Of Jets and Oranges

Bijoy wakes up from his nap beneath the orange tree to find the boy staring at him. Chapped lips, bare feet, needle-straight hair sticking up at the back of his head, a white ganji and a pair of dark blue shorts with a frayed hole near the left thigh – Bijoy has never seen the boy before.

“Did Bibhash send you to beat me up?”

Even as he asks it Bijoy realizes that his brother would never forgo the pleasure of pummeling him and laughing at his loud cries of complaint to their mother. Also the boy seems too skinny to take on Bijoy.

He has been secretly asking his mother to give him a second helping of rice and milk in the evening before Bibhash comes back from playing with his friends, and has gained some muscle. Not enough, but if his reflection in the stream from yesterday as he curled his biceps were anything to go by, Bijoy believes he can manage to tackle the boy to the ground. Or maybe just shove him aside and make a run for it. But only if the boy comes at him. Bijoy does not like fights.

The boy is still staring at Bijoy who is now sitting up under the tree and thinking his thoughts. He has not replied to Bijoy’s question yet.

“What is your name?” 

Bijoy decides to go with a more basic question, and this time in halting Mizo that he has picked from his classmates.

A flicker of surprise across the boy’s dusty face is about to give in to a smile.

Bijoy is slightly excited at the prospect of making a new friend that probably lives somewhere close by. When he thinks the boy is about to smile, scenes of himself and the boy teaming up to defeat Bibhash flash in front of his eyes.

But the boy catches himself, hastily recomposing his features back into a cool haughtiness. The rebuff irks Bijoy. Getting up and dusting his limbs in a huff, he shoves the boy with his shoulder as he barrels past him and hurries home. He tells his mother he doesn’t want his secret serving of rice and milk today.

A week passes before the boy reappears in the orange grove behind Bijoy’s house. This time he holds out a green fruit that looks like an orange but slightly bigger, its skin more wrinkly somehow.

“What is it?”

“Hatkora”, the boy replies. Plopping himself down next to Bijoy the boy picks up a mid-size stone and starts hitting the fruit with it. Not gentle taps but not all out smashes either.  “You have to make it soft,” he explains.

Bijoy looks on rapt, waiting for something to happen. For it to be one tap too many or too heavy and for the fruit to burst open.

When he cannot take it any longer Bijoy interrupts the boy, “How soft?” 

The boy stops his tapping and rolls the fruit between his palms.

Bijoy rolls his eyes. He could have eaten a whole orange in this time, he thinks, but decides not to interrupt the boy’s machinations. Despite their gruff first encounter, he still wanted to make friends with the boy.

Bijoy’s family of four had moved here last year when his father was posted to the Assam Rifles headquarters in Aizawl. His father’s colleagues had helped them find a two-room lime-plastered house that stood alongside a few similar dwellings on a step cut into a hill. Their collective backyards opened on to the copse of orange trees growing wild, which in turn melted into the forest beyond. It was a nice place for a young boy to grow up, with the promise of new adventures up and down the hilly neighbourhoods interspersed with fields and forests. But while Bibhash had quickly made friends with the kids his age, kids of other Assamese and Bengali personnel also serving in the Lushai Hills district, Bijoy had no such luck. This was partly because he was not boisterous like the other boys in school and partly because no one wanted to get on Bibhash’s bad side by being friendly with his scrawny younger brother.

So here he is, sitting in the orange grove and waiting for the boy to offer him some fruit. Bijoy has decided that no matter how the fruit tastes, he is going to widen his eyes and smile as he swallows.

Pulling out a small foldable knife from his blue shorts the boy finally cuts open the fruit and hands Bijoy a piece. It smells like a very sour orange, the light yellow flesh glistening with juices which soon run down his arm. Bijoy sucks on the sliver and squints his eyes, the sourness washes his tongue before a bitter taste settles at the back of his throat. The green rind is visible between his lips for a while, covering his teeth, till he is done with the piece.

“Tastes even better with some salt and chilli” , the boy says. He hands Bijoy another piece, smiling.

“Where did you get this?” Bijoy wants to know so he can tell his father about it. Imagining his father’s excitement upon learning about a new local fruit gives Bijoy a thrill of pride. 

“Up” the boy says, pointing vaguely at the hills behind the grove.

One afternoon Bibhash comes home early with a bruise under his left eye and a cut lip. When his mother asks what happened he says he got into a fight with some local boys. Later that night when their father returns he scolds Bibhash saying tribal boys fight all day, that’s all they want to do.

“It’s us who are supposed to behave better”, he booms.

“But they said we should go away”, protests Bibhash.

“They say that now. We’ll see how long that lasts”, their father mutters. “Now go get your books”, he commands “or do you want to become a good-for-nothing fellow like them?”

Bibhash drags his feet into the other room to get his schoolbag.

Their mother coughs and carries on with stirring the fish curry on the stove. 

Bijoy is seized by a strong urge to tell his father about the Mizo boy. Like the time he wanted to swipe his finger through the stove flame to see how hot it really was. But he keeps quiet about the boy and the hatkoras. About the fact that he himself has been sneaking spoonfuls of powder milk from their allotted rations every day, hiding it in a folded paper under his mattress, waiting for his stash to become roughly as much as a hatkora before giving it to his new friend.

On a Wednesday, two men from Assam Rifles come to their house and talk to his mother. She shows them to the inside room where they proceed to remove the cot his parents sleep on and start digging a hole. 

Bijoy is home because he has a stomach ache, possibly from eating too many hatkoras. He watches the men all day, sitting in a corner of the room.

“Why are you digging?”

“It’s a bunker”, one of the men explains, leaning on his shovel for a second. “For safety.”

“From bombs” the other man explains, only his head and shoulders visible as he continues to dig inside. A smattering of loose soil lands on Bijoy’s legs as another shovel full of dirt is tossed up onto the floor. 

“Big bombs?” Bijoy wants to know.

But the men continue to dig and do not answer. 

They leave with their shovels when it starts to get dark. They return the next day to finish the job.

That evening the men show their mother how to push aside the tin and wood cover, get under the bed, get into the bunker, and pull the cover back on. Bibhash is excited and keeps going in and out of the bunker as soon as the men leave, till their father comes back from work and screams at him to bring his books.

Bijoy wonders if he should ask his father about the bombs.

Bijoy has managed to pilfer some more powder milk, some rice, and two potatoes from their kitchen. With the loot in his school bag he waits for the boy to appear in the orange grove, the heat and guilt making him drowsy. The weight of his drooping neck almost makes him keel forward before he wakes up with a start to find the boy sitting across from him. Wiping the drool off his chin Bijoy moves to take off his bag.

But the boy raises his hand to stop him. Dusting himself off he motions for Bijoy to follow him and walks into the thick vegetation beyond. Grabbing the straps of his school bag tighter, Bijoy looks towards his house once before following in the boy’s footsteps.

The two boys walk for what feels like hours to Bijoy. The dense trees that block out the sun, the soft mossy soil under his feet, the tight green foliage that undulates around him – Bijoy is covered with a blanket that makes one unaware of any worlds that may exist outside. Time slows down in the forest. Bijoy feels sure that only a few minutes will have passed when he gets back home. His mother will never know he came so far away.

Soon the forest thins out, giving way to a steep incline over slippery rocks. The boy holds Bijoy’s hand as he guides him on a well-practised hop skip and jump routine before landing on a grassy clearing. Looking back Bijoy thinks he can spot their cluster of houses and the orange grove somewhere downhill.

The boy, still holding his hand, leads Bijoy towards the U-shaped building that sits in the clearing. As they go down the corridor that runs the length of the structure, passing by the different rooms, Bijoy spots blackboards on the walls and thin long tables and benches piled up to one side. On the floor of the rooms people sit around talking, wearing uniforms not very different from his father. Some people huddle together looking at a big paper spread out on the floor. Crossing another room, Bijoy barely reads the words Mizo National Front written on the blackboard before his attention is captured by a big boy coming towards them with a rifle in his hand.

Looking down to avoid eye contact with the boy or his rifle, Bijoy keeps up with his friend whose destination seems to be the room at the corner of the building . Here he motions Bijoy to take off his bag and give it to the woman sitting on the floor, who promptly takes out the stolen rations and starts arranging them. 

There are plastic jars of milk powder, four big buckets with rice, gunny sacks full of potatoes, hatkoras, and bananas in a corner of the room. The opposite corner has a big stove topped with a big metal kadhai. Bijoy counts more giant utensils lined up beside the stove before getting to the five rifles leaning against the wall, the kind that he has seen his father and his colleagues carry and march in unison when he had gone with his mother and Bibhash to watch the Independence Day parade.

Just as Bijoy is deciding which of his numerous questions to ask first, and the right Mizo words to ask them, another woman enters the room and starts speaking to the ration woman. Her voice reminds Bijoy of someone but before he can place it the woman turns and it is Miss Lucy Moitei, his English teacher from school.

Thoughts of punishment bloom wild and urgent in Bijoy’s mind. Will Miss Lucy scold him in front of his new friend? Will she tell his father that he was here? Even if he wasn’t sure where he was, he knew that he wasn’t supposed to be here. Why was Miss Lucy here? He thinks for a second before self-preservation kicks in and Bijoy makes a run for the door.

But he does not realize that he and the boy are still holding hands, and his initial momentum is stymied by the boy who is standing still. All that happens is Bijoy is jerked to a stop and now attempts to free his hand from the boy’s grip.

Miss Lucy walks over to the boy and kneels in front of him. They speak in hushed, clipped sentences – questions and answers. Bijoy does not fully understand what they are saying but knows that it is about him. He also knows that he will not be in any trouble because Miss Lucy seems as worried to see him here as he is to see her. Maybe she will not complain to his father after all.

“Our rations are not enough”, Bijoy’s mother complains. “The rice is over and there is still a week left in the month.”

“These rebels are getting bolder”, his father tells his mother’s reflection in the small plastic mirror hung on the wall, while straightening his beret.

“Maybe you can request”, his mother starts to say but is interrupted by the look on his father’s face.

“They attacked a supply truck just yesterday”, his fathers exclaims, taking the small steel tiffin box from his mother. He puts it in the cloth bag with his pen and his big red office register, adjusts his beret again, and ducks out of the house.

Bijoy sits in his corner of the room practising his English spellings and trying to not think of the buckets of rice and sacks of potatoes in the U-shaped school building up the hill. 

A week later Bijoy’s father does not return home in the evening. It is late at night before someone tells someone who informs their mother that the Mizo National Front rebels have attacked the Assam Rifles armoury at Aizawl. There is firing and no one is allowed to go in or out

Over the next two days news filters in. The MNF has taken over police stations, cut phone lines, and hoisted a flag. Bijoy wonders if his friend is with the rebels, running through the streets, doing daring things in a grown-up war. He watches Bibhash plead and argue with their mother to be allowed to go with his friends to fight the rebels. Bijoy is pleased when mother slaps him and locks him in the inside room. He does not want his brother to come across his new friend and beat him up.

On the third night they hear the jets in the sky.

In the first couple of hours they hear loud booms followed by quick whooshes passing over their house. They know these are fighter jets because their neighbour, Shonkhu sir, has heard from his friends in the Assam Rifles that the government may send in the Indian Air Force. To drop food and medicines from the sky while the rebels block the hill roads. Bibhash pleads with his mother again to go out and watch the jets. Their mother says no.

Bijoy has never seen a plane before. But the thought of joining in Bibhash’s plea keeps him quiet. Maybe he can see them tomorrow morning. They will drop some food in the orange grove behind their house he hopes.

The next moment there is a heavy bang outside, muffled and distant, but some limewash from their back wall flakes and falls to the floor. Two more explosions sound out and Bijoy and Bibhash move as one to run to the back window, curiosity having made momentary allies. But before they can unlock the window, the door bursts open behind them as Shonkhu sir enters, screaming for their mother.

“Get in the bunker” he shouts at their mother who has come running for the inside room.

He grabs the boys by their collars and marches them into the room where their mother has already pushed aside the tin covering and stepped inside. The boys drop to their knees and scuttle under the bed to get in the bunker. Shonkhu sir gets in behind them and heaves to pull the tin cover over their heads just as another loud bang shakes their house.

Their mother laments aloud, “Shonkhu, amar shob gelo re!”

But Shonkhu sir has no time to comfort.

Bijoy moves to hold his mother’s hand in the darkness, pretending to comfort her but ensuring there is no way he is left behind here, accidentally or otherwise.

A white beam lights up the bunker. Guided by Shonkhu sir’s steel torch they climb down deeper before coming to a tunnel that rises slightly upwards.

Like his walk through the forest, the outside world, the jets and the explosions do not exist in the tunnel. Time is slow and Bijoy feels they can walk for hours, maybe days, along the tunnel’s gradual incline. In whispers and shuffling feet several others join them.

Did the rifle men dig bunkers for everyone, Bijoy thinks, a little disappointed that their family is not the only one having this adventure. But he bets himself none of them know an actual rebel, not even Bibhash. He is the only one with a rebel friend. 

If they come across fighters, Bijoy plans to tell them that he knows the boy. He realises that he doesn’t know the boy’s name, but he will describe him. Tell them that he supplied rice and potatoes and milk powder up the hill. His mother would not scold him if he can get them safely past the rebels, right? Bijoy lets his sweaty palm slip from his mother’s. He walks a little straighter now, clutching his friendship with the boy as some talisman inside him.

A long time later Shonkhu sir taps on another tin covering above them and then Bijoy, Bibhash, their mother, and others of their little tunnel group are lifted out into the night by two rifle men. Coordinating in urgent whispers and a mix of Bengali and Assamese everyone falls in a single file led by one of the rifle men. Shonkhu sir and the other rifle man bring up the rear as they bow their heads and walk, short hurried steps impatient to be indoors.

Bijoy sneaks glances at the booming shadows that fly by in the dark. A muffled explosion and flames appear in the forest uphill. Deafening whooshes make the hair on Bijoy’s arm stand on end, and three distinct flames ignite at the foothills, just across the paddy fields that they are scurrying past. Bibhash grips his arm and pulls him along as the group breaks into a jog at the sight of a long rectangular building up ahead.

Bijoy is not sure if they won the war but the jets have left their skies. His family has settled into their plastic sheet bedding and demarcated their area with tins of condensed milk, canned tuna, and their stove, a pan, and some clothes that their father had brought from their house. There were others – men, women, children – all preparing to spend weeks in the classrooms of this school building now pressed into service as a temporary shelter by the Assam Rifles for civilians caught in the fray.

“The air force crushed them”, Bibhash tells another boy his age, a new friend he’s made at the shelter.

“They planned to take over the headquarters”, Bijoy’s father tells his mother, “but they could not.”

When can we go back home?” Bijoy’s mother asks.

His father does not reply.

Bijoy wants to ask if all the rebels are dead but he is not sure if he really wants to know the answer.

For as long as his father is posted in Lushai Hills, Bijoy remains on the lookout for the boy. Returning home from school, going to the market with his mother, playing with his friends beside their new house, Bijoy hopes to find the boy staring at him. But the riflemen have been burning orange groves and knocking on doors to ask if any one knows any rebels. So maybe it is good that the boy does not appear.

Putting down his tea cup Bijoy picks up the newspaper on his desk. There is another report of rebels giving up arms and returning to civilian life. The pictures of these mini ceremonies, MNF fighters posing with their surrendered weapons, are common now that Mizoram is a new state, following twenty years of militancy. 

“Das!”

Bijoy puts his open newspaper down on the desk to see Saikia Sir walking in with his customary tiered tiffin box.

“Good morning good morning” Bijoy calls out. “What has madam cooked today?”

“Forget all that,” Saikai says, putting his tiffin down on Bijoy’s desk and handing him an orange envelope. “Think it’s the transfer order.”

“That was fast,” Bijoy mutters, carefully tearing off the top of the envelope.

“It’s a new state. They want to have officers in place so things move smoothly”

“Hmm hmm…” Bijoy folds the letter and puts it on his desk.

“You will be handling these now ha?”

“Handling what?”

“Arre these” Saikia points his chin towards the picture in the newspaper. “Sitting in front of the table with all the rifles, our very own Bijoy Das!”

Saikia continues about seeing Bijoy in the newspaper soon. 

Bijoy smiles politely, already thinking of packing and shifting. Returning to Aizawl. Would it have changed a lot?

Transferring the lunch box to his own desk Saikia settles in for the day. Pushing aside the letter Bijoy starts to close the newspaper when the picture catches his eye.

The black and white dots do not offer any clarity beyond the fact that there are ten men in the picture, wearing some sort of uniform. But Bijoy looks on at the thin man in the middle with straight hair sticking up at the back, giving his grainy silhouette a peculiar shape. 

Briefly the air smells of oranges.