The Heart of Starkness: Naga Diaries 4

Typically, our trip to Tuenchang too began with a sacred ritual. The first set of tantrums. I was lost at the cyber café in Kohima, and so was Amlan. Sunil hot footed it back to the hotel. When I reached the hotel, Sunil was on slow fuse. Amlan was still nowhere in sight. As I hurried to call him, I ran smack into him outside the hotel.

We rushed to the bus stand to be told that there was no seat on the bus to TuengSang. Sunil blew, and muttered about time wasted blah blah. Finally we took a cab to Wokah, since we were told there were large menhirs lining the way. These menhirs had dates that commemorated those who died in inter-tribal wars, and then peace was made. These are huge stone blocks. Sanjay Borbaruah had told us this place was littered with them.

However, on the way to Wokah, we had a moony Lotha tribal who was the BJP vice president of the district, his young flunky, and the three of us in the jeep. No hotel in Wokah. We drive to two, Sunil is ballistic, and constantly giving a rather course commentary on the Nagas in Marathi. Nothing about racism or any other thing. Merely pissed at the deadly accuracy of each bit of information that we got from each source in Nagaland. The last piece said there were lots of hotels in Wokah. Amlan and I are enjoying this to the hilt. The people with us cannot understand why I and Amlan are laughing away, while each search for a hotel draws a blank.

Finally, the driver Vee and his friend Jimmy, take us to the government tourist guesthouse. We get the best room on our stay, and are told we need to pay on Rs 80 for that!

Then Jimmy invites us home. We shoot the Lotha family there, find the GaoNbura, blown drunk, totter into the house. He starts singing, attacking the peace process, and hoping everything works out alright etc. Meanwhile, once we are into singing, we get the whole blooming house singing. Jimmy’s younger sister is an attractive girl, whose eyes bulge with admiration when Amlan tells her he is the cameraman for Hello Dolly, a television serial she watches.

The family gets too intimate. We move upstairs, on invitation, to watch the footage on TV screen. Amlan wows the family with all the tricks he can play to the gallery with on our Sony digital camera. The family is suitably impressed, and decides to take their hospitality to new heights, and Rose disappears from the room, and then enters with a heavy load of family photographs in 16 albums, and dumps it on my lap.

After that, we land up at the NST hotel, run once again by pretty Lotha girls. The GaoNbura slips in behind us, insists we drink with him. We order and join him at the hotel, while we pack the food for us. The tourist bungalow is just across.

In the night, we have Jimmy, the driver Vee, and the president of the students union with us, besides Robin. We have a freaking great party. Sunil, as rum takes over, puts the boys through a synonym test. I take it all down faithfully. Now we have a list of Nagamese words for some very basic concepts.

High voiced discussion later, we retire. Next day, we finally manage to get a vehicle for as far as Mokongchung. From there are buses to Tuenchang, the district of the Chang tribe, where the story of Shitoba Chang is said to have taken place.

Economics interfere. Quick decisions have to be made. We have run out of DV tapes, and there is a lot of shooting to be done. No ATMs in MokongChung. We drive into the city, a bustling bazaar area. Amlan asks the first man next to whom we stop the vehicle for direction. He suspects that man is a Bihari. So asks in Hindi. He is told in flawlessly Bihari Hindi where the bus stand is. As we drive away, Amlan leans out of the window, and shouts for all of MokongChung to hear “BahenChod, Bihari.”

Sunil and I are stunned. Amlan has been the short tempered creative cinematographer with an FTII degree and some impressive credentials assisting some top Bollywood films to boot. He was the youngest in the group. A few meetings over the project and two weeks of traveling had suggested he was somebody still in the throes of growing up. A young man who has cleared an early bar for creative people. A sensitive, sometimes uncannily reverent, Amlan also was somebody capable of sudden, abrupt gusts of an atavistic extremism. He often turned pugnacious when criticized, primarily because he was out of yoke of the process and system he was training in.

He also was our main communicator because being Assamese, he was comfortable with Nagamese, a close linguistic cousin of his mothertongue. Besides, he was a sensitive young man. But, very close to the neurosis of the region, which must explain his bouts of stormy and nearly racist, bigoted extremism.

For years, the Assam Rifles was the idea of India in Nagaland. Amlan carried within him some deeprooted complaints against us Indians, just as many others in Nagaland. And yet, through out this trip, the best illustration into the emotional issue of the state and also the region, was ticking next to us in the vehicles we used, in the trains we traveled, and inside the hotel rooms we shared. Amlan was actually both an Indian and the Naga. Conflicted, tinder box and unpredictable.

We decide there is just enough time for the bus to Tuenchang. I dump the two guys into the bus. I am to find myself a vehicle back into Assam, and from there to Guwahati. There I am to find a place where they sell DV tapes. I am to source it, and then send it to the district commissioner of Tuenchang. The address, name etc I have to find. These guys will eventually be in touch, some kind of anyways, with the district commissioner. I say goodbye, and wonder how Nagaland, unpredictable Amlan and rather frazzled Sunil are going to find the rest of the Shitoba Chang story on their own, and lock it into the camera. For the Search For Shitoba was also slowly unraveling its makers.