Amish Raj Mulmi" />
  • ABOUT
  • PRINT
  • PRAISE
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • OPENINGS
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • CONTACT
The Missing Slate - For the discerning reader
  • HOME
  • Magazine
  • In This Issue
  • Literature
    • Billy Luck
      Billy Luck
    • To the Depths
      To the Depths
    • Dearly Departed
      Dearly Departed
    • Fiction
    • Poetry
  • Arts AND Culture
    • Tramontane
      Tramontane
    • Blade Runner 2049
      Blade Runner 2049
    • Loving Vincent
      Loving Vincent
    • The Critics
      • FILM
      • BOOKS
      • TELEVISION
    • SPOTLIGHT
    • SPECIAL FEATURES
  • ESSAYS
    • A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
      A SHEvolution is Coming in Saudi Arabia
    • Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
      Paxi: A New Business Empowering Women in Pakistan
    • Nature and Self
      Nature and Self
    • ARTICLES
    • COMMENTARY
    • Narrative Nonfiction
  • CONTESTS
    • Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2017 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2016 Nominations
    • Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
      Pushcart Prize 2015 Nominations
    • PUSHCART 2013
    • PUSHCART 2014
Fiction, LiteratureMay 4, 2013

A Thin Line That Divides Flora from Fauna

By Amish Raj Mulmi

It snowed on Dashain that year, a most unusual dance of sleet and ice that killed off half of the crops in our fields. My mother ran out of the house as soon as the first white flake landed on our veranda, and upon her discovery, ran back inside to awaken her husband, fast asleep after another day of farming, liquor and fucking. She seemed terribly worried, but as I cowered in the smoky kitchen under the stairs leading upstairs, my father woke up with a grunt, and I realized this was no ordinary matter. Soon, others had come out of their houses, their dark shawls rapidly turning white in the blackness of the night, and everybody seemed to be talking about the paddy crop. A few women had begun wailing their misfortune, until their husbands slapped them into silence. It seemed a terrible night to live through, but that was the only choice everyone had.

The next morning, while everyone rushed to the fields, my sister and I ran to the hill overlooking the river and its valley, where everybody’s fields were. They were running hither-thither, confused, like the ants living in the big banyan tree in the middle of the village when we disturbed their colony. The crops were no longer green; they were a dirty white of snow and mud, disturbed before they could ripen. Soon after, everybody huddled around the rock whose shade was used in the summers to eat meals, a behemoth the size of a house. My sister had got bored by now, and she kept tugging at me to go back. I pushed her away once, but she persisted, and finally I had to acquiesce. I dropped her home, where mother was anxiously waiting for father to return, then ran to the kirana shop where I knew the other boys would be. I ran so hard that my left slipper broke, so I took it off and ran barefoot.

My sister was born on a night of a moonless sky…the night we Bahuns and Chhetris said Lakshmi would enter our homes.
Barely had I reached the shop when the men returned. The boys’ chatter halted abruptly; all our fathers had a frown on their faces. Sahuji, our village shopkeeper and moneylender, asked Raame’s father if the crops would be okay; Raame’s father bit back with a stinging reply: ‘What are you worried about, Sahuji? Now we have no choice but to come to you for our loans.’ I think Sahuji was a bit hurt by that remark, for his eyes narrowed immediately.

It was only at night, when I heard my parents talk in hushed whispers, my mother’s voice almost a sob, that I found out our harvest wouldn’t last us the year. We would have to borrow, as would the rest of the village, but even Sahuji didn’t have enough rice to feed the entire village. They had decided they would go to the district headquarter, a day’s walk away, and petition the sarkaar. I suspected that gave mother some relief, and she stopped crying. Soon their bed began to creak.

XXX

The mountain towered over our lands like a heavenly sentry, a lone snow-covered peak amid the green and brown hills alongside it. There were more peaks behind the mountain, but to reach them one had to walk even more. Even though if one looked at the peaks from the district headquarter, it seemed as if all of them stood in a file, one after another, rising above the clouds that brought us rain. We had many names for the peak — the Gurungs called it the mountain of cranes in their language, believing it to be the nesting ground of the white-feathered birds that would swoop down to the rice fields and hunt for frogs and fish; we were Chhetris, so we didn’t believe in that hogwash. Instead, the children stuck to calling it budhi himal, the old mountain, because the thumb is the eldest of all our appendages.

Budhi Himal towered over our village. Its shadow loomed large and sometimes pierced the white clouds that gathered around it. After every rain, the clouds would dissipate, and the sun would begin to paint them in the colours of its own light. The yellow would become a deep red, at times almost blood-like, the silver linings would glow like a golden sword, flaming and penetrating the heart of the clouds with every stab. The clouds would realize their futile attempts at escape, and scatter – a fluff self-destructing into smaller wisps.

Down below, the river was the lord of all that it purveyed. Snaking amid boulders the size of houses, its white rage was gently channeled into narrow streams that led to the rice fields scattered on its banks. Much later, I would see a photograph of another village, which I mistook for my own. It was a clever daguerreotype, marketing itself as the rural idyll which everyone tried to visualize when they thought of us. The river snaked through it too, irrigating the rice fields on its banks. Then, like a stairway that crisscrossed the hills, began more fields – thousands and thousands of them. And like our village, folks working on them, running their ploughs pulled by two oxen, rows of women bending down to plant the paddy in the muddy swamp.

But paddy is a sensitive plant, and requires an almost emotional smothering to give out its grain willingly. Every year, father would wake just before dawn – when shapes just began to assume their outlines and trundle his way down the only street of the village, crossing Jange’s, Sita’s, Rame’s, and Parvati’s houses before turning right and reaching the tap that had only been installed the year Rame’s elder brother drowned in the river. Next to it was the sahuji’s shop and the stone-capped path that led down to the fields, onwards to the river, and then finally to the headquarters. By the time Father reached our fields, the clouds began to break up and a tiny sliver of sunlight screamed through them. He would walk around our biggest field to the makeshift of a canal all the farmers had dug, and remove the stone that had been placed at a side-stream that prevented the water from coming into our fields. He would then place a stone on another side-stream, stopping the water to Jange’s father’s fields – a crude implementation of irrigation rules and regulations.

Behind Sahuji’s house was another path, which led to the big fig tree under which a chautara had been constructed. The headmaster’s house stood proud across it in its distinctive pink and white, marked against a backdrop of mud-orange and slate-roofed houses. One Dashain, the headmaster decided to repair his rapidly crumbling house, and the very next day he accompanied donkeys carrying yellow sacks of cement and sand to his house. As usual, my father was employed to repair the house’s façade, being the only man with a decent knowledge of stonemasonry. Two weeks later, with a liberal application of the concrete, the cracks had been filled in, and the headmaster was content that he didn’t even have to spend his Dashain budget. Then his son came from the city – Kathmandu, some said; others Dilli – and decided the house now looked ugly. My father was delighted. Once again he was employed to paint the house. Not as fit to be a painter as a stonemason, the visibly poor job he had done was enough to begin a slanging match with the headmaster’s son, until my father threatened to tie him to his ox’s tail and send him to the city like that.

The house remained like that, an incomplete job, until the rains did their bit the next year by washing off the colour from the rest of the walls anyway.

Continue Reading

1 2 3 View All →

Tags

fictionStory of the Week

Share on

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google +
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
Previous articleHereditary Voids and Our Attempts to Climb Out
Next articleMaulvi and the Christian Girl

You may also like

Billy Luck

To the Depths

Dearly Departed

Ad

In the Magazine

A Word from the Editor

Don’t cry like a girl. Be a (wo)man.

Why holding up the women in our lives can help build a nation, in place of tearing it down.

Literature

This House is an African House

"This house is an African house./ This your body is an African woman’s body..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

Shoots

"Sapling legs bend smoothly, power foot in place,/ her back, parallel to solid ground,/ makes her torso a table of support..." By Kadija Sesay.

Literature

A Dry Season Doctor in West Africa

"She presses her toes together. I will never marry, she says. Jamais dans cette vie! Where can I find a man like you?" By...

In the Issue

Property of a Sorceress

"She died under mango trees, under kola nut/ and avocado trees, her nose pressed to their roots,/ her hands buried in dead leaves, her...

Literature

What Took Us to War

"What took us to war has again begun,/ and what took us to war/ has opened its wide mouth/ again to confuse us." By...

Literature

Sometimes, I Close My Eyes

"sometimes, this is the way of the world,/ the simple, ordinary world, where things are/ sometimes too ordinary to matter. Sometimes,/ I close my...

Literature

Quarter to War

"The footfalls fading from the streets/ The trees departing from the avenues/ The sweat evaporating from the skin..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Literature

Transgendered

"Lagos is a chronicle of liquid geographies/ Swimming on every tongue..." By Jumoke Verissimo.

Fiction

Sketches of my Mother

"The mother of my memories was elegant. She would not step out of the house without her trademark red lipstick and perfect hair. She...

Fiction

The Way of Meat

"Every day—any day—any one of us could be picked out for any reason, and we would be... We’d part like hair, pushing into the...

Fiction

Between Two Worlds

"Ursula spotted the three black students immediately. Everyone did. They could not be missed because they kept to themselves and apart from the rest...."...

Essays

Talking Gender

"In fact it is often through the uninformed use of such words that language becomes a tool in perpetuating sexism and violence against women...

Essays

Unmasking Female Circumcision

"Though the origins of the practice are unknown, many medical historians believe that FGM dates back to at least 2,000 years." Gimel Samera looks...

Essays

Not Just A Phase

"...in the workplace, a person can practically be forced out of their job by discrimination, taking numerous days off for fear of their physical...

Essays

The Birth of Bigotry

"The psychology of prejudice demands that we are each our own moral police". Maria Amir on the roots of bigotry and intolerance.

Fiction

The Score

"The person on the floor was unmistakeably dead. It looked like a woman; she couldn’t be sure yet..." By Hawa Jande Golakai.

More Stories

Love in the Time of Dengue

“As monsoon season progressed into autumn and the newspapers started giving daily roundups of the death tolls, dengue dominated the lives and conversation of all Lahoris…” Story of the Week (July 11), by Naureen Amjad.

Back to top
One last love letter...

April 24, 2021

It has taken us some time and patience to come to this decision. TMS would not have seen the success that it did without our readers and the tireless team that ran the magazine for the better part of eight years.

But… all good things must come to an end, especially when we look at the ever-expanding art and literary landscape in Pakistan, the country of the magazine’s birth.

We are amazed and proud of what the next generation of creators are working with, the themes they are featuring, and their inclusivity in the diversity of voices they are publishing. When TMS began, this was the world we envisioned…

Though the magazine has closed and our submissions shuttered, this website will remain open for the foreseeable future as an archive of the great work we published and the astounding collection of diverse voices we were privileged to feature.

If, however, someone is interested in picking up the baton, please email Maryam Piracha, the editor, at maryamp@themissingslate.com.

Farewell, fam! It’s been quite a ride.

Read previous post:
Writing in Perspective – A Conversation with Ilona Yusuf

In an exclusive, The Missing Slate got the chance to sit with Pakistani poet Ilona Yusuf at the Islamabad Literature...

Close