Boats on Land... and what it means to be a “Man” growing up in Shillong

This is not a book review of Boats on Land by Janice Pariat. 

I write this as someone who grew up in Shillong. I seek to put to words the memories, emotions and thoughts the book unlocked. To understand why I felt almost a physical pain reading it despite the vivid and extraordinary beauty of the writing, a living breathing character almost unto itself, evoking a sense of memory and touch and smell. Writing that wrings out your unarticulated thoughts and shapes them into fully formed poetic paper beasts, both savage and beautiful. 

This was my life. My home. My childhood. With all its brutality and toxic masculinity and violence. These were the myths and legends that I grew up with. Here was the schizophrenia of my split identity bleeding across the pages. Here was the boy gazing at a blue sky on a field of grass and the boy overhearing whispers that hinted at a violence and fear that only a child could truly imagine. 

I wish a man would write about Shillong like this, to hold a mirror to this world we grew up in. Or are we so scarred by the violence, the need to project strength and invulnerability, that we are incapable of doing so? 

I had a chat on my school group recently about some of our classmates and friends. Not just the ones who died (how casually we talk about the death of a child). But the ones who were beaten. Again and again and again. Day after day. Because they were sarong (snooty). Because they were sissies. Because they were Dkhar. 

What amazed me was how many of my classmates said it was part of growing up and that rite of passage toughened us up and made us the men we are today. 

Yes it did make us the men we are today. 

It made me a damaged man, who could only feel safe when he felt strong or powerful. Who was unable to acknowledge his imperfections and vulnerabilities to himself, let alone share it with the ones who loved him most. A man who lived in constant paranoia looking for violence to explode at any moment and always thinking about how to protect himself and his loved ones from it. A man with such a confused sense of identity, so fearful of not fitting in yet craving it anyway. A man believing he would never be accepted and rejecting acceptance. A man consumed with fear and self loathing and a desire to be loved but incapable of receiving love, incapable of loving himself, and convinced that the world couldn’t and wouldn’t unless he faked it. 

A man running from the the gaping maws of his inner demons that lay behind him towards a distant safe harbour that never seemed to arrive, and so exhausted and burnt out by a life of running, that he spent every single day feeling numb and drained as he sought out ever more self destructive ways to feel something, to cry for help. 

A man hurtling inevitably towards an inexorable violence, violence against the world, violence against those who loved him, and most of all violence towards himself.

A man who, even today, finds it easier to talk about his life in third person. 

But enough. I reclaim myself. 

Because I was saved. 

I was saved from Shillong. 

And yet I still love Shillong as much as I hate it. 

We love the things that cause us the greatest pain. And for me that thing was growing up in Shillong. 

And even today, in memories and stories, in legends and myths, in the food I eat and the smells that transport me, in the way I feel like I a child when a cold breeze brushes against the goosebumps on my skin... in a million ways large and small, I carry Shillong  in me.