March 2024 – SAMYUKTA FICTION

A Death in the Forest

Paromita Goswami

“Hey there!” shouted one of the seven policemen who had just walked into the dusty Adivasi village. Katiya happened to be returning from his sister’s house and guessed that he was being yelled at. He looked down and tried to saunter on as if he had not heard them. “Hey you, are you deaf?!” This time the shouts sounded more like threats. A woman, who had just stepped out sickle in hand, quickly turned round and disappeared into her hut. Children with mud-streaked faces peeped out from behind trees. Katiya stopped as the men strode towards him.

“Ah, just the person we wanted to see,” said the Inspector, playing friendly but placing a firm hand on his shoulder, “let’s go to your house and sit for a while.” Most unwillingly, Katiya led the group to his hut right at the end of the village. The dense, hilly Koparshi forest seemed to come right up to his little backyard. The village dogs ran around yapping; the hens stopped pecking at worms in the soil and flapping their wings vigorously, hid the chicks swiftly underneath.

The policemen settled on the string cots in Katiya’s outer courtyard; the red plastic chair was reserved for the Inspector. Katiya fetched water for them to drink and splash on their faces. Then he slaughtered four chickens and his wife made red hot chicken curry and rice. Katiya watched from a distance as the police chewed and sucked, licking their fingers clean, making noises of satisfaction at the curry’s spiciness and tang. Their rifles stood delicately balanced against their knees.

BALLAL’S BOTHER

Nalini Bera (orig. Bengali) (trans. by. Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar)

Putus, that is, the lantana flower. His daak naam or nickname was Putus, named after the lantana flower. His bhalo naam or good name was Ballal Murmu. His father’s nickname was Balka. The names of the father and the son were almost similar.

His house was in the village; not in the middle of it, but right at the place where one entered that village. His house was a usual Santal village house. There were several groves of bamboo around the house. There were both varieties of bamboo there: the plain bamboo and the spiny bamboo. As it is said in Bangla, “Benu bone mormore dokkhina baay”—the balmy southerly breeze blew through the bamboo clumps.

The leaves of the bamboo shook and murmured in the southerly breeze. Sometimes, venomous snakes too appeared, hissing. Snakeskin was often entangled in the bamboo and swayed in the wind like pennants.

One could see Putus alias Ballal Murmu’s one-storied mud house, through the gaps in the bamboo clumps, with its roof thatched with paddy straw. Nearby was a shelter for ghusur, that is, pigs. Ballal’s pigs grunted around and dug the ground with their snouts or loitered through the bamboos, chomping noisily on bamboo shoots, making a rot rot rot rot sound.

Baansh kawrole, that is what the bamboo shoots are called. Why only pigs, even humans cooked the bamboo shoots and ate those as a delicacy. Elephants too feasted on bamboo shoots. New bamboo grew from those bamboo shoots.

The Mudpie

Rimi B. Chatterjee

From the air, the Mudpie looked like an ordinary mangrove forest. You’d never guess it was the grave of one of the foremost cities of the modern era. Carlton Caron looked at the aerial photographs on the wall display in the Vijaya Base briefing room. The Mudpie sloped upwards to the north, a relic of how the monster tsunami of 2023 had scooped up the city’s giant corpse and danced a furious death-stomp all over Singapore Island. Carlton had been in first year at Naval School when it happened. It had felt like a bad omen for the days to come.

In the eighteen years since then, Nature had built a memorial to Old Singapore, made of mangroves and sea turtles and dolphins and fish and birds. Reef sharks, thought to be extinct in this part of the world, had returned, and it was thought there were saltwater crocodiles too, though no sightings had been confirmed.

The main reason for the growth of this popup natural paradise was the Glitch. The Glitch was a killer. It had claimed five lives in the months following the death of Old Singapore: two divers, one pilot and two fishermen who’d been part of the doomed rescue mission. There was nothing to rescue anyway: the Wave, generated by the sudden collapse of the undersea thorium mines around Rangsang Island, had towered above Singapore’s highest skyscrapers before falling on Marina Bay at a third of the speed of sound. In a matter of hours, a once-flourishing nation had turned into a an alien hellscape, buried in eternal night.

Waldeinsamkeit

Chitra Gopalakrishnan

A mild June sun sprawls outward in a pale yellow fan of light against the sky in the village of Satoli in the Kumaon hills of the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand.

Now and then, liquid sunshine casts a translucent light on the elevated, snow-clad, Himalayan mountain ranges and lingers over the peaks of Chaukhamba, Trishul, Nanda Devi, Sunanda Devi, and Panchachuli and then abruptly plays truant. When it does, these giants turn, within moments, into shadowy, grim sentinels guarding the horizon. Then just as suddenly when the sunbeams open out again, this time shining through marshmallow clouds, they distract these flinty mountains out of their cold, stony disposition.

The effect of this manoeuvre on me is magical: a floating sky with drifting peaks of silver gleams its way right into my heart.