The journey itself was excruciating; it was steaming hot and the bus was overcrowded and slow. The road’s countless potholes were anything but good to Hseng Noung’s now quite advanced pregnancy. But she bore it all with her usual calm fortitude.
The hills were a pleasant refuge from the heat of the Delhi plain. We found an old mansion called Rokeby which served as a boarding house for semi-permanent residents. It had a traditional English-style fireplace in the common room downstairs, a small library and the garden outside was full of marigolds. We spent five days there, mostly walking up and down the steep, winding roads of the hill station to get some badly needed exercise in preparation for the long trek which lay ahead of us.
We left Mussoorie by bus on May 7. When the scooter taxi from New Delhi bus station pulled in towards our house near Bengali Market, we saw Kewezeko waiting outside. He looked glum as he followed us upstairs to our room where we sat down.
“I couldn’t get on the plane to Dimapur. They’re fully booked until the end of June.”
Hseng Noung and I exclaimed in dismay. Kewezeko looked disappointed, too, but tried to cheer us up.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot while you’ve been away. Let’s go anyway. They can’t turn you back. Not with your letter from the KIA.”
We agreed and when he left, we told him to keep the money for the air fare and buy train tickets for us all instead.
After he had left, we parcelled up most of our books and unnecessary personal belongings to mail to Bangkok. After checking several lists and reweighing our packs time and time again, we settled for a minimum of clothes: for each of us two pairs of trousers, three shirts, a field-jacket, running shoes, socks, underwear and a bush hat.
Hseng Noung’s allowance included her cameras and film, some Chinese language text books and a first aid kit. I decided on my notebooks, maps, a pair of binoculars, a radio, a small tape-recorder, a compass and a Swiss army knife. Out of all the books I had considered taking along, I finally settled for two: Ian Fellowes-Gordon’s The Battle for Naw Seng’s Kingdom, which was about World War Two in the Kachin Hills, and E.R. Leach’s anthropological study Political Systems of Highland Burma. I also packed my fishing equipment: a rod, a reel and a set of spinners.
On March 14, we told Roger and Amala that we had booked our flights back to Bangkok. They were surprised—we had almost become part of the scene as a result of our long stay there. The Marwari landlady came running up to make sure we paid our rent and had a good look around to make sure no minor fittings were missing or damaged.
On March 15, I entered in my diary:
Left New Delhi—at long last!—at 6 pm on 156 down Tinsukia Mail. Met our Naga friends at the station only a few minutes before departure. They travelled second class—we had a first class coupe for ourselves. It was dusty and dirty, but at least we had some privacy.
There were plenty of Indian troops on the train, probably frontier guards going up to the northeast. They crammed into the second class compartments, and even in the corridor outside our coupe, sitting on their bedrolls and haversacks.
The train pulled out of New Delhi on time. It made brief halts at Ghaziabad, Aligarh, Tundla and some other uninspiring places; we eventually fell asleep.
It was a 45 hour train journey to Guwahati in Assam, kilometre after kilometre of dry, hot and dusty plains with hardly a tree in sight. We passed villages which consisted of clusters of mud-houses, closely packed together in the stink of cow dung and with an air of boredom hanging over them. The landscape did not change until the third and last day of our journey when we woke up in Assam. Here, we saw small and neat villages with planters’ style half-timbered houses, lush bamboo grooves, tea gardens and green paddy fields. It reminded me of Southeast Asia, although the people looked different.
At 2.30pm the train rumbled across the stately steel bridge over the Brahmaputra River and we reached Guwahati half an hour later. The broad gauge track ends there and a smaller, connecting train continues along the old Assam railway to Dimapur, Tinsukia and Dibrugarh.
Kewezeko and his friends had to get off also and they helped us find a taxi to Shillong. We tried to look casual, as if we had met on the train, so as not to attract any suspicion.
“See you in Shillong on Tuesday,” Kewezeko said and went back to the station to catch the train to Dimapur.
Our arrangement was simple. He would go up to Dimapur and Kohima, borrow a jeep and come back to Shillong and pick us up. Then, we would travel together to the Burmese border. I had bought hair-dyes and dark sunglasses in New Delhi, so nobody would think twice if they saw me in the back of a jeep. If we had to stop and get out at any army checkpoint, it would be a different story. I had failed to find walnut oil or something similar that could have been used to darken my skin; in India, cosmetic shops sell only agents that make your skin fairer.
It took us a couple of hours to reach Shillong in the hills south of Guwahati and the Brahmaputra Valley. We shared the taxi with some Indian businessmen who asked us lots of questions. Pretending we knew nothing about the area more than that Shillong was a beautiful place, we fended off their inquisitiveness.
The taxi drove into Shillong after dark and dropped us off at the Tourist Lodge near the town’s polo ground. It was far more expensive than we had thought—65 rupees for a run-down double room—and it had water only in the morning and late evening.
Shillong’s roads wind up and down the hills and valleys on which the town is built, past old bungalows, administrative buildings of the colonial era, an extensive military cantonment, churches and even a cathedral. Most tribesmen here are Christians, with a large congregation of Welsh Presbyterians among the Khasis.
When I first visited Meghalaya in 1976, Shillong was still a mainly tribal town dominated by indigenous Khasis, Garos, Jaintias and fairly large communities of Nagas, Mizos and other tribes from the Indo-Burmese frontier who had come to study at the local university, or to look for employment opportunities. In May 1985, plains people clearly outnumbered the tribals—and the influx has not been without friction. Bloody clashes erupted between the native population and “illegal immigrants” not only from Bangladesh, but also West Bengal and other overpopulated parts of the subcontinent. A curfew was imposed and shoot-on-sight orders issued in Shillong. It was only a year or two before we arrived that peace and normality had been restored.
A similar movement among the Assamese in the Brahmaputra Valley was even bloodier. The Assamese today have become Indianised to a large extent, but still they trace their origin back to Mongol, non-Aryan peoples. The original Assamese were closely related to the Thais, the Lao and the Burmese Shans, Hseng Noung’s people, and they founded their own kingdom in 1228. Six hundred years later, this kingdom was occupied by the British and annexed to the Indian Empire. Included with it were several surrounding hill areas, inhabited by various tribal people: the Khasi Hills where Shillong is situated, the Mizo Hills and the Naga Hills.
The first rains of the monsoon set in while we were in Shillong. It made us worried for our trip and we counted the days it would take to reach KIA headquarters from the Indo-Burmese border. At least 60 days. It would be the end of July before we could make it.
On the day before Kewezeko’s expected arrival, we went out for a last Western style meal at the Pinewood Hotel, the oldest in Shillong. It is well-known throughout India for maintaining the gracious standards of the Raj. The building is a two-storey, half-timbered structure surrounded by green lawns and pine trees. We had pea soup, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding and a bottle of beer, anticipating a daily diet of rice gruel and jungle greens for at least the next year.
Kewezeko came on Tuesday as appointed. We met in a shabby cafe called Ee-Cee near Shillong’s bus station and ordered a cup of coffee.
“Well, there’s good news and bad news,” he began ruefully. We had been hoping nothing more would go wrong. But apparently it had.
“The good thing is that the underground contacts in Dima
pur and Kohima were very glad to hear you’re coming. But, I’m afraid, they said they could do nothing more at this stage without a formal approval from their headquarters. So they sent a letter to Muivah’s camp across the border in Burma.”
We were told to wait for further instructions and, if possible, stay on in Shillong for another week or two. That was impossible. We had only a week’s permit for Shillong and even our Indian visas were about to expire. On top of that, we were also running out of money.
Kewezeko was as depressed as we were. There clearly was no choice but to return to Calcutta, apply to have our visas extended and send for more money. We were not overly worried about our permit since, surprisingly, nobody had bothered to check it so far. There were no annotations on it so we figured it would be possible to return on the same permit and just alter the “5” for May to a “6” for June if the need arose. A month was what we reckoned it would take to get a reply from the NSCN and to arrange our visa extensions in Calcutta.
According to the local ticket office in Shillong the train from Guwahati to Calcutta was fully booked. But we managed to buy two stand-by air tickets and the travel agent said we stood a fair chance of getting on the plane. We said goodbye to Kewezeko who was going back to Dimapur to wait for the NSCN’s reply. We had made up a primitive code for telegrams: ‘Varanasi’ stood for Guwahati and ‘Bombay’ meant Dimapur, depending on where we should go by train. Kewezeko said he would be able to make arrangements to pick us up at the appropriate station at just a few days’ notice.
We caught a taxi down to Guwahati, rushed through the town and continued towards Borjhar airport twenty kilometres further down the Brahmaputra. Though we forced a brave face it was hard to hide our disappointment. Even a month’s delay was a serious matter for us; the rainy season had begun and Hseng Noung would be six months pregnant in June, when we expected to make our next attempt to reach the Burmese frontier.
At the airport the plane was waiting on the tarmac but we were not allowed on it, though it was far from full, as the booking desk was closed and nothing in the world could persuade the sullen clerks to take out the passenger list and add our names to it:
“No, no, no. It’s closed. You’ll have to wait for the next flight. We can’t sidestep our procedures,” the head clerk said pursing his mouth.
I argued heatedly with him for fifteen minutes, but to no avail. The plane took off without us. We had to wait for another four hours for the next flight.
Then it happened. While we were sitting in the waiting hall, two smartly dressed Indians strode in. They were in civilian clothes, but had the unmistakable air of officialdom about them. They spotted me immediately and bustled over to the place where we were sitting.
“May I see your permit, please?”
I took out our passports—and the permit which was issued in both our names.
“How did you get in here? There’s nothing noted about your arrival on your permit.”
“We didn’t come by plane. We came by train.”
“So that’s why I didn’t see you,” the officer smiled. “But you should have reported your arrival to the nearest police station.”
He was evidently an intelligence officer and our passports and the permit were carefully checked. His companion sat quietly beside him and took down the details in a small notebook. The officer who seemed to be the more senior of the two took out his ballpen and scribbled on the reverse side of our permit: “Departed Borjhar airport, May 22, 1985.”
Damn it, I thought. That’s really blown it. I avoided looking in Hseng Noung’s direction and struggled to conceal my consternation. With an effort, I thanked him politely and asked for permission to leave. Our plane had landed and I wanted to get on as soon as possible.
It took off at 5 pm as dusk was falling. We were heading back to Calcutta.
2
CALCUTTA
No matter how hard we tried to raise each other’s morale by assuring each other that we were not yet beaten, we could not conceal from each other our intense disappointment at our enforced return to Calcutta. It was drizzling when the plane landed in the darkness at Dum Dum.
After the exorbitantly priced taxi eventually had ploughed its way through the crowds down to Sudder Street, we found that the Salvation Army Red Shield Guest House was full. Tired and weary, we checked into the considerably more expensive Fairlawn Hotel across the street.
Our official business was accomplished within a few days as we frantically ran around great dusty government offices and shabby banks. Our Indian visas expired on June 1, but we were able to extend them till July 1 without having to go through too much red tape. My ever-reliable Danish daily, Information, transferred another payment, which we picked up at the Bank of America’s Dalhousie Square branch. For once financially secure, we were even within the bounds of law.
We soon realised, though, that there was no legal way we could get a new permit for the northeast. At Meghalaya House in Russell Street, the same helpful Khasi officer whom we had met in March was happy to hear we had made it to Shillong. But he had his serious doubts as to what the response would be if we applied a second time. We said we liked Shillong so much we were longing to go back.
“That won’t be easy. The authorities may get suspicious if you go there too often. After all, it’s a sensitive area,” he hinted.
We went back to our hotel where we settled on a much more dubious solution. First, we changed the 5 for May to a 6 for June on our permit. In a pharmacy around the corner we bought a small phial of stain remover of the kind Indian ladies use when they have dyed their hair and got their clothes marked. It turned out to be too weak to remove the ballpen scribbling on the back of the paper. We had another bright idea. The visa extension we had got was not just a stamp in the passport; it consisted of a small booklet with signed and sealed documents, our passport pictures with personal details and extracts from the Indian immigration law. We stapled our permit to this booklet, thus concealing the cancellation.
After working out this creative solution, our next dilemma was to contact Kewezeko and inform him about what had happened at Borjhar airport. We wrote out an express telegram, asking him to come down to Calcutta, and went to the telegraph office in Dalhousie Square. Hseng Noung, who could easily pass for a Naga, went alone inside—while I waited by the main entrance of the old red-brick building.
She gave a Naga girl’s name when filling in the space ‘sender’ and the telegram was worded as a message from a lover:
“Dear Kewezeko. I miss you so much. Please come down to Calcutta soonest. We have legal matters to discuss regarding our future.”
We thought it would be clear enough for him to understand the urgency of the matter. Then we strolled back to our hotel room. Everything was set, once again. We had a legal visa extension, and a new permit of our contrivance which we fervently hoped would be passable and sufficient funds. We were ready to leave the moment we received news from Kewezeko.
The days went by and still there was no message from him. We moved back into the Salvation Army’s guest house when a vacancy came up. Luckily this time, it was a comparatively quiet room in a one storey-building at the back of the main hostel. At least, we could sleep soundly at night, though inevitably each morning we were woken up by the newspaper vendor, a thin elderly man dressed in baggy Indian clothes and with an irritatingly servile manner who had taken into his head to begin the day by delivering the paper direct to our room. He banged the door at six and if we were still asleep, he would rattle the padlock against the latch until I staggered out of bed and bought some peace at the price of a newspaper.
“Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir,” he said, bobbing his head repeatedly.
Then there was the turbaned flute vendor, a somewhat younger fellow who demonstrated the range of tones of his instruments by playing rapid sequences of scales as he walked around the cheap guest houses in Sudder Street. We never bought a flute, but he did not give up hope of clinching a sale and wou
ld frequently take up his post outside our room at any time of the day.
Calcutta was getting seriously hot and humid. In March, when we first arrived, it had been bearable; by May and June with the beginning of the monsoon the city becomes a living nightmare. The streets flood after each day’s heavy downpour, the water dissolving the accumulation of human and animal excreta that normally lies in the streets to form a reeking sludge bobbing on the surface amidst all kinds of unimaginable detritus.
If the heat and the stench outside was nauseating then retreating to our room offered little relief as the tropical storms caused frequent power cuts decommissioning the ceiling fans and lights. A lit candle only made the sultry room even hotter. So we would lie on the bed listening to the rain drumming on the roof. Intermittently, dramatic sheets of lightning illuminated the room to accentuate each crack in the walls and ceiling with its eerie flicker. Thunder followed, sometimes almost instantaneously, with a crash like an exploding bomb.
Better hotels, such as the Fairlawn across the street, had their own generators for emergencies. At night, the power cuts were especially annoying since it was impossible to sleep without a fan. If the power cut, we would be woken, soaked in sweat, to hear the Fairlawn’s generator starting up opposite.
Land of Jade Page 5