[Assam] Story for Grant/ A Granduncle's story

[Chan Mahanta]

Hi Grant:

Here is a story from my childhood for you. It is kind of long, but I 
hope you would like it:

I was about eight years old at the time. Our school was about half a 
mile from home. It was a small, one roomed hut, with dirt floor, 
mud-plastered bamboo walls and thatched roof framed with bamboo. 
Thatch is a kind of long and sturdy grass, which people used to make 
roofs with, after drying them. We had two teachers and two 
blackboards, where about fifty pupils from Grades A, B, 1st, 2nd and 
3rd. sat, in different groups, on the dirt floor,on mats that we 
brought with us from home. There were no bathrooms and no drinking 
water ,other than a pond in the front yard, where we drank from on 
hot days, with our hands cupped together.

When we were in second grade ( I think), there was a vaccination 
drive by the  State Public Health Department, funded by the World 
Health Organization, for immunizing children against the dreaded 
disease tuberculosis ( TB). The vaccine was called BCG, short for 
Bacillus Calmett-Guerin. The vaccination was done at another little 
school about two miles away from ours. All of us kids and the 
teachers walked about a mile and a half along the little but historic 
dirt road, that linked a large number of little villages separated by 
rice paddies, which ran from the capital of the Kingdom to the 
mountains in the south, and was called Khorikotia Ali ( Woodcutter's 
Trail). From the road we took a detour of another half a mile or so 
to the vaccination site along a railroad track.

We got our shots. OUCH--it stung too,but I did not cry.Then we were 
heading back home in groups of twos and threes and even more. After 
we got off from the railroad tracks and got back on Woodcutter's 
Trail, I got separated from the other kids who went to their homes in 
a different direction and I was trudging along the road all by 
myself. All of a sudden I heard a strange, beep-beep-beep sound 
coming from the rear, which was getting louder by the moment. It 
appeared
that the sound was from something over the road. I looked back and 
saw nothing but the sound was getting very loud and scary. Suddenly I 
saw this huge dragonfly looking thing with a large bulb like head 
appear over the groves of bamboo tree-tops that line the 
roadway,flying, it seemed, straight towards me. And that noise, now 
ear-splitting, going braap-braap-braap-braap ---!

Panic struck me!

I ran, as fast as my little legs would let me, towards the only house 
on my right about a hundred yards away, surrounded by waterlogged 
rice paddies. Thinking back, I probably ran that distance faster than 
anyone I would have ever known. I reached the gate, which was made 
of horizontal bamboo poles spaced about a foot or so apart on bamboo 
posts with holes in them, and are called 'nongola' in Assamese, my 
native language. To open the gate you slide the poles through the 
holes. But there was no time for that. I slipped right through the 
gaps and crossed the little front yard and almost flew into the 
house, struggling for breath. In those days and even today, people in 
the villages of Assam leave their front doors open. There is no fear 
of strangers . And there is always someone in the house. Since there 
were no door-bells, and knocking on mud-plastered walls or the woven 
bamboo-mat door panel don't make much of a sound, if a stranger comes 
visiting, he or she would make a coughing sound or clear the throat 
to indicate there is someone at the door. Later I learnt that  city 
folks made fun of that coughing sound as the "Assamese calling-bell".

Anyway, to make a long story short, the man of the house found me, 
this breathless kid barging into the house with panic in his eyes, 
just about when this dragon-fly-from-hell flew past the house. He 
knew what was coming after me.
He told me it was  kind of a 'ura-jahaaz'( flying ship). He also knew 
who I was, since took his bullock cart along the trail by our house 
every now and then to the railroad station, carrying old ladies to 
the train, or delivering rice  or firewood to the business-people who 
lived near the railroad station, and we would always ask him where he 
is going or what he is delivering in his ox-cart.
He told me not to worry now and go on home.

That evening, my older cousin,who passed away a couple of years back, 
told me that the scary, giant dragonfly was a helicopter. An oil 
company owned it and it was making seismological surveys looking for 
oil. Later on they found oil near there, and today it is called the 
Geleki Oilfields.

Now I hope you won't make fun of St. Louis Koka calling  me such a 
scardy-cat, OK :-)?

Take care.

Love,

SLK