Geronimo the landlord

The name Geronimo is fiction just as most names in this A2Z series are. But Geronimo was real. He was my landlord, the only landlord I ever had in Shillong. All other house owners were women, landladies. Khasi men hardly owned anything except the bottle of drink they carried home at the end of the day. I’m sure the situation is different today. The change had already started even before I quit Shillong.

Khasis are a hill tribe that follows matriliny. The mother is the boss at home. The children get the mother’s surname. The father is almost a nobody at home. In the olden tradition, men had certain status as they presided over religious and social functions. With the arrival of Christianity, the priestly and sacerdotal duties were usurped by the clergy. Now the Khasi men had little role to play at home. American journalist Thomas Laird described the Khasi land as a place “where women rule and men are used as breeding bulls.”

Whenever I went in search of an accommodation, it was a lady who met me. Every house in Shillong belonged to a lady. The man may at best be seen bringing in a cup of tea or the ritual offering of kwai for the guest. The house in Mawprem where I stayed for a couple of years was different, however. There the man of the house was the master. Along with his wife and two children, he lived upstairs while I occupied the rooms downstairs. The boy used to come to me for occasional help with his studies. The girl was seldom seen outside. This was quite the opposite of the usual Khasi way. But the boy displayed his tribe’s true DNA soon by leaving his studies. His father didn’t succeed in persuading him to study and secure a good job in the due course of time. The father was a drunkard himself. He worked in some government office during the day and came back home in the evening reeking of cheap whisky.

The Mawprem region of Shillong had acute water shortage. This prompted me to shift residence to Nongthymmai. When I told the landlord about my decision to leave his house, his instant reaction was, “O my God!” I couldn’t understand why my departure should bother him. Later, I was told by a friend from Shillong that it wasn’t easy to get nontribal tenants in that area and tribal tenants wouldn’t pay the rent regularly.  

“He refused to supply me with sufficient water,” I said to justify my decision.

“Where will he bring water from?” My friend asked. He was staying just a kilometre away in Upper Mawprem. My area was Lower Mawprem. Both Mawprems were without sufficient water supply. Upper Mawprem was worse because it had a large Nepali population which the local government bodies detested.

There was a brutal uprising against the Nepalis in 1987. The situation was so bad that schools were closed for months and curfew was imposed on the town for many weeks. I lived in a vulnerable place where a lot of people were under attack because they were Nepalis. I saw men being beaten up on the roadsides. I saw people – men, women and children – being packed like sardines on to a truck and driven away. They were taken to Guwahati and abandoned there. Go away, you don’t belong here – that was the message.

“It’s not safe to stay here anymore,” Geronimo told me one afternoon. He had decided to go away to the place of a relative in Mawlai, a militant Khasi stronghold. He advised me to leave too.

Where could I go? I had no relatives in Shillong. There were a couple of friends one of whom invited me to stay in the hostel of his school until the situation improved. I accepted the offer but was bored soon and returned to my own residence. The whole area looked deserted and ghostly when I returned. Geronimo and family hadn’t returned. I lived all alone in what looked like an abandoned battlefield. Once in a while a police jeep would come. One of those constables would call me to the vehicle to enquire whether I was safe. I think the policemen made me feel more unsafe than the eerie silence that I had got used to.

Every now and then the men of Shillong would organise an uprising against some ethnic group. Nontribal Dogs Get Lost and other such slogans appeared on the walls. Schools would become refugee camps. Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel would carry out flag marches every now and then. People like Geronimo would seek and find safer places to stay. People like me would take the risk and leave themselves to the mercy of the night’s sweat that would vaporise in the lurid yellow sunshine of the morning. The so-called revolutionaries went around shouting slogans, attacking helpless non-Khasis, and dreaming about some utopia where only one particular kind of people would exist.

Who were these revolutionaries in reality? Men who were utter failures. Men who couldn’t make use of the classrooms. As Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih wrote later in his magnum opus, Funeral Nights, the first divisioners in academics become doctors, engineers and lawyers. The 2^nd Divs become bureaucrats and control the 1^st Divs. The 3^rd Divs enter politics, become ministers and control the other two. “The dropouts join the militants and control all the above!”

Geronimo belonged to the second category. He knew where to hide when danger came in the shape of revolution. 

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