Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories Read Online Free

empty. In ten years of clinical service, no matter how late, he’d never turned away anyone who’d sat there. Sometimes his patients travelled for days from their villages deep in the folded valleys of Sohra; he knew for he’d visit occasionally to distribute medicine and clothing donated by the Welsh missionaries. He hadn’t been there recently though—with the outbreak of the second great war four years ago, these rations were hard to come by. Yet Father Bevan, the church elder, did his best, as he said, ‘for God and his people’.
    Usually Doctor Wallang would head indoors to his study, but this evening, with the last of the fine autumn weather, he decided to stroll down the garden path towards the main road. He passed the vegetable patch tended by his wife, and, to his left, a stone wall overhung with ‘knupmawiang. He liked these large creeper orchids with their flat, ribbed leaves and pale yellow flowers that opened during the rains and blossomed all through winter. It was October now, and they would be the sole floral survivors of the next few cold, crippling months. He leaned on the gate and watched the evening settle around him—in the fading light, the lime-washed missionary building opposite glowed an iridescent silver, smoke drifted from a cluster of small stone houses on a nearby hill, and the smell of wood fire rose in the air. Across the valley, the faint drone of an airplane broke the primitive silence. It was carrying passengers and rations from the American base camp in Dhaka to Shillong. The war had placed even this part of the world on the map.
    Further down the road, Flynn, the manager of a tea plantation over the next hill, was walking his dog, a large, scruffy-haired Bhutia from Sikkim.
    ‘Good evening, Sahib Flynn.’
    ‘Nothing good about it, doctor.’
    The Irishman’s gruffness stemmed not from impudence but worry. Almost a decade ago, during his first Sohra monsoon, it had crept into his voice, a raspy insidious shadow, and outlined his rough, thickset features. It had deepened over the years, when every summer, his life savings were washed away by rain, eroding like mud into a river. It wasn’t as though the locals hadn’t warned him—‘It doesn’t stop for weeks, Sahib Flynn,’ they’d said, ‘and nothing grows. See, the topsoil is all gone, nothing grows.’ Tea bushes, they tried to tell him, no matter how resilient, probably wouldn’t survive either.
    The doctor knew better than to ask how things were at the plantation, so he made small talk instead—the bishop’s impending visit to the village church, the fast approaching winter, the price of coal. Whilst they discussed rumbling rumours of plans to construct an industrial factory near Mawmluh village, the hound at Flynn’s feet looked up and growled.
    ‘What’s up, Sonny?’ Sahib Flynn placed a hand on the dog’s collar. Apart from them, the road was empty, disappearing on either end into rising mist. The garden in front of the missionary building was also vacant; Father Bevan and the other priests were probably at evening prayer. Sonny growled again, and barked.
    The sound of hooves echoed in the distance.
    ‘Don’t know why,’ Flynn muttered, ‘but this dog hates horses.’
    Soon, the rider was close enough to be recognized—it was Jonah, son of Mr and Mrs Smithson who lived in a bungalow at Kut Madan. Doctor Wallang expected him to stop at his gate—somebody had probably taken ill—but instead Jonah dismounted at the missionary building. He tied his horse to the gate, his walk marked by a limp, the remaining trace of a childhood illness.
    Flynn still had his hand on Sonny’s collar. ‘Last rites?’
    ‘Maybe,’ said the doctor, and stubbed out his cigarette on the gate.
    That evening Doctor Wallang’s family sat down to dinner in the kitchen as usual. In one corner, a fire spluttered, drying out ragged strips of fish and meat hung above the flames. At the table, the children wrestled for attention,