Nagaland Read online

  He nodded to his mother and patted his sister again—still no reaction—and walked back out to the shop. Taking another heingar from the tin, he sat down on the low wooden stool behind the counter. Augustine was short for his age, and slight. Sitting in the cool of the dirt floor, he couldn’t be seen by customers who arrived at the counter. Instead, he watched through the gap at the bottom for the arrival of legs. Whenever someone came, he would clamber up onto the counter to ask what they wanted. It wasn’t a taxing or even a crucial, job. Customers were few in Ukhrul, and the Baptist values of honesty and fairness ran deep. Usually, in the moments when Liko was drawn away from staffing the shop, people would leave their handful of coins or notes on the unattended counter, carefully doling out the right amount, and confident the rupees wouldn’t disappear in their absence. This afternoon it was quiet.

  Augustine sat, tracing his fingers through worn patterns in the dirt of the shop floor as he waited for his father. His father’s traditional Naga name was Luishomwo. In Tangkhul it meant ‘the reliable harvest’: he was born in a season of solid rains and subsequent plentiful crops. More commonly, his father went by the Christianised, Luke. Luke himself was not someone to be relied upon, to be punctual, or for anything really. Augustine knew he could find his mother, anytime, at the shop, or at home, or at the church. He wouldn’t know where to begin looking for his father. Even at his young age, Augustine understood his mother was the one on whom he could depend. He waited.

  Tired of having sat still for so long, Augustine climbed up to sit on the shop counter, and gazed down at the farrago of houses that seemed to tumble down the hill away from him, their patchwork silver tin roofs slowly turning a seamless gold in the afternoon sun. This—Ukhrul—was Augustine’s world. The town limits were the boundary of his lived experience; beyond was a world he knew only through stories. He knew there were other villages like his—he had heard his father talk about them—perched on ridges like this, the ridges he saw now stretching grey-green to the Burmese border. He knew, from his father too, that for as far as he could see in any direction, the land belonged to the Tangkhul, his people, one of the multifarious Naga tribes of the north-east. And further, he knew from the teachers at school that he lived in the state of Manipur, one of the ‘seven sisters’ they called it, using the collective appellation for the far north-eastern states of India. Augustine knew all of this, but only because people had told him it was so. Ukhrul was the limit of his lived experience, the knowledge he knew for himself.

  Augustine willed his father to be home, as he stared down the road, desperately hopeful Luke’s form would suddenly materialise out of the silent dark. Hunger gnawed at him now, though he knew instinctively, there would be food before bed. His mother never sent him to sleep hungry. The Shimrays had more than many in Ukhrul. Their shop, run in genial competition with a few neighbours’ further down the hill, was stocked most of the year; and the family had rice paddies that were well-watered, and forest in which they could hunt without fear of infringing another clan’s claim. There was enough. Augustine knew families in Ukhrul regarded as rich by local standards. The Shimrays were not that. But they had more than many. Augustine had recently been bought his first-ever pair of shoes, to start school. He hated them initially as they felt heavy and gave him blisters, so he would take them off and put them in his bag to walk home. But he was also glad to have them—plenty in his class came barefoot. Even at five, it was a distinction keenly felt.

  Still Augustine’s father had not come home. Now Augustine longed, more in raw hope than any expectation. The stars were out, and it was getting cold. There hadn’t been a customer for over an hour, and there were no heingar left. His younger brother Alex, still a toddler, had wandered into the shop for a time; he liked to be part of whatever his older sibling was doing. But he was soon bored, and as night fell, he went back to the warmth of the fire. Augustine could see the lights inside his home were on now—they always drained the amps and dulled the bulb outside the front of the shop. The electricity might hold for an hour or two more.

  ‘Close the shop and come inside,’ came a voice. Augustine’s mother had suddenly appeared in the rear doorway, still with her newborn who was soundly asleep. Liko had wrapped Maitonphi tightly in a blanket and secured the infant to her body, in the Naga style, with a shawl knotted around her shoulders. ‘Dinner is ready.’

  The church women and most of the relatives had left Augustine’s home now. But the inconvenience of giving birth had not deterred Liko, helped by Augustine’s Ayi and a couple of aunts who remained, from cooking dinner. The women were wrestling the blackened pot of sticky rice from the fire and cleaving off chunks for people’s plates. There was chicken, boiled in a hot, watery curry, and a spicy chutney. Over it they crushed heads of yongbah, a grass whose grainy flower served as a garnish. Placed on the floor, the plates sat untouched until the women had finished serving everyone. Liko reached out for Augustine and Alex’s hands and bowed her head.

  ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’

  ‘Amen.’

  Liko picked up her tin plate and began eating, her fingers swiftly transferring chunks of broth-stained rice to her mouth. Alex, too young, pushed his chicken around the plate, occasionally finding his mouth with a stray grain of rice as he licked his fingers. Augustine didn’t eat, his hunger displaced now by concern his father was not yet home. Luke had not yet seen his daughter.

  ‘Why is she called Maitonphi?’ Augustine asked pointing to the baby. The infant lay in a woven cradle hanging from a hook high up and to the side of the fire. The air in that corner was warm, but not smoky. The crib rocked gently back and forth.

  ‘Maitonphi was my grandmother’s name,’ Liko said.

  ‘Was she nice?’ Augustine wanted to talk, not eat.

  ‘You never met her, but she was very beautiful, and very kind,’ Liko replied. ‘When I was a girl, my aunties were strict and would make me stay inside to do chores, but my grandmother let me play outside or go to the forest with the other children.’

  ‘Why was she called Maitonphi?’

  ‘The name means “gentle one”. My grandmother was like that. It is a traditional name, very old-fashioned.’

  ‘From the old ways, the Hao, like Dad talks about?’

  ‘Haa,’ Liko answered ‘yes’ in Hindi, rather than Tangkhul, their mother tongue. Her voice had noticeably stiffened at the mention of Augustine’s father. Augustine recognised the tone, a sign that Liko considered his line of questioning extinguished and the conversation over. Liko didn’t share all of her grandmother’s easy-going nature, but she had inherited no small amount of her aunties’ rigour.

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait for Dad to come home?’ Augustine pushed his luck. He was still wearing his school shirt, stained red with the blood from his own head. He put his finger to the gash on his hairline, it wasn’t bleeding, but it felt swollen, the flesh around it tender. No one had noticed, or if they had, hadn’t felt compelled to ask what had happened. Hours ago, he had torn up the note from Madam Soso and thrown it in the gutter outside, where it vanished amongst the other rubbish. Augustine wanted his father home, his family felt incomplete without him. He had waited all afternoon for him. Maybe his father would ask about his head, and Augustine could tell him about his accident.

  ‘We should wait for Dad to come home,’ Augustine said, pushing his plate away, ‘otherwise he’ll have to eat dinner alone’.

  ‘Eat,’ Liko told Augustine, putting down her own plate to force his into his hands. ‘Your father can eat whenever he chooses to come home to his family. You eat now.’

  Augustine leads Akala from the grove of trees. He marches quickly to begin with, allowing too much of his anxiety to manifest. But the still of the midday forest is calming, and conscious that Akala does not know these forest trails, he slows his pace, helping her where the path becomes steep. Akala is determined to show
she can keep up, as though any hesitancy, she fears, he will read as reluctance and try to send her back. Augustine knows she can’t go back, however, just as much as he cannot. But as if to prove her commitment, she shuns his help more often than she accepts it, reaching past his outstretched hand to grab the rock face and haul herself up.

  In an hour and a half, they have reached the southern edge of the Phangrei plateau. There are few trees on the broad, windswept grassland. It is not a place where people spend much time or cross without reason. At the far end from where Augustine and Akala stand now, Shirui Peak rises imposingly from the plateau, curling up into the sky. Today the mountain’s summit is lost among clouds: Philava, the Goddess of the mountain, is home. But the plateau itself is flat, and despite the altitude and the wind, the walking here across grassland is easier. As they thread their way between the waist-high tussocks, they can see Augustine’s village, Ukhrul, perched on the headland of a short, steadily rising ridge to the east. On the flank of the closest valley west stands Akala’s village, Tiya. Their homes are separated by barely two kilometres, and the river. No two villages are closer. None are further apart.

  Augustine has been here dozens of times, but as they walk now, he looks more closely at his village, perhaps for the last time, and at Akala’s. Ukhrul appears much larger than Tiya. The vegetable market in the middle of town is attended by tall street lamps, and the neat file of power poles and their wires can be seen charting the course of the main street, even from this distance. Tiya has none of those things. There is no main market, just a couple of roadside stores. There are barely a dozen families in that place and only one church.

  The people of Tiya are Tangkhul too. They share the language and celebrate the same festivals. Their dress is similar enough that only those from each village can tell each apart. Most of the Tangkhul tribes, in these days of Christian fraternity, are on good terms, further bonded by families that weave in and out of each village, putting down roots and sprouting new shoots across the valleys and the ridges and the rivers. Clan names are common across the tribes; markers of the familial journey. The old women in the villages know who has married whom and from where, and it’s they who dictate the unions of the next generation, keeping names and bloodlines alive.

  But proximity breeds contempt.

  There is bad blood between Tiya and Ukhrul. In each generation, men have died. The feud between the two villages has its origins here at Phangrei, over the plateau on which they are now walking.

  The plateau runs south to north: Tiya stands guard on its western flank, Ukhrul on its east. Neither is closer than the other, and both make equal, singular, claim to it. Land, and its control, is the fundament of power to Naga tribes. Villages that control large territories seek more, always, while those with little, do all they can to defend what they have. To allow another village rights to land is to cede one’s own sovereignty, to be weakened, to surrender without honour.

  But it’s an old fight. There is no real reason for the rancour between Ukhrul and Tiya, only stubborn old-world pride. Perhaps pride is enough. No one, on either side, is prepared to concede. And it infects everything. People from Ukhrul do not speak to those from Tiya. They don’t hunt together or farm the same fields. They don’t allow their children to marry. There is rarely anybody on Phangrei plateau. Save for Augustine and Akala, there is no one here now.

  On Augustine’s part, it is all unintended, he hasn’t had time to formulate any real plan, let alone a gesture of grand symbolism. This is just a way out.

  YARHO

  The house was asleep when Augustine’s father finally came home. But he was singing, so soon everybody was awake. Luke had the fire going, and the radio, he thought softly, tuned to a station playing the latest Bollywood bubblegum pop. The static would come in waves, overwhelming the lyrics, but Luke would fill in the gaps with the right words or the wrong. It didn’t matter, the songs were all the same.

  In his right hand, he held a bamboo cup half-filled with zu, a homemade beer made from rice and typically fermented in someone’s illegal still, hidden in a paddy-field shack. Luke had spilled some of the viscous white brew down his forearm where it had dried in clumps. This was not his first cup. His hair was wet and slicked back. He’d walked home through the rain. Now, his noise woke Maitonphi, not yet a day old. He fetched her from her crib and sat by the fire holding her, still singing. Gradually, with the noise apparently unlikely to abate, the rest of the family joined him at the fire. Liko awoke, groaning in annoyance, and tried to take Maitonphi back to bed.

  ‘She needs her sleep.’

  ‘No, she’s my little Naga, my little Tangkhul. She stays with me.’

  Her husband was not in a mood to be argued with right now, so she put a kettle on the fire: tea would help him—his morning hangover, at least. She stoked the fire and turned off the radio. Luke began to sing, in Tangkhul, a lullaby to his infant daughter, who had fallen asleep in his arms. It was a sad song, one sung by farmers to encourage the rains in times of drought.

  My father was a cloud of the heavens,

  My mother was a wind from the sea,

  They are gone from me now, and the tears that I cry

  Fill the earth that nourishes me.

  Augustine and Alex came to sit next to the fire, draped in the blanket from their shared bed. Alex leaned drowsily on his sibling, but he didn’t want to miss out.

  Their father’s singing came to a quiet close. ‘Have I told you the story of Yarho?’ He addressed the question to Augustine. The baby was asleep and Alex nearly so. Liko had her back to Luke, making no attempt to hide her displeasure at his intrusion.

  ‘You told me, but tell me again,’ Augustine answered.

  ‘You’re not too tired?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It happened down past Yao-yi,’ Luke began, ‘near our fields, but a little further downstream. There, by the same river that flows past our land, a Tangkhul family had their house and their paddy fields. They were good fields and the family was a good family. They had only one child, Yarho; the name means “only son”. One day, the wife fell sick with fever. The husband looked after her as best he could, but she was too ill, and she died soon after. The husband was sad for a long time. He stopped going to work in the paddy fields, and he stopped eating. He didn’t talk to anyone; he just lay in his bed, looking out at the mountains. Soon he died, too, of a broken heart.’

  Augustine could hear, faintly, the rain outside, a little heavier now. He stared at his father. Luke’s eyes appeared impossibly bright. They shone, a heady combination of the beer, the light of the fire, and his own enthrallment, even at a legend he’d told a dozen times before. Luke was never more alive than when he was telling a story, when he had the floor and an audience captive. And Augustine never loved his father more than when he was like this. Liko took back the baby, who was awake again now and mewling with hunger. Luke gave her up without a fight, his attention was elsewhere.

  ‘Yarho was too young to live alone, so his father’s younger brother, who had no land, came to his house to work in the paddy fields. His uncle was a good man and he worked hard. But the uncle’s wife did not like Yarho. She wanted him to leave. When the uncle was home she was pleasant, but when she was alone in the house with Yarho, she was cruel to him. She would beat him and told him he was stupid. She made him pick up hot sticks from the fire, and laughed when he was burned.

  ‘Upset, Yarho would leave the house and would run up and over the hill and down to the bank of the river, to the bend where the birds would gather on the branches of the mahogany trees. There he would sit and cry, for the longest time, but always, that place made him feel better. It was quiet, and he felt safe. Nearby, there were fruits in the trees and the water from the river was cool. He spent more and more time in that place.’

  Absent Liko’s ministrations, the fire had died down, leaving the room
in almost total darkness. Despite her annoyance with her husband, Liko had come to sit next to him to listen. His charisma had won once again. She’d heard the story before, countless times, but Luke’s tales were always evolving: he’d add a plot twist or a turn, a new character or a song. He’d blend old legends together, or weave ancient with new. Each iteration of Luke’s stories offered fresh meaning, every telling revealed a new shade of his soul.

  Luke had put down the bamboo mug. He spoke with his hands and his eyes as much as his voice. ‘You know the place, Augustine. We have been there together.’ Augustine nodded.

  ‘Yarho would gather the feathers that fell from the bodies of the hornbill birds who rested on the trees. The feathers were very beautiful, long and white, with a brown stripe. Yarho would watch the birds. They would sit peacefully on the branches, but when there was a noise in the forest, they would instantly rise up together and fly away. Sometimes they would be gone only a few minutes, sometimes for days, but always they came back. And wherever they went, they were always together.

  ‘Yarho wished he could be like the hornbills; he wished he could leave whenever he wanted, to fly all over the land, to be free. And he wished he belonged somewhere. He used to belong to his family, but his parents were dead, and his uncle worked in the fields all day. His aunt did not want him. Yarho felt he belonged with the hornbills, so he gathered up all the fallen feathers he could find, and he began to weave. He tied the feathers together with grass and used fallen branches as frames to make himself wings. When the hornbills saw what he was doing, he thought they would laugh. But they didn’t. Instead, they sat above him and furiously beat their wings against their bodies, shaking free the feathers that were loose. The feathers fell down gently onto Yarho for him to use.’