Mountain Tales by Saumya Roy

Author:Saumya Roy [Roy, Saumya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2021-07-08T00:00:00+00:00

14

As Eid approached in Banjara Galli, fragrant smells wafted into Moharram Ali’s house and filled his wife Yasmin’s head. She had nothing to offer in return for the food she smelled. She owed its makers money. She told them fasting gave her a headache and she needed to sleep through the evenings to get over it. But she didn’t fast.

Moharram Ali had tried to work further along the mountains, through the fires. Many months later, when I met him, he dismissed the smoke and changed air in Banjara Galli that were unsettling life in the lanes, in his airy, elegant manner. Mountain air doesn’t ‘suit’ everybody, he told me. But he had worked there most of his life – a bit of smoke didn’t bother him, he said. He would not admit that things had changed, that the mountain air no longer suited his family. As security tightened, Moharram Ali dropped into the family’s house at night to pick up money that he said he had left behind in his hasty flight. When Yasmin tried calling him, to ask for Eid expenses, his phone was switched off or went unanswered. Friends stalked their home to retrieve loans they had given him. But they never saw him. The legend of Shaitan Singh – of Moharram Ali’s invincible luck – had flamed out untraceably, gutting his family.

The market stayed open all night on Chaand Raat, the first night of the crescent moon that would bring Eid. The settlements glowed against the dark mountains, and pickers spilled into the market to bask in the moonlight, shop with whatever money they had and eat. Others set up stalls to sell bangles, henna cones, spice bundles to layer into pulaos and edible silver to set, quivering, on sweets, hoping to earn money away from the trash. Hyder Ali had told me that Shaitans, creatures of the dark, stayed away in the glow of that night.

Moharram Ali returned Yasmin’s call that evening; she had not wanted her boys to be draped in the mountain filth while their friends wore new white kurtas for Eid prayers. In the months since their debts had mounted and Moharram Ali had left, Mehrun and Ashra’s clothes had inched up and tightened till they no longer fitted them. He would take the girls out to buy new clothes, he said, and would send her a set. Yasmin did not know how to tell Sharib, who was filled with rage against his father, that there was nothing left for him or his brother. She went, instead, to ask friends for a loan.

Mehrun and Ashra met Moharram Ali in the market, which was luminescent with fairy lights and bejewelled shoppers. Mehrun wore a sullen pout, thinking about everything Hera and Sharib said about their father. Ashra held Moharram Ali’s hand and kept up a chatter that he could barely hear as they wove through the crowd. They passed butcher’s shops without customers, with long, bony carcasses that hung, partly carved, for days and attracted mostly flies.

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