Their Own World-Part Two

He does not even have enough money to bribe the cops to make them arrest the man who has eloped with his underage daughter. He can no longer walk about the town with an already-eloped daughter at home about whom people have become quite inquisitive. But he cannot afford to lose his face; soon the daughter is married off with three truck-load of dowry. Some loud-mouthed in the village says “ they should have given a ready-made house and a magical lamp  as well, so that they can spend the rest of their life on fornicating to breed and breed.”

Few months after the he married off his underage daughter with truckloads of dowry just to save his face the man was accepted by his friends with whom he sits every morning talking this family and that family and sometimes about local politics in E-neh Chaobi’s tea stall. Eneh Chaobi’s stall possesses no pieces of furniture, except for a morah (footstooll) on which the old and wrinkled lady sits by the earthen hearth. 


Most people think he is back on his healthy track, until one night when some underage comrades try to lob an old Chinese grenade and it explodes in their faces. The armed organization’s publicity says that Tamo Ningthem scared them with his mangy dogs and that made the underage comrades unhooked the grenade pin and in panic they forgot to lob it. He tries to explain to them that it wasn’t him and has nothing against the interest of the comrades. Soon the matter appeared sealed.

He starts working on the second floor of his unfinished house and very soon the progressive work begins to touch the third floor. Sometimes he is seen with stern-looking teenage boys who speak in authoritative tone and always have their hands in their jacket pockets giving the people around the impression that they always carry something.



He has found his mining fields. Now with the money and the armed people he knows he stands out among the simple folks. His underage daughter has returned with her husband and two constantly wailing kids to live with him. They have occupied the third floor, sometimes the wailing kids are seen stand on the balcony and through the balustrades they stick out their willies to pee straight into the courtyard.

One morning Tamo  is seen with a lady in front of a shop. 

In some Levi’s trousers she has shoved down her enormous legs, the torso encased in a  tight white T-shirt holds a dyed head with eyes swallowed up by mascara, crooked and stained teeth behind crayoned-like lips with their edges lined. 

This lady with the dyed head happens to be a distant relation whom he discovered in a corner of the Family Welfare Department of the state. Her father was born rich and became richer with invisible construction works, so he had enough money for her to attend a school affiliated to New Delhi which prepared her with her Hindi to study in the capital city. 

She partied, polished her Hindi and one morning when she woke up she realized she had graduated from college and like most Indian graduates she propelled straight to a post graduate programme to study humanities. Her father said it was a useful course and something large could be managed. 


Again she woke up amid a chattering crowd blabbering about going abroad to get a degree so that they could get a job easily in an India becoming more global in few metros. Her father agreed to her proposal to study in a foreign country; UK was too expensive for her, so was America, Canada and New Zealand too remote, but Australia seemed like a fair place when she considered its bikini-clad people on the warm beaches and hundreds of never-heard universities. 


Two years she lived there attending this class and that class, eating home-cooked meals, posing half-naked on the beaches, she even tried to go topless but courage failed her, coated her Hinglish with Aussie accent with yaar and nah popping up in every sentence, making her a laughing stock her white friends. 


That was the last time she mingled with them and also the time she boasted she could drink like a fish ,drank and talked sex since she thought it was really cool, and woke up the next morning with her virginity gone. What was terrible was that there were five guys and few lady friends and she couldn’t tell who among the men had done that thing of which she had spoken with much excitement in her drunken state.

After her Aussie days there was nothing that she could do of her own. Hair dyed in four different colours she arrived at Tuhihal Airport with two large suitcases pasted with “Australia” stickers; simpletons at the airport knew she had been to a foreign country. 


She didn’t even realise that she couldn’t accomplished anything there, and on top of that she was also humiliated, but the attention she received at the airport drowned the recent past. Her father who had dressed up just like a Pashtun man in shalwar kameez suit, vermillion smeared on his forehead and a mouth distorted with betel nuts came to pick her up with flamboyant pride. 


With a master’s degree from a renowned university in India combined with another from Australia she stood distinct when her father went to slip in few millions before she sat for state’s civil service entrance test.

Tamo Ningthem asks Tamo Tondon the shopkeeper if he has any cheese, Tondon knows nothing about it, he remains silent. The lady says it would be so easy to get in any shop in Australia.

Tamo Ningthem says, “This place is very very remote.” He asks the shopkeeper again, “ you have some tinned tuna?”

Tondon finally snaps and shouts, “Hey Ningthem why pretend when we both happen to be people who know each other inside. Take that shit somewhere! ”

Ningthem offended before his guest barks back, “You have to learn some manners. It’s shame that people from my village make me lose my face in front of such foreign-return lady!”

The dyed lady interjects in Meiteilon mixed with Hindi and English, all forces out as a toddler’s incoherent language. This makes Tondon think that she is in fact making fun of him. He gives a thundering shout which springs from his fury, “Getta hell out of here ! And take that blabbering of  Moon’s language to your shit hole!”

People mill about for a while and intervene and soon the fury dwindles and the enmity between the two tamos ends with smiles. The lady, too, has forgotten the whole affair and on the way back to Tamo Ningthem’s she blabbers, “Oh, I have to present a paper on exploitation of children in the state. Phew! I wouldn’t know how I will manage it Meiteilon. You should wish me luck, since it is really important for the people of the state. Had it been Melbourne it would have been a lot easier. I sometimes think I am doing the right job in the wrong place. Here people have no self-respect and they hate their own culture.”

After few hours she rolls out her hatchback car and on the road it is deterred by two armoured vehicles. From the front one jumps out a sub-inspector, his tiny face almost concealed by a pair of Aviator Ray-ban sunglasses, one hand busy adjusting them as though they don’t fit his face, while the another on his hip where a pistol gleams. His sunglasses-concealed is instantly recognised by the dyed-lady, and the lady sticks out her head and bladders something in the Moon's language, the man guffaws and greets her in another incoherent language. Had someone observed the gestures and the language between them, the person would have felt that he were on another planet.

This sub-inspector is someone whom she met when she was in the capital city of India in their student days. They partied together, classed themselves better breed among those louhwai( country) people. But the man’s father was disappointed since his son couldn’t finish college. 


He returned home after five years with the same degree with which he had left his hometown after high school. Without a university degree it was nowhere near possible for his director father to bribe his ministers for a decent government job. So with the high school degree the highest that suited the man was this sub-inspector job which was managed with one million rupee. 


He’s been a known terror for his fake encounters and willingness to absorb as much dough he can for anything, from sparing a life to making a tarnishing document disappear. With an official salary of ten thousand a month he has built a house of four millions. 


Though he has installed a huge matchbox with few openings his deeds haven’t permitted him any peace at home; people like to settle scores with him. The matchbox stands as a structure to be identified with him. He sips confiscated liquor till his eyes become bloodshot, and hits the road in his armored vehicle to do the bidding of his master and also to re-enact the action-packed films he grew up watching.

If mainland India has produced its grammatically correct people in suits and boot-able kind, then Kangleipak has produced its third-rated pidgin-blabbering who shrink in suits and a completely disconnected people who haven’t changed a thing in the past several centuries, but are visited by misfortunes and battered before they can even think of crawling out of their ancient domains.


More to come...........