I thanked him and took two.
‘It’s our duty to look after you, Madam,’ he added, returning them to the drawer.
Soon afterwards I was in Roing, a small town at the base of the Mishmi Hills, where the final shudders of the eastern Himalayas slide into the plains of Assam.
Roing is home to the Idu Mishmi people: tough, hill-dwelling animists whose population spreads from here up the Dibang Valley to the border with Tibet. In the absence of a written script no one really knows where the Idu came from. Their history has been told around fires since time immemorial, warping into a blur of fantastical folktales and obscured memories. They probably migrated south from China, either from northern Yunnan or somewhere near Mongolia, around 800 years ago, coming through Tibet and over the Himalayas into this jagged, empty land. But no one can be sure. What is certain is that this fearsomely individualistic warrior race did not impress the Victorians who came to prod around their territory. The British knew them as the Chulikata, or crop-haired Mishmi, on account of their mop-top coiffures (which the British anthropologist Elwin had so liked): Beatle-like fringes, shaved temples and long hair tied into a knot at the back. According to the British these Chulikata were dirty, deceitful savages who roamed the hills ‘little encumbered by clothing’, raiding and plundering at will. In 1853 a British Political Officer wrote that they were ‘more savage and warlike than other Mishmis, and some year ago, were never seen on the plains except as marauders’.
Colonel F. M. Bailey, the British soldier, spy and explorer, who tramped up the Dibang Valley in 1913 in search of the fabled falls of the Brahmaputra, called them ‘troublesome and unpleasant’. The Tibetans went as far as to brand them cannibals who feasted on the bride’s mother at wedding celebrations. Countless others insulted their character, looks, hygiene and ‘primitive’ ways. But from the outset I adored the Idu, and few more so than the owner of Roing’s Mishmi Hill Camp, the wonderful Jibi Pulu.
Jibi was an impish, middle-aged Idu with a thicket of black hair that sprung determinedly from a high, balding forehead like the crest of a cockatoo. Below this, twinkly bespectacled eyes slanted downwards onto the apples of high cheekbones, and a scant moustache framed a wide, shapely mouth. Wise, kind and quick to laugh, there was something of Yoda about him, and most of his stories began with a sage-like, ‘One fine day . . .’ It had been on one of these fine days that he’d sat with a beer by the Deopani River and dreamt up the Mishmi Hill Camp – now a handful of thatched bamboo huts and safari-style tents overlooking the river and the mountains beyond.
I’d intended to stay just a day in Roing, servicing the beleaguered Hero and wringing myself dry, but landslides had closed the one road north up the Dibang Valley and, until they were cleared, I was stuck. But there are many worse places to be stranded than among the Idu, a people who believe that anyone who disrespects a guest will die an unpleasant death. Jibi spent much of the next few days driving me around the potholed streets of Roing – his tiny, battered white Maruti Suzuki squeaking and juddering over every bump – depositing me at the smoking hearths of various English-speaking friends and elders. There I’d sit for hours, cross-legged in the half-light of bamboo huts, drinking countless cups of sweet black tea as puckish men entranced me with stories about the Idu and their culture. Christianity has made fewer inroads among the Idu than the Naga and many other Northeastern tribes, and these middle-aged Idu still inhabited a world of spirits, magic and animal sacrifice. But at the same time these small, nimble mountain men wore jeans and fleeces and were dentists, doctors and English teachers with children at college in Guwahati and Delhi and jeeps parked outside. Their houses were similarly divided: half-modern and concrete, half-Mishmi hut, with televisions and Hindu calendars in one room and mithun skulls hanging near the engoko – the square, centralized hearths integral to Mishmi life – in another.
Jibi was similarly caught between worlds. His wife worked away as a government accountant in Lohit district and his two young children spoke more Hindi than Idu. He wore jeans and a khaki shirt and had been educated in Shillong, at the same college as Phupla. But at his parents’ house, a hut in the jungle a few miles from Roing, a gaggle of crop-haired old ladies sat beside the fire chattering like starlings, faces etched with wrinkles and dirt-blackened hands knotted like the roots of ancient trees. Beside them sat fantastically attired old men, their long ebony hair tied in knots under wide-brimmed cane helmets and daos slung across the backs of their etokojo, black sleeveless jackets woven with horizontal bands of orange and yellow embroidery.
The women smiled and eyed me with friendly curiosity. ‘How can we talk to her if she doesn’t speak any Idu or Hindu?’ asked one of them, laughing.
The Idu all had one thing in common, though. Whoever they were and whatever their age or profession, no one was in a hurry. Everyone had time to sit and talk and tell stories, their handsome, jovial faces lit up by the flickering flames. How very different to the grim-faced, hurrying, screen-addicted masses of our time-poor Western world.
Jibi was apparently related to everyone in Roing, every introduction beginning with a ‘This my cousin brother’, ‘This my cousin brother father’, or another such genealogical riddle. This wasn’t down to the Pulu clan having notably fruitful loins. While I struggle to name my second cousins or bend my brain around how exactly it is we’re related, with a population of only 12,000 and an extremely rigid clan structure, most Idu share the same blood and all of them can reel off their kin to a distance of ten or twelve generations. They have to: in a society bound by taboos, one of the strictest is to do with marriage – an Idu mustn’t marry anyone closer than a tenth cousin. Marrying outside the tribe is also a big no-no. Such a restrictive gene pool makes Idu dating a complicated game of Who’s Who and has led to many a star-crossed lover.
Jibi was also kind enough to introduce me to yuchi, a delicious and deceptively harmless-tasting Idu rice beer. This I discovered, as we drank it around the fire at the camp on my first night, was significantly stronger than a pint of Pilsner. One glass bathed me in a fuzzy afterglow. Two glasses and I was slurring. Three glasses and making it to bed felt like navigating the sinking deck of the Titanic. On one of these evenings we were joined by a pair of PhD students who were passing through – a Britisher (to my great surprise) and an Assamese, who were travelling around the Northeast researching border issues. The Assamese, a weighty intellectual called Mirza, took great delight in informing me of the leeches that would soon come out of hibernation.
‘The worst are the elephant leeches,’ he said, sucking his teeth. ‘They can make your foot or leg swell up like an elephant and the bite can easily go septic and kill you.’
The following day Jibi banged on my door at 7.30 a.m. with news that the Big Chief of the Arunachal Pradesh and Upper Assam Police was coming to the camp for breakfast. Soon afterwards, seven impossibly clean white Land Cruisers swept down the track and disgorged a small army of khaki-clad soldiers stiff with assault rifles, jungle boots and identically clipped moustaches. Behind them came a white van, out of which leapt a flock of waiters. They dashed across the grass like anxious penguins, bearing silver dishes, white tablecloths, bottled water and ashtrays, laying everything out in a fervour of activity. Ten minutes later another Land Cruiser sped in and out stepped the chief, all polished belt buckles and epaulettes and shoeshine. More interested in the Hero and who’d ridden it here, he ordered a series of photos: me with the bike, me and him, me and the top box, him with the Hero.
‘Our Indian girls need Dutch courage like this – hopefully you’ll inspire them,’ he surmised.
I left him to his luxuriant spread and retired to my hut to write my diary, interrupted every few minutes by soldiers sidling up with a ‘One selfie, Madam?’ In India you never know how your day is going to start.
The rain continued all week but at some point news filtered through that the road north was open again. With more rain forecast, and landslides likely, I decided to leave the Hero –
who’d been serviced for the grand sum of 200 rupees, or two pounds – with Jibi and travel to Anini, the farthest town up the valley, by Sumo taxi instead. The main form of transport in the Northeast, these tank-like 4WDs ply all the main routes in the state, roaring up the mountains laden with people, animals, food and domestic goods. It would be an interesting deviation from two wheels. Without the bike I’d at least be able to walk south again if further landslides closed the road. It was a week’s walk to Roing from the upper reaches of the valley; with the bike I could be stuck there for far longer.
There was one person I hadn’t yet managed to meet in Roing and that was Tine Mena, an Idu girl I’d heard about from Abhra. She was away in the mountains collecting medicinal plants and no one knew when she was coming back. But as chance would have it she returned the evening before I left, roaring into the camp on a racy red Yamaha, her long black hair streaming behind her. Thirty years old, and from a remote village halfway up the Dibang Valley, Tine had cheekbones you could swing off and eyes that regularly vanished into a crumple of laughter lines. She was tiny, the top of her head only just reaching my shoulders, but tougher than biltong. In 2011 she’d been one of the first Indian women to conquer Mount Everest, and the first woman from the Northeast, standing on the summit holding the Indian tricolour and a photo of her family in front of their bamboo hut. It was physically easy, she told me; she was an Idu – she’d grown up marching up and down mountains. It was the mental endurance that was tough; keeping going when you hadn’t slept properly for days and your body was weakened from altitude.
By even greater chance, it transpired that Tine’s clan were about to hold a festival. A private celebration of the main Idu festival of reh, it involved five days of shamanic chanting, animal sacrifice, feasting and drinking – all in the name of bolstering clan ties and garnering the good favour of the spirits. It was taking place in a small village a few hours south of Anini and about a thousand people would be attending, almost ten per cent of the Idu population. Tine wasn’t able to go but I must, she said; she’d send a message to a cousin in the village and ask them to look after me. By the time I wriggled into my sleeping bag that night, my head spinning with yuchi and anticipation, we’d concocted a loose plan. I’d take a Sumo tomorrow as far as the village of Etalin, about ten hours north of here, and wait at the Inspection Bungalow there for someone to pick me up. There was no phone reception in the village and Tine didn’t yet know how she’d send the message, who this person might be or when they would turn up. I just had to reach Etalin and wait. It all sounded delightfully tenuous.
Dawn was announced by the usual discordant orchestra of cocks crowing, dogs barking and men hoicking and, by six o’clock, I was waiting at the Sumo stand near the market. I’d left half of my luggage with Jibi, so with me was just a rucksack and, in case I found a bike to borrow in Anini, my motorcycle helmet. Most people in Arunachal Pradesh arise at the abominably early hours of four or five in the morning and already shutters were clattering open, women were sweeping their stalls and a squad of paramilitary was jogging down the main street, their boots drumming on the ground. A small crowd milled around the Sumo stand, waiting as luggage was tied onto roof racks by whippet-thin Nepali drivers. Idu teenagers giggled and flirted – the boys sporting the streaked red hair that was all the rage among young tribals here; the girls in tight jeans and SARS-like face masks (the latest fashion too, apparently). Older Idu men in cane hats and etokojo, their daos across their backs, waited silently to leave. At their feet a black piglet squealed and quivered miserably in a bamboo cage, and a basket clucked with chickens. A woman with a shy little boy turned out to be Jibi’s cousin, a headmistress travelling to visit her husband in Anini.
Half an hour later a delicate-looking Nepali youth clambered behind the enormous wheel of our Sumo and we were off – nine people squeezed into three rows of seats, plus a pig, chickens, sacks of rice and a television set – winding, bumping and beeping up into the maw of the mountains. Soon we were high above the plains and climbing through a mass of lushly forested hills, the wheel spinning and turning through the Nepali’s skilled hands. He was only nineteen but he’d been driving this route for three years already and knew every curve and camber. It was the first clear day in weeks: the steep slopes gleamed with dew and sunshine, and distant ridges melted into a cerulean sky. Far below, the entwining fingers of the Deopani and Dibang rivers shone like shards of silver on the plains. The juncture of hill and plain seemed even more pronounced from here and it was easy to see why the British had drawn a line along the seam. Occasionally we’d pass a village, its buildings encircling the slopes like crowns of thatch and iron. Around these, mithun – the first live ones I’d seen – bucked away from the roadside as we passed; dark brown, muscular beasts with heads like battering rams and those thick, conical horns.
Up, up we went, the air getting colder as we climbed, my fellow passengers numbed into sleep or silence by the constant jolting. Now the hills swelled in such abundance it was as if a monstrous mole had feverishly nosed its way through the earth’s leafy crust, leaving waterfalls of foliage to froth and pour down the precipitous slopes. The little boy was sick out of the window but never cried or complained for a second, and now and then we’d stop briefly at a roadside hut while the driver tied another package to the roof. After a few hours we reached the 2,655-metre Mayodia Pass, rounding a corner into an arena of glittering snow-dusted peaks. Here, at a sorry collection of rusted metal hovels, where lines of washing flapped in the breeze and snow lay on the verge, we stopped for tea and bowls of instant noodles.
At 4 p.m. we reached Etalin, a small settlement on the banks of a roaring green river. Only forty miles from Roing, as the crow flies, it had taken us ten hours to cover the 160 miles by road.
All I had to do now was wait.
8
TRIBAL GATHERING
The Inspection Bungalow, a shabby white building with four dank rooms built to accommodate visiting government employees, was on a hill just off the main road. Not knowing whether I’d be waiting for an hour or two days I took a room from the one-eyed Nepali caretaker and sat on the steps to wait.
Darkness fell, the crickets took up their twilight duties, and still there was no sign of anyone. To pass time I wrote my diary then walked to the nearest wine shop to buy two bottles of suspiciously cheap Royal Stag whisky for my as-yet-unknown hosts. At seven o’clock, a jeep pulled up at the bungalow, but it was only three government engineers passing through for the night. Then, an hour later, as I ate rice and dhal in the dimly lit kitchen, I heard the sound of a car engine approaching and knew it had come for me.
I walked outside as a dashing-looking young Idu man stepped out of his white Scorpio truck. ‘Hello, my name Sadhu Mihu. Mr Ajitu Molo sent me,’ he said.
In dark-green cords, a floppy khaki hat, green gumboots and a navy down jacket, he could have been dressed for an English country fair. Only his broad Tibetan features and dao, hanging in a bamboo sheath at his side, would have given him away. Who Mr Ajitu Molo was I never did find out, but whether by smoke signals, telepathy or the bush telegraph, Tine’s message had clearly found a way through. Ten minutes later, having apologized to the caretaker for leaving so soon, I’d hefted my rucksack into the truck and was being driven into the blackness of the hills by this handsome Idu tribesman. I had no idea where we were going or what lay ahead but, in the short time I’d spent with the Idu, I trusted them instinctively. Wherever Sadhu was taking me, and whatever the next few days held in store, I felt sure it was going to be a marvellous adventure. I hoped my instinct wouldn’t let me down.
We drove for an hour down a twisting dirt track, clanking over metal Bailey bridges, a river purling far below. Sadhu, who was a few years younger than me, couldn’t have been further from the Victorian depiction of the Idu as ferocious and filthy savages. Gentle and exceedingly polite, he insisted on calling me ‘Madam’, and was terribly concerned his house wouldn’t be up to my standards.
/> ‘The guest is god,’ he said, as we rounded a corner an hour later and saw the lights of Atunli village sewn into the hills. ‘I am honoured to have you here.’
But Sadhu needn’t have worried about Madam’s standards, for I would rather have stayed with him than in any five-star hotel. His house – a spacious, three-roomed abode made of wood, bamboo and concrete with a roof of rusting corrugated iron – was the location for the festival warm-up party. Half-drunk whisky bottles and bamboo flagons of rice wine stood around the engoko, and the room was bawdy with the laughter of a roistering, garrulous crowd. Roughly twenty men and women were huddled about the fire, their arms draped affectionately around each other’s knees and shoulders, the light of the flames falling upon the brims of cane helmets, bandoliers of bullets, pistols, strings of beads, hooped silver earrings and the tips of elephant-bone knife handles. Almost all of them had the traditional cropped hairstyle so rarely seen in Roing, freshly cut and shaven for the festival. A silent, scrawny Indian boy flitted among them, filling the kettle, pouring cups of tea and adding logs to the fire.
The minute I sat down an old man thrust a glass of whisky into my hand with a mischievous grin. The others, unable to speak any English, eyed me curiously and smiled. Warmed by the whisky and the flames I gazed around me, spellbound by the hubbub of nasal, sing-song voices and the beautiful, elfish faces. It was like attending a gathering of wood sprites. One woman, who must have been about forty-five, had the button nose, rosebud lips and perfectly rounded cheekbones of an exquisitely carved porcelain doll. Even Colonel E. T. Dalton, a British soldier and explorer, had begrudgingly admitted to the Idu women’s beauty when writing in 1872.
‘Some among them have red lips and ruddy complexions, and I have seen girls that are decidedly good-looking, but their beauty is terribly marred by their peculiar method of cropping the hair.’
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 10