Nagaland Read online

  Praise for Nagaland

  Delightfully engrossing page-turner that provides a fascinating insight into Nagaland, its rich tapestry of legends, history and culture. Ben Doherty’s intimate understanding of the Naga people is evident in the flair and passion of his writing. A riveting and poignant read.

  – Nim Gholkar, author

  With echoes of Rushdie annd Garcia Marquez, Nagaland takes the reader on a lyrical exploration of person and place. This enchanting work of fiction explores a lesser known corner of India through the protagonists’ gripping and wondrous journey, while revealing Doherty as a writer with serious talent.

  – Nick McKenzie, The Age

  I have come across some extraordinary real life stories of inspiration, love, and tragedy with my travels in India as a journalist. But NAGALAND is exceptional. Ben’s skilful storytelling engages emotionally in the life of an amazing man, his defiance for the sake of love, and his devotion to place and to culture. In my opinion, it is a must read.

  – Som Patidar, journalist

  Published by Wild Dingo Press

  Melbourne, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.wilddingopress.com.au

  First published by Wild Dingo Press 2018

  Text copyright©Ben Doherty

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968,

  no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval

  system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,

  mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without

  prior permission of the copyright owners and the publisher

  of this book.

  Designer: Debra Billson

  Editor: Catherine Lewis

  Chapter graphic: Tracey Small

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

  Doherty, Ben, 1981- author.

  Nagaland / Ben Doherty.

  ISBN: 9780648066378 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9780987381354 (ebook: pdf)

  ISBN: 9780648215943 (ebook: epub)

  Acknowledgements

  I am the messenger of another’s story. As such, there are many, too many, people to thank for the existence of this work.

  I offer my deep and abiding appreciation to those many and varied folk who have supported this story along the way. To the late and beloved Michael Gordon, to Anthony Sharwood, Favourite Aunty Pauline, Dan Street, Laura Doherty, Kath and Cam Deyell, Stephanies March and Convery, Nim Gholkar, and Paul Wilson for reading early drafts and offering their feedback, criticisms, and encouragement.

  To Andrew and Susan Cowell, to Tom Cribb, and to the Codrington Library at All Souls College for—at various times—a quiet place to write and re-imagine.

  To Margaret Gee for her early faith and guidance. And to Jody Lee and Nadine Davidoff for their insightful assistance. This work is better for all of your contributions.

  My immense thanks to Katia Ariel, who seized the essence of this story immediately, to whom Augustine spoke intuitively and for whom Nagaland resonated in all its complexity and colour. You found the soul of this story, and unveiled so much of Nagaland’s hidden beauty.

  I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Catherine Lewis, Alex Cseh-Scurry, and all of the team at Wild Dingo Press for their immense leap of faith, taken in me and in this story. Catherine found me in the long, long grasses of storytelling and—somehow—brought forth this tale you have before you. I hope this work, in some small way, repays the faith you have shown.

  My undying love and gratitude go to my wonderful wife Kim, who believed in this story from the first word, who read it over time and time again, and who always encouraged me to keep going. And to Molly, for simply being the sweetest, most gorgeous girl imaginable.

  But my greatest thanks must go to Augustine, his family, friends and community, for allowing me a glimpse into the majesty of Nagaland, its history, its tribulations, and its indomitable spirit. Thank you for allowing me to be bearer of this tale.

  In the green-grey hills of your land Augustine, you told me: ‘we live forever through our stories’.

  This is yours…

  Ben Doherty

  February, 2018

  Eight words

  The diary arrived addressed to me.

  Wedged into my letterbox, its battered yellow envelope carried no sender’s name, no return address. Ends crudely wrapped in sellotape, the package was postmarked with a single circular stamp bearing a date—19 December 2015—and, in tiny letters: Republic of India: Nagaland.

  The diary itself was a small book, bound in brown leather and held closed by a long, thin twine wound tightly around its middle. Its creamy pages were filled, overfilled and seemingly without order, with drawings of birds and mountains and flowers; with hastily drawn maps and tightly scrawled verses of poetry—song-lyrics-in-progress perhaps—all written in the same shaky hand.

  A feather—white with a dark brown, almost-black, horizontal stripe, I recognised it to be from a hornbill—served as a bookmark, attending the penultimate page. Now unbound, the book fell open in my hands here to reveal what appeared to be a journal entry. The script was Roman, written in the careful cursive of one writing something important, something permanent, but I could make no sense of it. To my inexpert eyes only a handful of words were familiar: enough, only, to recognise the language as Tangkhul, one of Nagaland’s myriad dialects.

  But at the bottom of the page was a single sentence written in English. The letters ran haphazardly across the page: set down, evidently, in haste:

  We live forever through our stories. Tell ours.

  I recognised the plea. Instinctively now, I knew to whom this diary belonged. So why was it now here with me, on the other side of the world?

  Table of Contents

  Praise for Nagaland

  Acknowledgements

  Eight words

  Part One

  WALK WITH ME

  THE VILLAGE AT THE END OF THE EARTH

  Part Two

  THE UN-NUMBERED BUNGALOW TWO FROM THE VERY TOP

  YARHO

  THE SONGS A FATHER SUNG

  INDIAN HISTORY

  THE NUMBER 4

  THE BOY WITH THE BIRTHMARK

  BUSINESS IN BURMA

  GOLDEN

  BOMBAY BY BICYCLE

  THE LILIES OF SHIRUI

  THEJA

  THE SOLDIER WITH THE SHINY GUN

  ZAKI

  ‘IN MY ACHING BONES’

  TICKET 161

  SUNSET

  THESE HILLS

  A TRAIN AT MIDNIGHT

  KANCHAA AND COWARDS

  SECHUMHANG

  GRACE

  THE HORNBILL

  NIDO

  Part Three

  SUKHAYAP

  Part One

  WALK WITH ME

  ‘We live forever through our stories,’ Augustine said, running a testing thumb over the newly sharpened edge of his dao. He turned to look at me, swinging the squat knife to his shoulder, the blunt edge coming to rest on his collar bone, the acute glinting in the weak sun of the mountains. ‘That’s why this is important, that’s what you must understand.’

  Augustine had never spoken like this before: so expansively, so easefully. We’d met almost three years earlier at the height of India’s cruelly hot summer of 2011, and in the time since, we had slowly built a friendship in instalments—parties of mutual friends, gigs of bands we’d wanted to see, long drives stuck in Delhi’s unrelent
ing traffic. But little was simple, was predictable with Augustine. He was a person comfortably silent a long time, and guarded when he did speak. His was a character revealed by adumbration. Augustine would vanish often and without explanation even when he returned, weeks later. He’d simply been ‘busy’ or ‘around’, offering no clue as to where he’d been, no real concession he’d ever even been gone. Yet return he would, always.

  He would appear on his terms. When I was struck by dengue, delirious with the break-bone fever and able to find a tiny measure of comfort only by lying in strange contortions on the cool stone floor of my house, he materialised without notice, carrying a dark-green concoction made of papaya leaves and myriad undeclared spices. ‘My Ayi’s recipe,’ he said. It popped and bubbled in an old Coke bottle.

  ‘How did you even know I was sick?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged. Augustine stayed, for days it seemed, silently pressing upon me another sip of the foul-tasting potion during my half-lucid moments of wakefulness. When I awoke properly after nearly a fortnight, well again but weak, he was gone. I wouldn’t see him again for two months.

  Now, it was 2014, and we were in Augustine’s homeland, the land of the Naga. India’s brief-but-sharp winter had settled all over the north of the country, but it lay most heavily here. The fierce winds carried flurries of snowflakes too fragile to settle on the ground, but enough to dust the eaves of the houses and the branches of the trees.

  We sat in the hard dirt outside Augustine’s ancestral home in the village of Ukhrul, high in the mountains of far north-eastern India, that forgotten teardrop of brittle, unyielding land wedged between Bangladesh and Burma. It was here, despite the cold and the wind, that Augustine felt most comfortable, felt most himself. Here he held court.

  ‘These are not just stories we tell our children and grandchildren; these stories are who we are.’

  He paused and lowered his voice. ‘You are a journalist. You call them legends. But to us they are truth, they are history. They are destiny.’

  Augustine was not usually like this. In low-lying Delhi where we had both lived, a few suburbs and several worlds apart, he was quiet. Not sullen, but cautious, almost timid. In the city, he spoke only when he had to, and as much as he needed to. And he spoke quietly there, so quietly he could barely be heard in that noisy place. He moved cautiously in the big city, walking with his shoulders hunched and his head bowed slightly, as though he felt he took up too much space in the crowded capital.

  Here though, in Ukhrul, he was different. I have noticed it on each visit to this place. Here among his own people, he stood far taller, with his shoulders back and his chin lifted. He spoke powerfully, and laughed readily. He smiled so I could see his teeth.

  Augustine and I met when our rock bands played together at the same New Delhi pub, one of the few that existed, and one of the fewer still that had live music. Augustine’s band was on before ours, but it should have been the other way around. They were much better than we were. Three-quarters of the crowd were Naga, like Augustine, and they’d come to see him play.

  I wasn’t in India to play in a band. I was a journalist, a foreign correspondent with an Australian newspaper, on my second posting in Asia, and forever racing over a roiling, restless region—the far-distant corners of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Burma. Mine was the impossible task of ‘covering’ a home to one-and-a-half billion people.

  When I was here, in this country, ‘India Rising’ was supposed to be my story. The emergent behemoth, with its tens-of-millions-strong middle class, the coming global superpower: that was the assignment from my editors. But inexorably, almost subconsciously, I found myself drawn to the fringes of India, the ragged, inchoate edges, the parts that remained fuzzy to understanding even as the rest of the country swung into the sharp focus of global view. I found myself filing stories on the disappearing language of Toto in the remote jungles abutting Bhutan, on a baby girl in Madhya Pradesh who couldn’t grow because she was born when the rains didn’t fall, and on children digging shiny stones out of mines in Meghalaya.

  The more I learned over my years in India, the more I realised how little I knew. Everything that was true about India was also inescapably false. India was gloriously uncategorisable, proudly defiant of generalisation or stereotype. The more I grasped for its essence, the more it eluded me. There was no one India. The difference of India—that’s what staggered, what captivated, me. Its divergence and dichotomy: from the hard-scrabble stone villages of Kashmir in the north to Kerala’s tropical fecundity in the south; from the river deltas of Gujarat in the west to the grey-green hills of the Naga, where I sat now, in the far, far east. The difference was akin to that of Scotland to…Poland. Everything was different: the languages people spoke, the food they ate, the crops they grew and the houses they lived in, the gods they worshipped and the clothes they wore while doing it. The time people got out of bed in the morning was different; so too, the movies they watched, the music they listened to, their politics and their histories. Their interest in cricket—surely, I thought, India’s one unifying factor—I discovered, waxed and waned across this land, the barren plains and the fertile river valleys, the coarse-sand beaches and the jagged mountains.

  For all of India’s diversity, Augustine was something different again. Nowhere in my travels through India or across the region, had I seen anyone like Augustine. He was unmissable. He wore his hair long, falling in a straight ponytail halfway down his back, but the sides of his head he kept closely shaved. His angular face was carefully inked in tattoos, three horizontal lines across the bridge of his nose and a vertical pattern that ran from his lower lip down his chin to his neck. These were the traditional markings of the Naga people, the tattoos of the headhunter. But now, even among the Naga, they represented a custom that had almost entirely died out. Only the oldest men and women in the villages looked like Augustine did. Of his generation, only he was marked in this way.

  Despite his ancient adornments, Augustine dressed in modern clothes, head to foot in black: long flowing shirts that draped formlessly across his lean body over jeans, and heavy boots. And he wore a feather—the white feather of a hornbill, with its single dark stripe—pointing straight up from the back of his head.

  ‘We live forever through our stories,’ Augustine’s voice brought me back to the here-and-now, to the cold dirt outside his home. He was still running that thumb along the sharp edge of his dao. Augustine had never done small talk, but both he and I recognised the unspoken significance of my visit to Ukhrul this time. What we had was ending. A month earlier, Augustine had suddenly announced—a declaration in itself was unusual enough for him—that he was moving back to his village to live in these hills and the house he called Sechumhang—No Man’s Land—halfway down the valley. At the same time, my posting in India was almost finished. I would be replaced, in the way of correspondents, and leave soon for Australia and its distant familiarity. I had returned to his village to say goodbye, to Augustine and to these hills. But I had come back, too, to know that Augustine was okay, and to seek to understand what it was that had pushed, or pulled, him back to this place. I sensed not trouble, but disquiet in him. It might be a long time before we saw each other again.

  ‘Come,’ Augustine said, again, too-casually swinging that blade, this time to point straight at me, and then out over the mountains. ‘Walk with me.’

  THE VILLAGE AT THE END OF THE EARTH

  Augustine and I walked west, downhill along the same dusty streets, barely changed from those he’d known as a child. We passed the vaulted roof and the spire of the chapel his family still attended each Sunday morning. The Shimrays’ pew was on the gospel side, five rows from the front. Ukhrul boasted two churches, impressive stone Baptist houses that stood, like gleaming white sentries, at either end of the village. Two churches gave the town a sense of grandeur, either past or impending, though there was no suggestion that these
halcyon days were either particularly recent or in any way imminent. The churches, their stone courtyards and statues of Christ—graphic, agonised representations of the final moments of his crucifixion—were kept spotlessly clean, washed every day as if to further accentuate their piety in comparison to the remainder of this fusty, faded place. ‘My father,’ Augustine said, ‘used to say these were the grandest buildings in all of Ukhrul’. The blasphemous mutterings were lost on the child. ‘I was much older before I understood what he meant.’

  Augustine’s attendance at church services was, these days, sporadic at best, he confessed. There were reasons he didn’t go much anymore, memories that lived in that place. But as a child he liked visiting church, the familiar drone of the incomprehensible hymns, the colourful kaleidoscope of light from the stained-glass windows swirling across the spotless marble floor. Just being at church was an occasion. ‘Nobody we knew lived in a house made of stone or brick.’ Homes in Ukhrul were all just like his, he said, unpainted wooden bungalows with dirt floors and low ceilings stained black with the soot of the fireplaces.

  Ukhrul is an emaciated village, strung narrow as it descends west along a nameless mountain ridge, below and around which the Langdangkong River curls on its languid way to the plains below. Augustine and I turned to look back uphill: we could see the school buses wending their lone route, up and down the main street that was the only sealed road in these hills. People built their modest homes along narrow alleys that ran off this street, steep passages that plunged from the ridgeline into the forest below, spindly capillaries to the town’s lone artery. From east to west the town fell nearly forty metres, and the villagers divided themselves into Upper Ukhrul and Lower, defined by which church they attended. The maidan, a grass-starved public square that doubled as a football field and a place for teenagers to hang out after sunset, was the dividing line. The distinction, Augustine said, was not a spoken one, rather it was felt, almost by instinct. Up or down. There was little hostility to it but everyone had to, in the way of small places, belong to one or the other. The Shimrays’ house—we could see it now—sat atop a small rise about halfway down the town, but the Shimrays belonged to Lower Ukhrul. That’s why they went to church where they did.