Nagaland Read online

  We stood unmoving as sunset’s momentary brilliance, those final few minutes of glittering defiance, faded, and the dusty town was returned to its unremarkable brown hue. The dark falls quickly in the mountains and we looped around the sparse few houses at the bottom of the village, above the place Augustine called No Man’s Land. We stared down into the valley. The next ridgeline was an indistinct grey smudged into the dark sky above it. The ranges beyond blurred one into another. Everywhere here, in every direction, were mountains. The ground was hard and unyielding. What little farming land there was, by the rivers in the valleys, was overworked and barely subsistent, let alone profitable. It was that time of year now, Augustine said—the time between the rains and the harvest. Ukhrul knows the hungry season. We started back up the hill towards the light of the fire that had appeared in the window of his family home. There would be food there.

  We were not the only ones walking. Farmers carrying tools had made their way up the mountainside from the paddy fields, saying hello to Augustine as they passed. Women bearing shopping were less inclined to stop, too busy corralling meandering children home before dark. From behind us, out of the gloaming, came the sound of a measured, careful tread. Augustine did not turn around, but muttered only one word: ‘Rifles’.

  Just beyond the lower western end of Ukhrul stood an imposing military base. From almost any vantage point in town, one could see its floodlit whitewashed walls, wreathed in rolls of razor wire. The base thrummed to the vibration of generators 24 hours a day. It was the only place in the village where the electricity never went out. This was the garrison of the Assam Rifles, the Indian government’s oldest paramilitary police force. The Rifles were, in fact, older than the country they were paid to protect. The British, in the days of the Raj, established the Cachar Levy, as the regiment was first called, to protect white settlers from the raids of the ‘bloodthirsty’ headhunters who lived in these hills.

  While the Rifles were separate from the army, they were, to anyone who saw them, indistinguishable from soldiers. They wore khaki and neat moustaches, carried ranks on their shoulders, and assault weapons in their hands. They saluted. Their symbol was two crossed kukri, the curved fighting knives most famously carried by the Gurkhas of Nepal. In full parade dress, each Rifleman bore one on his belt.

  Augustine ignored the two riflemen, but I turned to look. They weren’t marching, but out of habit their feet fell in perfect unison, their black boots crunching noisily on the gravel of the road. In the dusk, the men were barely distinct until they were almost beside us. The riflemen didn’t look at Augustine or at me, and offered no acknowledgement we were there. They wore camouflage pants and green army-issue t-shirts, the fronts of which carried their unit’s motto ‘Friends of the Hill People’, a bleak misnomer. The hill people of Ukhrul and the Rifles didn’t talk much, and they certainly weren’t friends. The Rifles looked different from the local people, being plainland north Indians or darker-skinned Tamils from the south. These men were not happy about their posting, Augustine said. They were a long way from home, it was cold in these hills, and the chance for proper soldiering—the adventure they signed up for—was limited. ‘In a strange way, they are a good fit,’ he said. ‘The Naga don’t want the Rifles here, and the Rifles don’t want to be here. On that, we agree.’ We watched the two men stalk off into the night.

  ‘The Rifles are told they have two jobs: watch the locals, and watch for outsiders,’ Augustine said cryptically once the men were safely out of earshot. Manipur had, for decades, been gripped by a secessionist insurgency, an ancient grudge that, most of the time, bored most of the people, but which every few months broke to some violent new mutiny. The insurrection was the work of a left-wing guerrilla outfit called the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, whose declared aim was Naga self-determination, a free nation for the Naga people. They were Baptists; some people called them ‘Christian extremists’.

  ‘It was more active when I was small,’ Augustine said. ‘I didn’t really know what they were talking about, but I would always hear the adults talk about “the NSCN” or “the Underground”, and when they did, they kept their voices low.’

  The NSCN was weaker now, its campaign wearied by internecine conflict and the creeping corruption endemic to any long struggle for freedom yet to yield any appreciable liberty. But it loomed large still in the psyche of the people of these hills. Once, it was rumoured the NSCN had 10,000 fighters in the mountains and valleys of Nagaland and Manipur, but no one really knew how many there were, or how many remained. ‘But we would know when they were close,’ Augustine said. ‘I would hear someone at my mother’s shop say, “they are back from the hills”.’ Invariably, a few days later, trucks would begin blowing up in the marketplace: small bombs, but enough to kill a few blameless vendors and their customers, so everyone was again exercised by the terror that walked among them. But each time, a few weeks would pass without event, and the shopkeepers would return—someone always in the lost person’s place—and everyone would resume their unworried routines. There were still bombs now, but not so many, Augustine said. The Rifles occasionally made a few arrests, always loudly trumpeted in the local newspapers, but the insurgency seemed undiminished by their attention. It was as though a certain amount of rebellion was permitted, and the Rifles were there just to make sure it didn’t get out of hand.

  The Assam Rifles’ other task was the nearby border with Burma. Both they and Burma’s Tatmadaw patrolled these hills, even though there was not much of a border. There was no fence, no boundary posts controlling movements, just a few stone cairns on a ridgeline marked out decades ago by some forgotten cartographer. People walked back and forth unhindered, crossing with the seasons, herding cattle from one country to another, or working land on the other side from their homes. People here weren’t Indian, or Burmese—those were labels that mattered in Delhi and Rangoon. No one here had passports, or ID cards. Nationality was just another marker of dislocation, another category into which people didn’t comfortably fit.

  It was the same even inside India. This was the state of Manipur, but Augustine and his family were not Manipuri. Those people were ‘meitei’, plainland people. The Shimrays were Naga, people of the hills. Their homeland, rightly, should be part of the state immediately to the north: Nagaland. ‘The British draw lines on other people’s countries,’ Augustine said as we walked back up the final dusty rise to his family home. ‘Now we are told what is our place by some faraway Delhiwallah babu1. We don’t worry about such things. We have been here much longer than that.’ As if in evidence of that truth, Augustine’s grandmother, here long before the bloody birth of the modern nation of India, was waiting for us at the front door. She leaned on its handle, her back bent, it appeared, from decades stooped over the same fire we could see burning low behind her. Wordlessly, she motioned us inside with her arms. ‘Sorry Ayi,’ Augustine mumbled, but she was smiling as she ushered him in.

  That night, there was mutton for dinner; I couldn’t tell if this was usual, or an indulgence by virtue of my visit. I worried it was the latter, but it was an impossible question to ask. Augustine’s family sat cross-legged by the fire as the food was placed before them. As the guest, I was impressed upon to sit nearest the fire—‘the seat of honour’, Augustine explained. He translated his statement into Tangkhul for his older relatives, who smiled and nodded. Grace was said in English, hands held. Augustine’s Ayi pressed a heaving plate into my hands, gesturing with her fingers for me to eat. The meat was rich, marbled with fat. ‘Very good,’ I said, eating, to the same nods and smiles.

  After dinner, Augustine and I took a small brazier and coals from the fire and walked to the roadside to stand outside the now-closed shopfront. Augustine rolled and lit a cigarette, then offered it to me. I declined. As the darkness closed in, he talked idly of the families that lived in the houses we could still see, his features lost to the tendrils of smoke that escaped into the cold night
air and the uncertain light of the flame.

  ‘You’re more at home here. I can see that,’ I said at last. ‘I can see why you’ve come back to this place.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ Augustine replied forcefully, more forcefully, I think, than he intended. He softened. ‘I mean, it’s not…there is more to it than what you can see from the outside.’

  ‘Than I can see from the outside?’

  ‘Than anyone can see from the outside.’

  ‘Then why did you come back?’ Finally, I asked the question that had hung between us since I’d arrived. The one question Augustine had been both anxious for me to ask, and fearful that I would.

  ‘It’s a long story. And it doesn’t make sense unless…’ Augustine stumbled, ‘unless you understand it all.’

  ‘Start from the beginning.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it really starts on that day.’

  ‘Which day?’

  ‘The beginning, the first day I can remember.’

  Augustine hauled himself up to sit on the bare wooden counter of the shopfront.

  ‘Here,’ he said, patting the bench with his hand, ‘this is where I sat and waited for my father that night: the night after the day my sister was born.’

  Part Two

  Augustine arrives at the riverbank before Akala. It is less than ten minutes since he’d received her text; she’d still be coming down the hill. But he is worried. Someone might have seen her; her father might have caught her leaving, or maybe her brothers would know where she was going. He drums his fists against his thighs as he paces back and forth. He doesn’t want to sit, he can’t stand still, or think clearly. He wants her to be here.

  Akala arrives within minutes, sobbing. She carries nothing but her chonkhom, red too, for Tangkhul, but decorated in the women’s style with brilliant, angled stripes of electric green. She wears it pulled tightly over her narrow shoulders, as though the threadbare shawl has some power to protect her. She scrabbles up the rocks the last few metres to where Augustine stands in the shade of the trees. ‘No one saw me leave,’ she says, pre-empting his question. They stand at a distance from one another, momentarily shy. Then, Akala falls into Augustine, collapsing in his arms, crying. She is normally shy about touching, but now she clings to Augustine tightly and howls. He holds her as her body shudders against his. Only now does Akala realise, and now he does, too, just what it is they’ve done.

  ‘How did your father find out?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Akala says through tears. ‘I came home to find my mother crying. She handed me my phone that I had hidden in my room, and she told me my father had found it. He had gone to see Atsu’s family, fearing they would find out I’d been seeing you, and would call the wedding off. He was going round to beg them to honour our engagement; and was going to offer more money, like a disgraced man, on his knees. My mother told me to wait for him.’ Akala is in hysterics at the thought of her father, humiliated and pleading for a wedding she doesn’t want. ‘My mother kept asking, “Lord, where did I go wrong?”. I started to cry, so she sent me to my room, but I was still holding the phone. I texted you and then. When you replied, I escaped out the window. No one saw me leave, but I have, no money, no clothes, nothing…’

  Augustine has little more, but he has what they need. Before he left Sechumhang, he wrapped a shawl around his shoulders and pulled his father’s old air rifle from the eave on the back stoop. There was ammunition in a small leather pouch by the door that he now feels in his pocket along with matches and a mug, and a small cloth knotted at the top, holding a handful of rice. Augustine feels his dao too, the sheathed, sharpened blade pressing against the small of his back. They will need it where they are going. Only his diary is missing, but Augustine is comforted by the knowledge it has been dispatched to safety, far away. Further than he has ever been in his lifetime.

  Augustine doesn’t have a plan, not yet. He just knows somewhere else, anywhere else, will be better than here. He holds Akala and allows himself a moment where he doesn’t have to think, just feel. Her heaving, racking breaths settle. They hold each other’s hands a minute longer, heads bowed close.

  ‘Come on. We have to go now,’ he says.

  The easiest path out is back up towards Augustine’s village, but that is impossible, as is walking back towards her home. In the other direction, the valley falls towards the plainlands. They know they cannot make their way there, either, without being discovered. They must climb. ‘This way,’ Augustine says, pointing north. ‘Above these trees is a trail out; I know it from hunting with my father. We can get out over the plateau at Phangrei. It’s not too hard.’

  ‘We go together?’ Akala says, half-questioning, half-insisting.

  ‘Of course.’

  THE UN-NUMBERED BUNGALOW TWO FROM THE VERY TOP

  In a high, forgotten corner of India in a village at the end of the earth, Augustine Shimray formed his first memory. Two memories. He fell off a chair onto his head, and his sister was born. He was five.

  Climbing on a chair at school to open a window, Augustine fell and gashed his forehead. It didn’t hurt, but the amount of blood was immense. He blinked hard, in shock as much as discomfort, as it ran into his eyes and down his shirt. The overwrought teachers at Little Angels, the modest primary school at the lower end of Ukhrul village, didn’t want to deal with a mischievous kid who wouldn’t sit properly on his chair and was now covered in blood, so the principal, Madam Soso, sent him home with a note to his mother that he might be concussed. The letter was handed to Augustine in an envelope marked with the date—October 31, 1987—and addressed: ‘To the family of Augustine Horchuingam Luiyainao Shimray’. Augustine couldn’t read very well yet, but he recognised his own full tribal name when it was written out, so he knew he was in trouble. People only ever called him Augustine.

  He walked slowly home, alone, up the hill to the un-numbered bungalow two from the very top which commanded views down the valley and to his family’s land by the river. Unusually, for his was a house where people congregated, there was no one out in the street. Nor was his mother behind the counter of the single-room shop that she owned and ran on the roadside outside their home. The shop, nameless and unadorned save for a single, unreliable light bulb hanging from the front awning, was a slouching edifice with a dirt floor inside and a low bench for customers at the front. Typically, the shop’s regulars would sit on the pew for hours talking to his mother, she relaying to them the gossip of the last visitors, they, in turn, listening, adjudicating, and adding their own. Together, they knew all of Ukhrul’s business, and kept watch on the world passing by.

  Augustine loved the fact that his mother owned a shop. But he didn’t love the shop itself. It was an uncomfortable place to spend any length of time, at any time. In summer, the dust whipped in from the street and coated everything inside in grit despite the near constant attention of Augustine’s mother’s feather duster. In winter, the cold wind exploited the lack of insulation and the cracks in the timber walls. The shop sold, to Augustine’s comprehension, anything and everything imaginable. In reality, it was anything and everything Augustine’s mother, Likoknaro, could source. Its offerings varied with the seasons and the markets: tomatoes in spring, rice in the weeks after harvest, chips and lollies and hair oil and razor blades year-round, batteries if they could ever be found for a reasonable price.

  Now the shop was open—Augustine only ever knew it to be closed on Sundays—but empty. He slid underneath the counter, and from the unguarded plastic tin on a low shelf, he helped himself to a heingar, the sickly-sweet discs of confectionary his mother made from desiccated coconut, sugar and water. Breaking it in half, he stuck the larger brown ellipse in his pocket, the other sticky piece into his mouth, and walked inside.

  He stopped suddenly as he stepped through the door into the front room of his home. Before him was a tight gaggle of busy women—most of whom he rec
ognised—and in the middle of them, his mother. His aunties were all here, and he knew, though more vaguely, the women from church who were fussing over his mother and the fire and the food, but he was nervous with their crowded presence in his home. He ran to his Ayi—his father’s mother, Changsonla—who stood in a corner, and wrapped himself in her skirts.

  ‘Come,’ Ayi said to him gently, ‘there is someone you must meet’. Augustine’s grandmother guided him to the middle of the throng. There, his mother was holding a baby he’d never seen before.

  ‘Augustine,’ she said, ‘this is your sister. This is Maitonphi.’

  Maitonphi had been born an hour before, at home, just as her siblings had been. She was sound asleep. Augustine was intrigued by the new arrival, but hardly overwhelmed with curiosity. He had understood enough to know a new baby was coming, but the mechanics of it were beyond him, and besides, there were kids all over in this street, and new ones all the time; another one was not especially interesting. Still, he wanted to hold her all the same. His mother told him he was too small, but he could ‘very gently’ stroke her head. He roughed up the mess of soft black hair on her head. Maitonphi slept on. He liked her straight away.

  ‘Augustine, I must stay with the baby,’ his mother said. ‘Could you take care of the shop for me, just until your father gets home?’

  The note from the Madam Soso was still burning a hole in one shirt pocket, the contraband heingar the other. Augustine had been worried he would be in trouble, but no one seemed to notice, let alone worry, that he was home in the middle of the day, his blue school shirt splashed with a deep crimson stain. Even at the age of five, Augustine was wise enough not to offer the principal’s missive unprompted.