| Subi Taba | July 2025 | Short Story |
A solitary woman named Lily was afloat over the shallow waters of the Pakke river, flowing quietly through the heart of the forgotten township of Seijosa. She looked at the sky from the gravelly riverbed and wondered about the mechanics of drowning. A person drowns when their body loses its balance in water, panics in an attempt to stay afloat and in that struggle to restore its lost balance, the body drowns. Eventually, the body is found floating in the water that drowned it.
It was impossible to drown in the Pakke river, Lily thought as she turned over and tried to submerge her head inside the crystal-clear water. But during a rare monsoon flood, the sluggish Pakke did manage to swallow three people and fifteen houses, and sent dozens of cows floating towards the plains of Assam. Before the flood, it was a small stream, but after the flood, it changed its course and became an iconic river with a long stretch of sandy beach that invited Assamese picnickers during the winter season.
When the air cooled down, Lily emerged out of the water, carefully stepping over the slippery river stones. She sat down on a rock to change her clothes and dry her long wet hair. A brown hare with big round eyes hopped along the sandy bank, hiding behind the silver grass that shed white feathery blooms against the billowing river breeze. Flocks of great hornbills flew across the Pakke. The hornbills, no matter where they spent their day scavenging, always flew back to their roosting site before nightfall. Just after the last hornbill made it across the river, the yellow sun began to crawl behind the mountains.
Lily looked at the fading outlines of the mountains. A dark cloak of twilight settled over the landscape, welcoming the faint trumpeting of wild elephants in the distant wilderness of the Pakke Tiger Reserve. As she stood, tiny fish darted in the green algal puddles. She picked up a white grainy river stone for her baths and walked back home on the sandy pathway, listening to the carol songs from the neighbourhood church. She walked past the Nepali woman who was sitting in her wooden shop by the roadside selling steamed momos. The woman’s son was playing a car racing game on her mobile phone. The cobbled road was blocked by lazy cows, who would not move out of the way. Lily walked between the cows, who were chewing their cud and looking leisurely at the darkness around them. She reached her small white house surrounded by robust jackfruit and mango trees, and an idle yellow pond in the backyard. She switched on the light in the veranda.
The potted purple maid flowers stood in welcoming silence near the doorsteps. Lily leant down and picked up the fallen petals and smelt them. The blossoms had no fragrance, like their souls had faded. She walked inside her house. The yellow pomelo she had bought a week ago from the weekly market was still uneaten and sat on the corner of the dining table. The rice beer she had prepared five days ago was fermenting slowly inside the kitchen, releasing incipient wafts of alcohol inside the house. She cooked rice and fish curry with tomatoes and onions. After dinner, she poured herself a pint of the slightly immature rice beer and walked towards the veranda with her shop’s accounts book.
People were moving out of Seijosa to the nearby towns and cities, and her grocery shop hardly had any customers left. People with cars drove to the nearby Itakhola market and Tezpur market to purchase their groceries from bigger retail shops. She climbed up on a reclining cane chair and opened her accounts book. The sales record of the past few months was a source of major dismay. The only things she had sold were Maggi noodles, tomatoes and school notebooks. As she finished the calculations, she realized her shop was running on losses, and if it went on, she would have barely enough money left to refill the empty shelves. She shoved aside the accounts book and took a sip of the rice beer.
Stars had filled up the dark sky, and the moon hung low, peering down at her through the roof shades. She gazed at the alluring moon, briefly forgetting about her financial woes, and felt fascinated by the soft milky moonlight. She kept looking at the glimmer of the distant stars till eddies of longing curled up inside her like a purring cat. Once under the same starry skies, before the last embers of the New Year bonfire had died, she had lain on the same cane chair, curled around her husband’s warm body, talking about their future. She could not recall the exact words of the conversation, but she remembered the feeling. It was the feeling of an invincible togetherness.
She watched time slowly trail along with the moving stars. Some regrets rose out of the roof shades. We should have moved out of Seijosa when we had the time. We should have grasped our moment and set up our lives in the small corners of a quaint city when we had the will. We shouldn’t have waited too long, Tamar. I don’t know what to do with my life now. I have forgotten what it feels like to be a woman, to wear a smile or a perfume.
The ghosts of the past crept into her dreams like a silent scuttling spider with beady eyes. She and her husband are newly married, alive and breathing together inside a boathouse floating on a small lake. It is nighttime. The waterfowls have stopped quacking, the frogs have stopped croaking, and all the worldly distractions have slunk away like unattended lovers. They are intertwined in a sweaty embrace over the tranquil waters of the lake. It is a warm summer night, and her husband’s nose is lined with tiny dots of sweat. Below their bed, under the web of reeds and water hyacinths, the fish are eavesdropping on their conversations and swim away mouthing bubbly poesies to each other under the faint glow of the moonlight.
Excerpted with author’s permission from ‘Love And Longing In Seijosa’ in Tales from the Dawn-Lit Mountains: Stories from Arunachal Pradesh, Subi Taba, Penguin India.
Illustration by Jompi Ete
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Subi Taba is an author from Arunachal Pradesh, India. She was awarded the South Asia Speaks 2021 literary fellowship and won Penguin Random House’s The Perfect Pitch Season 1. Her debut fiction, Tales from the Dawn-lit Mountains is published by Penguin Random House, India. Besides being an author, she works as an Agriculture Development Officer.
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Feature Image provided by the author
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