Free Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories by Janice Pariat

ten miles away from our side of town. Mama Kyn was lying on the ground, facing the stream, too weak to move. He had to be carried on a stretcher that my father brought from the hospital. Back at home, he fell into a fever, and muttered strange names, calling many times for Bolen and Hipster.
    ‘Who are these people?’ asked Aunt Ruth.
    I held my silence.
    While he was convalescing, Mama Kyn would sit outside his shack, sipping tea, and often I would keep him company. The broom was always stationed by his door like a sentry on duty. As usual, we didn’t talk much, this time not even about fishing, but I thought if I were with him, perhaps he wouldn’t disappear so often.
    One clear afternoon in early spring, we were alone in the backyard; there were no football matches in progress and the air filled only with the fragrance of sweet peas.
    ‘Mama, when you—go away, do you remember anything?’ I asked.
    A small smile spread over his face. ‘I am catching Golden Mahseer. They’re all around me, flying through the air, leaping into water. I reach out, one after another…they lie in my hand like pieces of the sun.’
    When Mama Kyn vanished for the last time, people in the household spent days blaming each other for removing the broom. ‘It must have been Gordon, coming back late at night and thinking it’d be funny.’ Aunt Ruth disapproved of her younger brother’s lifestyle. ‘Maybe Bah Lam,’ suggested my mother, ‘he’s getting a little forgetful these days.’ ‘One of those neighbourhood kids playing a prank,’ said my grandmother, ‘they’re always jumping in and out of our garden.’ Suspicion even fell on us, but Keith, Stef, and I solemnly denied it. For days, accusations flew around like sharp poisoned arrows. Nobody thought of the possibility that he’d done so himself. No one saw how the broom probably didn’t keep anything away.
    Many years have passed and the rooms at the great old house have gradually emptied. Each generation passing on—Mena, my grandparents, Bah Lam, my mother and father, succumbing to the slow, crushing wheel of time. Others, like me and Keith, moved away to our wives’ homes in other parts of town. Only Stef and her family remain. At times, I visit and notice all the changes that have taken place. The shacks at the edge of the garden are now smart cement houses rented out to strangers; the kitchen has lost its open wood fires and soot-blackened walls to gas stoves, melamine and fresh coats of weather-proof paint. Kamra rim, the original room, has been bolstered by hardy new planks. Outside, though, some things remain the same—football is still played in the backyard, albeit with better equipment, and my grandmother’s vegetable garden is still tended by someone with careful, loving hands. One afternoon, I landed up to find a stash of things being emptied from the storage room—school books and notepads, a rusty typewriter, a small tin trunk. I picked up a fishing rod with a broken line, it lay cold and heavy in my hands.
    ‘Is that yours?’ It was Stef’s younger son. He watched me, curious and alert.
    ‘No, not mine.’ I told him about Mama Kyn.
    ‘Where did he go?’ he asked.
    I tried to explain about the spirits that lived in the waters, who followed us home and beckoned us back, the ones that made us fall in love.
    The ten-year-old looked incredulous. ‘Only old people believe in all that.’
    Occasionally, when I go fishing, I sit on the bank, or wade into the water, hoping to catch a glimpse of something wondrous. What does it take, I think, to have faith in things beyond the ordinary? Age? Childlike wonder? Is it right to cling so fiercely to the world? As they absorb my solitude, the silence of the distant hills and the drifting indifference of the clouds, I think of disappearances, the ones that surprise us and those that don’t. At first, I am steeped in sadness. Then I notice how the air fills with cicadas, the trees cast their trembling shadows