ONE WINTER MORNING IN LAMKA

By- Khamkhokam Guite

It was a winter morning in Lamka. The whole town was covered with a thick blanket of dew bearing fog from river Tuitha. It was bitterly cold. My family hurdled around warm charcoal fire in the kitchen. “These charcoals are from our village” my mother told me. The statement was mean more for assurance of the quality of the charcoals. The fire was cracking and burning bright in the pot.

Our old village is near Chin State in Burma. The trees are hard with thick barks. The thick barks ooze with turbid liquid. These thick and watery barks protect them from frequent forest fire. Forest fire may deny them their green leaves but can’t snuff off their lives thanks to their thick skins. Once monsoon starts, new and better buds sprout up from the trees. Old and hard native trees can still be found in the hill top area of the village. They are the very best for converting into charcoal as their thermal contents are higher than any other trees.

In the comfort of warm fire and enjoying morning tea, my family filled me with what I had missed out of the family news. Some relatives married off their son or daughter and some other died in my absence. My mother gave me a long list of ‘must condole’. “Don’t forget to give them something” was her usual refrained. “In such cold winter days, I can’t help thinking about our relatives where you stayed in their house during your student time. Their mother is getting old and she must felt very cold last night” my mother was saying. I knew what she was getting at.

When we were discussing trivia, my in-laws came visiting us. We knew from them that their eldest daughter was still working in Delhi and their son was with her studying in a college.
Any discussion inadvertently led to the tragic experience of 1997-98. I told them the heartrending story I heard about the day Thanlon was burning. There was a boy around eight years old. His mother was lying dead near him. The traumatic boy lost all senses and cried hysterically “Ma, let us run” without knowing that a hundred call would not awoke her up anymore. He was subdued by repeated injection of morphine.

I told them my desired to know in what kind of human being the boy might grow up now. Whether time really heals his wound inside? Or whether the tragic happening which he couldn’t understand nor responsible left him with private grievous wound he would take to his grave? They were in the dark like me.

“Do you know 2 or 3 men kidnapped from old Churachand and killed at the start of the fratricide?” my sister-in-law chirped in. “Amongst them, one had three very young boys. Their young mother found herself a new husband. The three children with their old grand mother rented a house in our neighborhood in New Lamka. I don’t know what they will eat and how they will pay the house rent,” she continued. The remarks gnawed me inside since then and followed me like my shadow.

Hearing her words, as self absorb as usual, my life story appeared before me like a mirror. I know ‘the fowls of the air sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns’ but they are provided adequately. But my adult life story is the annals of existential and mundane worry such as “what shall we eat? Or, what shall we drink? Or, wherewithal shall we be clothed?”

“Hope floats in human breast”, they say. I imagined the lives and fancies of the boys. They knew very well as eight year olds usually do, that a dead person never returned back. But that was others dead fathers. Their father might be different. Every evening, they might expect that their father would somehow show his face at the gate and came back never to go away any more. They might be struggling to cope with reality and still thought that everything was a dream. They might nurse an illusion that one day they would awake up and found that it was all a very bad nightmare. They might be worry sick that in case, just in case their father returned back, how he would know their new house in a very New Lamka!! They might be raking their small heads thinking how to explain the absence of their Mom to him.

Idyllic old Churachand is such a place where there was no new comer since 1970s.The place had seen better times. But it was like an old maid in 1997without any eager suitors. The small remnant community lived together here at least forty to fifty years and knew each other. The children felt safe here and belonging. It was the fountain head of spiritualism in Zogam from colonial times to the late 60s. From here, thousands obtained their spiritual healing. From here, the message of ‘the King of Peace’ was proclaimed. Scriptures in the tongues of natives saw the light of days from here.

But in ironic twist of events for the young boys, cruel fate snatched away their father from here. They lost their mother here, as for her; to be ‘mere Mom’ to them was not sufficient. She had her own needs as every body else. She had her own reasons to do what she did. They witnessed their home where they were born and brought up went up in flame and turned into ashes. Their family history was turned topsy-turvy.

New Lamka is the exact opposite of the old Churachand. It is the melting pot where ‘frogs in small ponds’ from numerous villages gather. Uprooting the lonely and bewildered boys from old Churachand and force planted them in a crucible called New Lamka would be damned hard on them. Their inner turmoil and alienation could only be imagined.

Lamka, as usual, is very dark at night. On certain nights, you can enjoy moonlight or shed idle tears. You can see constellations and galaxy in the outer space. Some nights, depending on your mood, you are happy that there are billions of stars to accompany you. Some nights, you feel that there are billions of heavenly bodies oblivious of your existence. You can’t help feeling that the universe doesn’t care whether you exist or not.

The boys might look up the sky. They could see little tinkle stars up above. When their lives were complete with both parents living together in their home, the boys might imagine that those black spots on the surface of the moon were hornbills on a big banyan tree. But, circumstances was as it was, the black spots on the moon surface might then appear to them like big tear drops.

Their old grand Ma was never tired of telling them that there is a loving God beyond those stars looking down on them and protecting them. She told them that their father is now in heaven above with God happily! You can’t blame the boys if they felt cheated.

Thinking about the boys, I promised myself that I would visit them soon. I didn’t have any magic wane to heal their wound inside. I knew I wouldn’t be able to fill that empty spaces in their psyche. I might be an irritation to them like fly in the eye. With my meager resource, I knew I wouldn’t be able to make any difference in their lives. However noble the intentions, I might be like Job’s friends robbing their solitude without mitigating their emotional and material deprivation. But still. Visit I must, I promised.

Living in the tyranny of the urgent screaming for immediate attention, days became week. Weeks became month. Months became years. The promised is yet to be fulfilled. The boys must be shy gawky teenagers now.

Having walked along that path called ‘teenage’ and now having teenage children of my own, I know a little bit about the ups and downs of that road. You may pick up the pebbles along the road with curiosity and learn life’s lessons on the way. Or you may stumble and hurt yourself on the pebbles and the consequences chase you down to your grave. All these choices are yours when you’re least equipped to know better.

“God does not play Roulette with the universe,” said the great scientist Albert Einstein. Having seen so many and hearing so much, I don’t know. I really don’t know whether God plays Roulette with the universe or not. Even if I live a hundred years, I will never understand this life. I have seen so many having so much advantage and looked so promising but felling in the way side. And, some survive and prosper “Against All Odds”. I wish the boys to survive and prosper “Against All Odds”.

Thinking all those thoughts, I involuntarily opened the bed room door of my teenage children. I saw them sleeping peacefully in their beds. The rhyme of their breathing reassured me. And I heard someone singing in the nearby church -

“Nungchiang in thei ni, avek in thei ni
Nungchiang in thei ni, bang hang hi hiam?”
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