A Moron's Life

By Nameirakpam Bobo Meitei *

Darkness is where we have been and blinding darkness is what courts us at night. It doesn't make any difference, we were born to it and we grew up in it. It's on our bones, on our minds, on our skins, and it contaminates what we wear.

We are tainted and we didn't know until we were forced to travel across the mountain-ringed valley. We couldn't live there, we couldn't live among them, we are a different people. They want us dead in the name of their institution.

To them we are a flat-nosed, narrow-eyed people. They have been killing us, not all of them, though, but their paranoid brothers in uniform. They say "Arey, we have come here for democracy and in democracy certain unwanted occurrences do occur, but what we are aiming at is the eventual scenario."

We fear them, but we entertain no respect for them, and we are quite alert in their presence, making sure we don't fall onto their suspicious radar. Anybody could be a victim of suspicion and many have already been.

Thousands overlap thousands, and we don't bury them, you know. The one good thing about cremation is your loved ones are consumed by the furious fire and after few hours there is nothing left, perhaps the memories, then new memories dawn upon us quick and they move in and force the old ones out, they slosh for a while and by the time they are about to settle they are conducted in the same manner they conducted the old ones.

My grandmother counting her children on her frail and wrinkled fingers, and when she can't count them her eyes squint, says "I never thought your father would survive cholera and typhoid. Before him we lost three. We didn't know about doctors. We needed to have more kids because we wouldn't know how many would be taken away from us."

Now my mother sitting below a hanging hurricane lantern, her enormous silhouette against the colourless wall says "Son, my dear son. One isn't enough. If those democratic soldiers took away our only child we wouldn't have anyone to live for. We also had to calculate how many would be shot and kidnapped by those revolutionary extortionists. When you have a daughter she could be raped and dumped somewhere, but we would certainly find her body. But a son, a son, I don't think we should ever hope of seeing him again if they picked him."

My mother's calculation is not uncommon in our place, and it is a calculation which has been imposed on them. We never try to recollect, we overlook our present, our eyes are fixed on the vague future. Those who can afford and know where they can find that vague future have crossed the mountains.

They have left and they have settled in some foreign settings and they are never to return, for they have discovered that the where we have been is morbid, hopeless, barbaric, etc. we are stranded in our own setting, we are trapped between what some people's "demoncrazy" and "defunct revolutionary charade."

We don't like it, not a single bit of it, despite our apparent dislike we have been made parties to their charade. You know they need us, without us how could they carry on. Those kins of ours from the other side of the world, we don't really know whether there is one or not, say we are in a nasty world and we all are soaked in the blood of our siblings.

We have been here and it's our colour, even the bloodied earth is ours. When it splashes all over the earth you know it's your blood, on your earth, your own blood colouring your land. The sun will rise and it will be seen between the monstrous clouds, it may try to punch through in vain, some of it will curdle and when it is almost curdled torrential rain will wet it and when it's joined the streams heading toward the canals and rivers the thick fog will arrive to conceal its insignificant departure.

They say we are a pack of redundant morons, may we are, we don't have time to attach importance to what they say, before sunrise we have to be in the paddy-fields and before sunset we have to herd our cattle and at night, only when sit by the fire we know we miss them, while we are missing them we also have to court the possibility that we might be visited by them, "demoncrazy army", barging in and petrifying us because they are suspicious, and "rotting comrades", smiling at us while cocking their pistols, which they bought with the money they forced us to pay.

They want everything we have, we give them everything and, you know, people always want more, and they ask for us. Our lives.

We are morons, we know, our land is uncivilized, we know, but to give our lives to them is something we can't afford. Since we said this in our shattered voice they say they like our lives more than before, now they force us to give. When you are forced you can only holler, try to reason, but those seeking your lives are adamant, what could you do?

You may bite them at their hands, punch them few times, all that they need to do is to pull the trigger, that trigger, you know, and what comes out so quickly through the cold barrel comes to you, it has no sympathy, it goes to wherever they want it to go and it does its work perfectly; pierces through the parts, your mother rubs, and ploughs through and leaves you through other parts.

We are always fascinated by the miracle modern technology has enabled people. A swing could chop off one life now you just need one pull to get rid of tens. No wonder the kids who were quite happy with origami and kites now begin asking for those Chinese toy guns. I shouldn't be telling you these, but it's too late.

I'm not like those story-tellers in blue suit, polished shoes with eyes behind thick sunglasses. We are a colourless people, our feet and hands are caked in mud, faces burned with sun, houses roofed with thatch, foods are cooked on earthen stove releasing massive smoke which hangs as strips of soot in our kitchens, blackens the colourless walls.

Our stories are told within those blackened walls, below the roof overhung with strips of soot.

Nameirakpam Bobo Meitei

* Nameirakpam Bobo Meitei, a resident of Bangkok, contributes to e-pao.net regularly. The writer can be contacted at bobomeitei(at)hotmail(dot)com . This article was webcasted on August 27 2010.