Yash Kumbhat

Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending was selected by Ottessa Moshfegh as the winner of the 2022 Louis Begley Fiction Prize.

There is the wind and the sun, and there are clouds. The sun is behind the clouds. High above, gray sky, and beyond that it is probably plain white, then blue, then darker still. Black, even. Above me, though, it is gray. Drizzling.

I am looking down the road. My house—what is left of it—is on the other side of a slight rise in the earth, behind me. I can’t see it when I turn. “Come on, Javed,” a voice says beside me. “You can’t keep standing here. Come back inside.” 

“Inside where?” I am thinking, as a hand pulls me back.  

I heard it first from Noor, who is only a few years older than me, and lives down the road. I found her running through the paddies, toward me. I was running, too, in the direction of my house. That was a day ago. “What are you doing here?” she had said. “Come back, now.” My mother had sent her, she said. “Didn’t you feel it?” she asked. “I did,” I said, “Was it very bad this time?” She took my hand in hers and we kept running.

Still earlier in the day, though not too long ago, I had gone looking for a bird’s nest with my friend, Mohan, since he said he remembered where he had seen it first. 

“There are two birds, one has purple feathers along its neck and the other is more or less yellow.” 

We had agreed, at school in the morning, to set out before dusk arrived, and I told him I would meet him in front of his house. We were excited about it. My mother was dozing on the chattai when I left, and my father had just returned from the fields. 

He had agreed to look after some of the others’ crops, too, for a part of their yields. Half the village had left in the few days since talk of the new world made it to these parts. That’s what everybody was calling it, the “new world.” We didn’t go because the rice was doing well, for once. “That’s reason enough.”

Father had been very tired ever since. “Javed, it’s going to rain,” he said to me as I was leaving. “Don’t go out.” He did not say it again when I put my shoes on and stood by the door, so I went. 

At Mohan’s house, his mother looked through the door at the graying clouds. “Mohan,” she said, “Don’t you dare get caught in the rain.” And he said he would not, and we went about on our way, down the road leading toward the forest.      

We were not far from the nest when the clouds began thundering and the air changed, the light faded and the sky darkened. Mohan looked at me with fear in his eyes and turned around and began running back toward the village. He went on shouting a single “Sorry!”—it trailed behind him like a kite’s string—the whole time until he disappeared from view, where the road dipped. 

The thought of sweeping the house made me miserable—I knew my father would hand me the broom as soon as I returned. And then I thought I caught a flash of purple in one of the trees ahead, and the trees were so close to me, so I continued walking toward it., 

Mohan had told me, “The nest is hanging from the end of a low branch.” I ran my hands across the bark of many different trees, but I could not find the nest. “It will look like a tangle of rubbish, but it will have the shape of a pear.” I went on walking through the forest, looking for it. 

I must have been in the middle of blinking when the earth began shaking, because I can’t remember it starting. That’s true every time it’s happened, though—the quaking, I mean. It seemed like the trees had always been groaning, the loose dirt always trembling, and I was just late in seeing it. This time, my knees were trembling, too, and I lost my footing and stumbled, and fell to the ground. I heard it through the earth—it had a sound of its own, a steady, grumbling sound, apart from everything else that it had disturbed. A little way away, a tree came crashing down and toppled another, and I scrambled back as fast as I could. 

Only then did I realize that it had been raining for a few minutes, at least, because the canopies shrugged off hundreds and hundreds of drops of water from their leaves, and they dropped at once. The pattering went on echoing, and I ran out toward the paddies, toward my house.  

I was out of breath when I got to the village. Noor’s hand had slipped out of mine along the way, and I had kept running.

A wind was gusting down the road and dust swirled in clouds. I heard coughing everywhere. Fumbling through that fog, by memory alone I thought I had found the way to my house. I kept on walking with my hand stretched out, thinking, I will feel the door, or a wall, now… now… now…  

And then I was suddenly inside, except the sky was above me and the clay tiles in shards on the floor. The walls were only half intact. Some of the houses on either side, too. Some of their roofs and their walls, too.  

My father and my mother had changed positions, it seemed. He was lying on his back, with his hand blocking his eyes, like he was trying to sleep. And she was awake, on her knees at his side. She turned when she heard me come in, then turned back toward my father. “Good, you’re back,” she said. “Are you hurt?” she asked. “No,” I said. She opened her mouth as if to say something more, but then she did not. Like the words that had been sitting on her tongue had dropped off, too. 

I stood by my mother’s side and watched Father’s chest rise and fall. The bits of house on his chest rise and fall. I watched Mother’s chest rise and fall. Breaths brushing back and forth across a strand of hair falling over her eyes, ever so slightly. I was afraid to put my arms around her. We remained like that for some time, just breathing. 

And when the sun had begun setting, Mohan came to say goodbye.  

I shook my head. “Where are you going?” 

“Yes,” he said. “My father says we have to rush if we want to get there in time.” 

He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said. 

Noor’s mother was standing at a little distance from me, outside their house, which had more or less survived. She was saying to another woman, “It’s not the worst I’ve ever seen.” 

Someone came inside and lifted Father onto a wide khat, between two others. He did not make a sound, though the others lying beside him both groaned. 

My mother said, “I’m going to take him to the hospital, now.” She stood up and said, “You stay here, wait for me.”  

Four people held up a leg each, and my mother walked alongside it, down the road.  

I ran out behind her and shouted again. “Mother, when will you come back?” 

But by then she was a speck on the road, getting smaller and smaller, until there was only a dirty, flat line where moments ago she had been. I could almost hear the earth’s gears turning beneath my feet. I stood looking at the road.   

Thump, thump, thump—the wheels of our carriage bounce over the road. A boy is running alongside us. His parents are behind, lost in a large crowd, shouting at him to stop, or slow down. Soon he falls behind. The sky is darkening, my children and grandchildren, my siblings and in-laws—all of them that are still living—are sitting around me, crowded together, happily. Sleeping, looking at the countryside—sometimes at tiled roofs in the distance, sometimes at nothing more than the undulating plains—and talking about passing things. “Didi,” my sister says, leaning against her husband, “Why are you smiling like that?” I say, “I don’t know.” I had thought, when we set out, that I would feel at least a little unhappy. That is bound to happen, I thought. But here I am, and there is not a drop of sadness in me, not a single whisper of it. “Just because,” I say. The rain patters on the carriage top. The horse is whinnying and grunting; we have told the driver not to crack that whip, as much as he can. The road is stretching out in front of my eyes, the grooves we are leaving behind are deep, the rain gathers in them, and I think to myself, free, at last.

Karim, Mahfooz, Asif, My Brother & Me, 19km

The night and the rain have hidden everything away, and a few of us are having a rest around a couple big boulders.

It is drizzling, but the slant of the rock faces catches some of the showers first. About as dry as one can hope to be, in weather like this.  

A lamp is approaching and then it comes to a sudden stop. The lamp is tied to the arm of a cart, and on top of the cart, large, indistinct shapes are covered by a wet cloth. 

The cart is pushed forward and rolls back. The objects under the cloth shift, too, and the lamp sways like a head. The wheels and the axles make a creaking sound. The wheels are stuck in the mud. Ruts carve up the road—if this can be called a road at all. 

The cart jerks forward, again it stops. 

More lamps and lanterns, clutched in hand and drawn forward on carriages; other shadowed figures, empty-handed, or holding light duffel bags, or bent low under heavier loads—parting around the cart stalled in that makeshift road. Like water parts around rocks in a river’s course. Everything fades into the dark ahead. 

“There you are,” I say to my brother. 

“No need to wait for me,” says Asghar. “I will manage to get it moving soon.” 

 Nobody is waiting, anyway. We are only resting, for a minute, before we must begin moving again.   

“I will have it moving in no time,” he grunts, trying to lift up the left rear wheel, as if he could. 

“Leave it, Asghar,” I say. “Sit down.” 

“You won’t get any more money for getting there a few minutes quicker,” I say again, but my brother stays where he is, bent over by the wheel, heaving.   

We are on the road toward the new world—Karim, Mahfooz, Asif, my brother and me. Our instructions are simple: “You are going there anyway, right? Take these things over with you and you can earn a little money for your travels.” Odds and ends inside the boxes and on the cart—some rich man’s things. “He will meet you there.” 

We said, “Alright, we’ll do it,” and then we set out. That was four nights ago. 

“How did you get stuck lugging that big thing around?” Mahfooz asks. He kicks his own load with a flick of his leg. “This is all I was given.”  

“That’s because of your chicken arms, Mahfooz. Nobody could trust you to lift anything heavier than a twig.”

“My wonderful chicken arms will get paid just as much as you, Asif. But, please, you enjoy that iron trunk.” 

“If you are good, Asif, maybe Mahfooz will even use some of it to buy you a nice shirt in the new world. God knows you could use it,” Karim says.

“Watch it,” Asif says. “My mother stitched me this herself.”

“New world, new world… what is the point of dragging all these old things to such a new place?” I say. 

“So that it can look just like this one.” 

“You’ll have to tell me what it’s like,” Asif says, since he will drop the man’s things off and return to his family. 

“Yes,” Karim says. “Alright.”  

Soon, Asghar gives up trying to move the cart and sits down beside me. 

“What do you think it will be like, really?” he asks.  

 There is nothing above us—no clouds and no moon. It feels like there is no sky at all, that’s how dark it is.   

“Who cares? I just want to get somewhere I can sleep.” 

Around us, though out of sight, the river of travelers continues flowing.

“Heaven, right here on earth,” one of the men is saying. “Can you imagine that….” He puts his hand on his heart over the pocket stitched into the chest of his checkered shirt when he says this, 

, he says. He is standing with his arms crossed, under a torn sheet of tarpaulin. The man has lips like a fox and long hair that hangs like a crown on his forehead. A steady stream of rain drips down from the edges of the sheet, into the dark, muddied street. “Nothing like this shithole,” he says, stomping the ground with his dirty boot. “Nothing like everything else, that’s what I’ve heard.”

“We have all heard that, you fool,” I am grumbling under my breath, into the pot of water boiling on the stove top. 

A voice from another corner of the crowd says, “God has lit a path for us, my friends!” A cheer goes up around me. Another voice adds, “And it will not crumble beneath our feet.” Again, there is a murmuring of happiness. The first voice shouts, “Free at last!” Then someone else shouts out, “Which one of you scoundrels has taken my bag!” and nobody has much to say about that.    

Umh! My eyes are rolling inside their sockets like polished marbles. A young man, with a bag slung across his chest, thrusts two coins into my hand. He asks, “Say, what is the name of this town?” 

I respond, “The city of mud, of course.” 

“The city of mud,” he says haltingly, like it is a question. I think it is obvious: look anywhere, on any corner of this hill, you will find mud under it, on top of it, inside it, or around it, or it will just be plain mud that you are looking it, in which case you might have fallen down, so stand up. 

“Yes,” I respond, “Mud. Now take your stinking tea.”

My name is Jibrail and I am tired of saying, to these infernal travelers, “Can’t you see that I’m closed for business?” But the more I say it, the more people shout out, and the louder they shout, “Onto the new world!” Yes, fools, I am thinking to myself, take your speeches there, please, far away from me…

“Alu,” I say, “I can’t bear this any longer…” 

Alu is my wife. She has no use of her legs anymore and is sitting at the door to our room, watching everything.

I have begun trying out a number of different excuses that might drive these infernal travelers back to their precious road, but nothing is working. 

I have tried: “I’m afraid I’m out of sugar—will salt do?” 

I have pretended I am a traveler myself. I say, “Excuse me, I am overjoyed to be traveling with you!” I repeat the words I have heard them say, to sell my performance. “Free, at last!” I say, “Hope, at last!” And then I ask, “But do you know whose shop this is?” and I look about in confusion. 

I have resorted to prophesizing disaster, even. I say, to a young woman rocking her crying baby uselessly, “My wife says this whole joint is about to come crashing down… trust me, she has a sixth sense about these things.” But the baby continues wailing, the tea continues boiling, the travelers continue speaking.

Yash Kumbhat

Yash Kumbhat

Fiction

Spring Summer 2022

Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending