Name Place Animal Thing by Daribha Lyndem

Author:Daribha Lyndem [Lyndem, Daribha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zubaan Publishers Pvt. Ltd.
Published: 2020-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Bishar Mary

Bishar Mary, who we would soon call just Bi, came to the house when I had just turned thirteen. I never knew her last name. I remember going to my grandmother’s house one evening after school and seeing her in the kitchen by the sink as she washed rice. ‘Kong, kumno?’ I asked her politely.

‘Kumne,’ she greeted, smiling cheerfully, her voice mellifluous and her eyes twinkling. I called her Kong because it was the polite term used for any woman whose name you did not know or felt too awkward to use. That’s what we called a maid, or a shopkeeper, or the lady you sat next to in church as you asked her to share with you the one hymn book in the pew. But when I moved closer, I saw that I knew her.

‘Oh phi lah wan?’ I asked surprised.

‘Hooid,’ she replied.

This was Bi who I had first met in Mairang, my grandfather’s village. She was to be my grandmother’s new maid. I never referred to her as that when talking about her. I always said ‘helper’ or ‘nongiarap’. One time when referring to a maid I said ‘nong trei’, meaning a person who works. My mother corrected me, told me the term had a pejorative tone, and I only used the word ‘helper’ from then.

Bi stayed in that house for the next decade and longer, until the time that I got married, taking care of my grandmother and everyone else who stepped foot in the house. When she first arrived she was not more than twenty six. She was small and lithe, and her light skin was covered in freckles around her cheeks. We called freckles ‘eit thyllah’ which means flea droppings, and when I saw her face the phrase made sense. Bi had very long frizzy hair that she always kept in a bun. Her hair was thin, and the bun was barely the size of a baby’s fist.

At twenty four, Bi had already had two children, both daughters. Her husband, if that was what you could call him, had left her alone to take care of their girls, her aging mother and herself. When she moved to work at my grandmother’s house in Shillong, her daughters Diane and Bari stayed back in Mairang with her mother. They went to school there and would come to visit during the holidays. They grew up without their mother raising them, while she was in the city raising us.

Bi and her husband were not ‘married’ in the modern sense, although he was the father of her children. A lot of people in the villages, and many in the city, never performed any ceremonies to formalize a relationship between a man and a woman. There was never a need. When I was younger I always wondered about Kong Kyntiew, who stayed down the road from Mei’s house. She had a baby before she was married.

‘Why were you not invited for the wedding?’ I asked Mei soon after Kong Kyntiew and her boyfriend had moved in together.

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