Bitter Wormwood

all.

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ART

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BIRTH

Mose was born in 1937. No one knew the date but it was in late September just as the fields were being readied to be harvested. His mother, Vilaü, was in the fields, tying together the stalks of rice that would be harvested the following week. Suddenly she felt cramping pains low in her abdomen. She tried to continue working, but the pains came again and intensified. Their field was an hour and a half away from the village, so the young mother birthed her son in the field shed.

Vilaü’s mother-in-law, Khrienuo, helped her to wash the infant with a little water from the stream. Then she sent her daughter-in-law home with her infant son wrapped in a little bundle of cloth. No further ceremony to it. Khrienuo stayed on a bit to finish the rest of the work. Their neighbours were not surprised when they saw Vilaü walking past their fields with the baby. Women birthing while out in the fields was not an uncommon phenomenon in those days.

Vilaü bathed her baby properly once she had reached home. She made sure to remove all traces of mucus from his mouth and nose as she had been taught. The midwife had heard the baby’s cries. She came running.

"Hou, Vilanuo, you should not have gone to the field today," she lightly admonished the young mother,

Didn’t you have any dreams last night?

I did but I thought it would be in the evening, replied Vilaü. I really needed to get the paddy ready for the harvest. Besides, I did not have my pains until late in the morning, by which time I was already at work.

Oh well, you’ll just have to be more alert next time, said the midwife, as she placed the baby on her lap to examine him.

How thick his hair is! she exclaimed as she continued her examination. Look at that forehead! Ohh...this one is going to be a warrior one day, I can just tell.

"Oh, Anyie, how can you tell?" asked Vilaü.

Look at that wide forehead!It means he is going to wield a spear.

Or a gun, said his mother thoughtfully.

The midwife insisted that Vilaü should go to bed. She then began to cook the evening meal. The baby was restless now and pushed away with his tongue, the water that Vilaü was feeding him. He made little cries of complaint.

That is a hungry cry, he needs milk, try and feed him, said the midwife. Vilaü clumsily offered her breast and he began to feed voraciously.

See? If you pay attention you will know when he is asking for food, or wanting to sleep or be changed. Babies are not very complicated. Vilaü smiled at the midwife and quietly fed her baby.

You should think of a name for him soon. I am sure your mother-in-law, Khrienuo, will have thought of something by now. Our people always name our children as soon as they can, because naming them makes them members of the clan and protects them from being taken by spirits.

Oh really? I didn’t know it protected them from the spirits.

Knowledge of these things comes slowly, with life, with experience, said the midwife with a smile.

The chicken broth was soon ready. She served her two cupfuls of the rich soup in a deep tin bowl.

Drink as much as you can of the soup, she said to Vilaü. It helps your body to make more milk.

Vilaü ate well as she was quite hungry after the birthing. She was tired too and lay back after eating her fill.

Khrienuo came home soon after and the midwife left saying, You are in safe hands now.

That evening, Khrienuo had a name for the child. We will call him Moselie, it means one-who-will-meet-life-without-guile. It is a good name. It means that he will never plot to harm another person.

It’s an unusual name, Mother. I have never heard it before, said Vilaü thoughtfully. It’s a good name, I like it, she added.

The two women spent the next days caring for the baby. Khrienuo was a widow. She had been widowed for ten years now. She lived in the house adjoining theirs and they jointly owned the fields. Vilaü’s husband, Luo-o, was very pleased their first child was a boy. He happily took over the task of harvesting the field so his wife did not have to return to field-work in the next month. It was quite usual for new mothers to strap their babies on their backs and work at the fields. Harvest-time was such a crucial time and if there was a sudden storm the grain could fall off the stalks and be lost. People worked faster in the harvesting week. Vilaü was grateful to be spared the hard labour as her baby was growing rapidly and seemed to want feeding very frequently.

Anyie: maternal aunt

THE TREE RITUAL

Luo-o was a proud father. He liked to carry his son around the village square. Moselie was a healthy baby. Everyone called him Mose and the name stuck. At seven months he was crawling on the mud floor of his parents’ house. He always needed careful watching because he had a habit of picking up small objects from the floor, and trying to eat them. The months passed quickly and he was soon waddling behind his mother. She carried him to the fields and back, but kept him close to her as she worked in the water-logged fields in raintime. The toddler could play all day in the fields and was none the worse for it.

"Hou! what a strong constitution he has!" remarked his grandmother, Khrienuo. This pleased his mother greatly.

He has never been sick, not even for a day, Vilaü said proudly. Remember when he had a little fever at eight months? That was just because he was teething and after that he has never been sick.

Good, may he soon be blest with siblings, Khrienuo said and smiled. Both knew that child-bearing women were expected to have more children within a gap of two years or one and a half years.

Mose had now begun to say his first words. Ta, Ta, he called out to his grandmother whenever he saw her. He had shortened the word Atsa for grandmother to Ta. Khrienuo would proudly pick him up and give him a treat. She liked to carry him round the village in the evening and he would point out to old women and call out Ta, Ta. People enjoyed seeing the two of them together for Mose was a happy child, smiling happily when anyone approached them. For a week or two, the only word he spoke was, Ta but in the next weeks he quickly followed it up with his own names for his parents.

Luo-o now spent more time with the men of his age-group. They were planning a festival to celebrate a new gate for the clan. This would be a whole tree, ritually selected and cut and dragged from the forest with a great deal of ceremony.

The seer has shown us the exact tree, he explained to his wife and mother. It is deep in the forest but there are no other big trees nearby so it will be easy enough to find it.

Where is it, son? Khrienuo asked.

Towards Dzübo, it is about a four hour walk from here, so we will be gone two days.

Be careful, son, those are areas which used to be known as unclean regions in the old days.

We will be careful, Mother. The seer warned us too.

Hmm, has he had any bad dreams? Khrienuo questioned.

He didn’t say anything. However, he warned us thrice to be careful. But the clan badly needs a new gate. I’m sure it will be all right. There are twenty of us. We will find the tree and cut it down after the elder has done the neccesary rituals. Then we will come home on the second day. It will be the duty of the whole clan to drag it home.

Well son, when a seer gives a warning, no one should take it lightly, said his mother.

We will be careful, Luo-o promised.

On the morning of his departure, Luo-o was restless and impatient. He tore about the house looking for his dao-holder and when he had found it, he put it on hastily and bid his wife and son a quick farewell.

The party returned the same evening but not before one of their clansmen had run ahead with the sad news. Luo-o had been crushed by the tree when they were felling it. He had died instantly. The tree was abandoned, even though it had been ritually selected, because it was taboo to use it after it had claimed a life. Vilaü screamed at the news. Her screams brought Khrienuo running and shouting, No! Not Luo-o, let it not be true!

But it was only too true and the wailing of the two women alerted the rest of the clan to the tragedy that had struck them.

After Luo-o’s burial, the household was hushed by this sudden invasion of death and even the young Mose seemed to sense that something was very wrong. He wandered around the house and called, Apfu, Apfu. Vilaü did not know what to tell him in the beginning, and she would burst out crying. The little boy began to associate his questions with the sadness of his mother and stopped asking after some time.

Vilaü mourned her husband for years. It made her alternate in her treatment of her young son. Some days she let him do as he wished. On other days she was quite harsh with him. She rarely smiled now. Her clanspeople saw her beside her husband’s grave frequently, weeping.

Luo-o’s death had hit his family very hard indeed. Khrienuo was just as grieved as Vilaü by the loss of her only son, but she took it more wisely. She had had her share of losses in life. She said to those close to her: If life is hard to you, you simply harden yourself so its griefs are easier to bear. That is the only way to meet it.

Khrienuo was very loving to her grandson. She saw the bitterness in her daughter-in-law and knew it would take a long time to heal. She tried to compensate for it by giving young Mose more of her time, and cooking meals for them as often as she could. Vilaü was not an insensitive woman. She saw these efforts made by her mother-in-law and was grateful. In the first year, Mose seemed to prefer staying at his grandmother’s house. The boy sensed the dismal atmosphere in his own house.

At his grandmother’s he played happily with his mud pellets and tried to shoot them out of a small slingshot. Khrienuo would laughingly teach him to place a pellet in the middle of the slingshot, and pull it back so that the pellet shot out. He would manage a shot or two, but would cry if he had let go of the rubber too fast and it slammed back and hit his finger painfully. Bad, bad sling, he would shout and throw the slingshot away and run crying to his grandmother. But in minutes he would have forgotten the pain and picked up the slingshot again to try and master it.

THE JAPANESE ARE COMING!

Mose turned five in 1942. He had made friends with a neighbour’s son, Neituo, who was the same age as he. The two became inseparable. Most mornings Mose would run out of the house and be at Neituo’s house as soon as his friend woke up.

Come back soon, food’s nearly ready, his mother would shout after him. But she knew she would have to go across half an hour later to bring him back to eat the morning meal. Vilaü let him go, knowing that he would be well behaved at other people’s houses, never eating their food and saying the right things at the right time. Neighbours often complimented her on her son’s good manners. She had taught him well. She and Khrienuo had decided that he was ready for school the next year, but when 1943 came, the war closed down the schools in Kohima.

Along with their clanspeople, Mose, his mother and grandmother fled the Japanese invasion of their village. Their small family sought refuge in the village of Rukhroma. They were given an abandoned house to stay in and the villagers shared their food with them. Mose could only hazily recollect this period of his life. When the area where they were sheltering in was shelled, they left the village. His maternal uncle had carried him on his back, and they had trekked several jungle paths and camped in the woods. He had one vivid memory of seeing a war plane crash with a deafening sound into some rocks at Zubza. It was such an exciting sight for him and he had wished they would see more planes crashing.

By the time the war was over and the schools reopened, Mose was seven. A quiet boy, he was the smallest in his class at the Mission School. Mose liked school and was a quick learner which pleased his teachers a lot. This boy will go far, predicted one of the male teachers.

Mose was always accompanied by Neituo. Of the two, Mose was the more diligent. Neituo was not unintelligent but he was lazy. School seemed tedious to him after the initial excitement of the first two months rubbed off. There were ten of them in the first class. Four girls and six boys. Their teacher was strict with them, but gave them sweets if they had learnt their alphabets and numbers. The missionary who ran the school was also very strict. Mose was in awe of him. The older students often went to his house to run errands after school. They spoke confidently to him in English. Mose understood only snatches of what they said. He dearly wished to speak as they did.

School over! he declared in English when he came home in the afternoon. As he said it, he flung his bag on the mud floor of their house. It made his mother and grandmother laugh out loud.

Oh, so now we shall all speak in English to each other, shall we? his grandmother asked.

Yes, Mose answered with a big smile.

What is your name? Khrienuo asked her grandson in English.

Grandmother! You never told me you could speak English! Mose burst out in Tenyidie.

Well, you never asked me before, Khrienuo responded with a smile.

Mother, how about you? Did you ever learn to speak English? Mose wanted to know.

No, I had no time for that nonsense, Vilaü replied. There was no school when I was young.

Well, how did Grandmother learn it then? the boy asked.

Oh, ha ha, Khrienuo laughed, when the men got drunk they could all speak English, and that is what I picked up. Our neighbours would come home drunk on Saturday nights and two of them would always get into a fight because one would ask, What is your name? and the other would reply, No tokai! The one asking would not give up and in the end they would be so angry that they would go at each other with their fists. Before we learnt what it meant, we thought the question was a very offensive one. But it was not that, it was actually their drunkenness that led to their quarreling over such an innocent question.

They all laughed at this story. Khrienuo explained to Mose,

The two of them had worked with the white soldiers as labourers so they picked up some English words from that time. That was how most of the men learnt English.

Now show us what you have learned at school today, said his mother.

Mose happily unpacked his schoolbag and laid out his drawings. The two women praised his drawings of animals and people. In his other notebook, he had written down his alphabets in big letters.

Can you read that to us? asked his mother, Your grandmother and I could learn English from you!

Mose laughed at the thought that he might someday teach his mother and grandmother. He pictured the two of them sitting in small chairs like the ones they sat on at school and trying to write on the small tables in front.

You’d never fit into the chairs, he protested.

What do you mean, son? asked his mother.

If you went to school to learn English, you would be too big to sit in our chairs, he explained.

Oh that? said his grandmother, We would bring our own chairs to school.

The boy smiled at that idea.

Mose was soon distracted when their neighbour’s cat slipped into their kitchen.

Drat that cat, must be trying to steal meat again, Vilaü said. The boy sprang up after the cat and chased it out the door. In turn, the cat ran into the chickens outside, so there was an almighty racket with the hens squawking and the cat mewling as it raced