to accompany her husband on his last journey. Usually it is men who take part in the last rites at the gravesite and stay on to supervise the erection of the temporary fence around the fresh grave. But when Lentina saw the group, including her sons and her own brothers, stepping out of the house behind the hearse, some impulse urged her to join them. Her words were met with silence, because no one was prepared to voice dissent at such a moment. So the party departed, and in the graveyard while the last prayers droned on, Lentina stood among the assortment of headstones and began ruminating on man s puny attempts to defy death; as if erecting these memorials would bring the dead back to life.
Lentina decided that she did not want any such attempt at immortality when her time came, and at that thought she experienced an epiphanic sensation: why not have a laburnum tree planted on her grave, one which would live on over her remains instead of a silly headstone? This way, even her lifelong wish to have such a tree close to her would be fulfilled. In spite of the sombre occasion, she began to smile but when a relative saw her, she quickly went back to looking appropriately bereaved. But the sense of elation she felt could not be hidden for long. So she looked around for her driver and gesturing to him to follow her made her way home.
That night she could not sleep from excitement: it was as if a big problem had solved itself; but how was she going to accomplish it? It was clear that she could not confide in her relatives or children; so she had to find someone who would understand her deep-seated longing for the yellow wonders. She turned her attention to her servants: whom among them could she trust? Not the cook or the gardener, they had families, and secrets in families are never sacrosanct. Suddenly her mind turned to the driver who had been in their employment for more years than she could remember. He was a widower. She decided to make him her confidant. She would take him for a drive the next day to the cemetery and would explain to him what she wanted for a headstone when she died, and why. But there would be one condition: she had to see the tree bloom during her lifetime. The driver s name was Mapu but every one called him Babu because Lentina s grandson called him by that name, unable to pronounce Mapu at first. The name stuck and Mapu good-naturedly did not object even when the older people began calling him Babu.
The next morning, she sent for Babu and they took the road to the cemetery. This in itself would not appear strange: a widow paying a visit to the grave of her husband. But Lentina s intention was different; she wanted to survey the still-empty sites and to reserve a spot where she would be buried. It had to be a spot which would no