Reminiscences

Our idyllic world
Many were born, to use a worn out phrase, with a silver spoon in their mouths. I was born naked, literally naked, perhaps with froth in my mouth, delivered at home in the most natural way by whosoever was present in our house at the time of my birth. They cut my umbilical cord not by a sterilized blade or knife but by a sharpened piece of bamboo called ‘tlaihnat’ and tied my side of the cord either with ‘patsum’, the cut off piece of the warp of a woven cloth, or ‘hnâng’, a split cane or bamboo that was easily reachable at the time of my arrival in this wonderful planet. Most of my generation from the hills came to this world in this fashion, naturally and originally, the very same way Adam and Eve delivered their first-born. But nature was gracious. We survive.

I was the last born in my family of seven brothers and six sisters, holding a lucky Christ’s number 13 (12 disciples + Jesus Christ). My father died when I was only three months. In our way of saying, he died a believer (Ringtu niin a thi) but before he could learn the ABC that the old folks then called it ‘the white man’s magic’. In modern statistical term, therefore, my father died illiterate. In the traditional sense, however, my father was one of the most educated and respected persons in my village Pherzawl in South West Manipur in his time. Apart from being a poet, he was a famed craftsman specializing in intricate cane and bamboo works like making all kinds of baskets and he received orders from far distant villages. He was also a trusted elder in the Village Council, a duty he had to render because of his marriage into the Chief’s family.

The only civilization that had then deeply penetrated our idyllic world was the Christian faith that came along with the British rule. Everything by then was far and beyond. In our imagination, the misty heaven was much closer to Imphal, the capital of Manipur where the Maharaja and the British rulers sat. Imphal was then called ‘Phaipui’ meaning a city on a vast plain. While our spiritual city called Jerusalem was to the believer only a heartbeat away, the Zo capital Aizawl was many days journey away. The other big place we used to hear often was Hringchar (Silchar) from where we got essential supply of salt, kerosene, and some clothing and stationery materials. The village produced the rest.

Our need was little; our satisfaction, even smaller. Three square meals of cooked rice a day and a year’s supply of food grain and salt were all that we basically needed. The village church met all our spiritual needs. We were in direct touch with God and nature. We had no radio, no newspaper and no post office. Our only channel of contact with the outside world was through travelers and messengers who used to bring stale news of whatever they heard and misheard and added as much salt and masala as they chose to make the news more interesting and palatable. Howsoever old the news might be, still news was news to us. This was the condition in most hill areas of northeast India in those days. But we envied nobody and nobody envied us.

The rural furnace
Village life in remote hill areas was simple and idyllic as it was tough, rough and toilsome. It’s a constant struggle for survival. January came and the task of clearing jungle thickets for the new jhum site began. The cut trees, bamboos and undergrowth called ‘vahchap or chap’ was left to dry for a month or so and then it was burnt by end March or beginning of April. The more the burnt and scorched the soil, the better. The fiery heat left thick ashes to fertilize the soil and killed many embedded seeds thereby making weeding easier. Unseasoned rain could play havoc as wet ‘chap’ would not burn well leaving no ashes but only half burnt debris that had to be cleared with much labor. It also left the embedded seeds in the soil intact and the unwanted seeds would spring up at the first drop of rain making weeding extremely a difficult task.

This was followed by a tormentous season of sowing under heat and dust and four months of weeding under rain and sun. Then came the autumn, a season of rest and recreation which most villagers spent collecting house building materials from the forest and also household provisions from outside the village. Soon, winter and harvest season arrived and if the jhums were far from the village, all working hands would stay at a temporary hut built in or near the jhum till harvest was over and then only returned to the village just on time for Christmas and New Year celebrations. Then, the monotonous cycle began all over again in January.

Village life started at the break of dawn. Our reliable alarm clocks were the ubiquitous village cocks. They crowed about five times between dusk and dawn. At the fifth crowing, women got up to start their daily chores of carrying water from the spring, winnowing of unhusked rice at the mortar and cooking for the family. It was impossible for a single hand to perform all these tasks simultaneously. In a subsistence economy based purely on manual labor, a large family was therefore a boon as it had a better chance of survival. It is now the opposite for those living on a white-collar job. Less has become a boon and more a curse.

We normally ate our morning meal at sunrise. Then, all the working hands carrying packed lunch left for the jhum to work all day long and returned at dusk. Our school started at 7.a.m and closed at 1.p.m when we would return home, had lunch and then helped in household works like carrying rice paddy from the jungle barn, fetching water from the far distant spring, collecting firewood from the jungle, making or repairing kitchen gardens, tending domestic animals and preparing dinner for the family. On Saturdays and holidays, we helped our family at jhum and at home. Therefore, most students of my generation from the hills knew jhuming and related works including jungle clearing, sowing, weeding and harvesting apart from house building, basket making and setting all kinds of traps to catch wild animals, fowls and birds. We had learned the art of survival and the value of manual labor in practice.

My generation was shaped and molded in this rural furnace. It was this rough and tough but practical training in real life drama that we had had in our impressionable years that stood by me in the difficult stages of life’s journey. When faced with problems and challenges, my village experience has always become a handy survival kit.

War broke our Eden
When I was born on July 15, 1939 Adolf Hitler had already invaded and taken over Czechoslovakia and was on his way to overrunning Poland, Finland, Denmark, Norway, Netherlands, Belgium and France, thus inaugurating the bloodiest war ever fought in the history of our planet. In Asia, Japan had already taken Korea, Manchuria, and large chunks of China and was planning to invade and conquer Philippines, Indo-China (Vietnam), Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and British colonies in Asia as far as Burma. By May 1942 Japan had already occupied Burma, bringing the war to our doorsteps. Our world never remained the same again since the baptism of gunfire and bombs.

Before the war, only birds, bats, bees, butterflies and other flying insects monopolized our solemn air space with the hovering skylark commanding the blue sky. It was a sight so divine and tranquil as to give you instant inner peace untranslatable in any human tongue and art form. Nature’s peace flowed into you and you were one with nature. This was what William Wordsworth wrote in his eternal poem,

The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.

World War 2 broke that tranquility. The noisy birds called fighter planes came and rent our serene air. Dogfights between the Allied and the Japanese fighter planes became a common sight, chasing each other like birds of prey. I still vividly remember that afternoon in 1944 when I accompanied my mother to the nearby forest to collect firewood. A transport plane suddenly appeared in the blue sky frightening not only us but also the birds and the beasts. The plane hovered lower and lower and dropped rations on our school hill for the arriving army battalion. On return from the forest, we saw several gunny bags scattered all around our school and also few broken tombstones hit by the falling bags. This was our closest encounter with the big bird.

Our village school
I was brought up in that atmosphere. I attended the village middle school, which ran classes from ABC Grade to Class VI with two teachers. Our headmaster was Class VIII passed and our Second Master was Lower Primary (Class II) passed. The school building consisted of only a medium-size hall in which they put rows of roughly hewn benches and desks for Class II and above and the lower classes had only wooden benches but not desks. At every period, our headmaster had to take five different classes and the rest by his assistant. We were taught to memorize or learn by heart every subject except mathematics of which we had to learn the formula. The Mission Board of Examinations conducted exams for the Lower Primary (Class II) and Class VI exams and the rest by the school. I topped at the Lower Primary Examination in 1949 and scored full marks in most subjects.

It was a proud moment. We invited the entire village folks for a celebration in our house, one of the biggest in the village measuring 15X6 Mizo ‘hlams’. It was packed to the brim. I was asked to say a few words in English. Apart from being only 10 in age, I was a shy boy and speech was not and never is my cup of tea. But I had to say something in English. So I mustered up courage and recited a piece from our English text as eloquent as a senior priest would deliver his well-versed incantation or benediction. My maiden speech was crowned with thunderous applause. The simple village folks did not bother whether I delivered a Tertullian speech or recited lines that I memorized from my textbooks. The meaning of what I said did not matter to them at all. For them, to hear a foreign tongue coming out of my lips was a joy. The fact that I uttered words of English was all that they would like to hear. I proved their point and met their expectations of me. The sound of their thunderous applause remained an encouragement till this day.

My ultimate ambition at that time was to pass Matriculation and become a teacher in our Middle School. My second ambition was to visit Imphal at least once before I died. These were wishful dreams then, a classic case of building a castle in the air. But my second dream was fulfilled in early 1955 when I went to Churachandpur for the first time and then visited Imphal. Churachandpur was then a three-day walk from Pherzawl. I had already then finished Class IX. And it was for the first time that I saw a bus! My first dream came true four years later. But my ambition grew at every climb of a step. My desire to go further up increased. I gradually began to realize that one step was enough for each move forward and another step for the next move but every stepping stone I carved should be solid and firm.

Our chief Pu Dolura, my maternal uncle, was a farsighted man. He was once a teacher himself and knew the value of education. So he established Pherzawl High School in February 1951, the first ever high school in Churachandpur District with Thanglora as headmaster. Thanglora was a born teacher who could make every subject intelligible and interesting. Students from Mizoram, Tripura, Cachar and many parts of Manipur came to study and a fusion of Zo culture began to take place with students from Mizoram playing a major role. It was during this time that I picked up many songs in Lushai as it was then known as also the dialect itself. Much later, I realized that my vision of a strong, united Zo nation was born unconsciously during those formative years but it took many years to develop into a concrete shape. My Zoram Khawvel serial is the product of that vision.

From failure to a long leap
I finished schooling from Pherzawl High School in 1959 after two frightful flops in Matriculation examinations in 1957 and 1958. It was a terrible demeaning experience I would not like to repeat even in my dream. I had learned a good lesson from that experience and never let myself failed again in exams since. It was easier to succeed than to fail. The amount of hard work I had put in to succeed was much easier to bear than the heavy burden of failure and shame. Luckily, I had also discovered that failure could be made to a very good use. During the two solitary and traumatic years when I had to bear the shame of my stupidity and neglect with self-imposed dignity, I turned and searched within myself to find out who I was and whether I was blessed with any latent ability. In the process, I landed up composing a few memorable songs, wrote my first novel and learned tonic solfa to the core. I discovered a very big part of myself.

I graduated from D.M. College, Imphal in 1963 without even having an opportunity to see a train! I am therefore holder of a very rare honor called ‘Rêl lu hmu loa B.A tling sartifiket’, one of my proud possessions in life. And after two years of post-graduate study at Guwahati University and a year’s stint at Sielmat Christian College as Lecturer, I joined Indian Revenue Service in 1967 and Indian Foreign Service in 1970 leaving my pet dream of establishing a world-class institute to be called Institute of Tribalogy in the northeast. And then I went abroad in 1976 for more than two decades to serve in four continents in the pomp and glittery of a diplomatic society considered to be the most honored profession on this planet. It was a long shot from Pherzawl, too long a jump difficult for any normal person to fully absorb its impact, culturally and psychologically.

Our new world
Our century is by far the bloodiest and the fastest growing century in human history. It practically began with World War I followed closely by World War II and then the Cold War years that produced stockpiles of nuclear arsenal enough to annihilate the human race several times over. Localized wars and ethnic violence in its worst brutal form continued throughout claiming many thousands of lives. The pace of scientific advancement exceeded all other centuries combined, especially in the field of electronics with small computer chips ruling the roost. I can now converse with my children in Wellington, London and New York at the touch of a button. I only hope that we shy away from further computerizing at least some pleasures of life like kissing, making love, drinking and eating which, if Biblical writers are right, they have already done away with in heaven where the inhabitants no longer suffer from pains, hunger, sickness, loneliness, tears and hate! Heaven has a meaning and an attraction because of the existence of hell. Could there then be a pleasure without pain? Fulfillment without want? Smile without tear? Love without hate? Positive without negative? Yes without No? I really wonder!

Pherzawl prism and yardstick
Everything in life is relative, a measurement from a certain point to another. Happiness is measured from a certain point of pain or pleasure or expectation. For me, the yardstick of my life is drawn from Pherzawl from where I measure the ups and downs of my life and how far I have traveled in life’s journey. Even after my profession landed me in the upper echelons of international society to hobnob with the VVIPs and dignitaries of other countries, I remained firmly attached to my roots knowing that if I did not, I would be quickly dehumanized with no face and identity and be drifting in the human ocean like a broken reed in a vast lake with no roots to hang on. I can never appreciate what I am today unless I knew what I had been before.

At the same time, I also now see our world from many viewpoints. Depending on how one looks at it, our world can be very small or very big. In one way, it is an extended global village peopled by various races and tongues that formed themselves into separate nationalities like many ‘vengs’ in a big village or town who are competing with each other. Our world shrinks at every improvement of communication system. In my childhood, Delhi was many months journey from Pherzawl but I can now reach in three hours from Imphal by air. The world looks even smaller if you observed it from a faraway galactic station. You will then find out that it is not even a small village but a tiny speck among the many billion stars in an ever-expanding universe. Likewise, I could see the meaning of my life clearer when I measure it from my Pherzawl window.

I may not be far wrong in claiming that my generation of hill boys and girls jumped from almost a zero point to the pinnacle of elite services in India and elsewhere. We have expanded Zoram khawvel to the far corners of India and abroad. Despite various culture shocks that we have to encounter and also the many layers of civilization that we have to absorb within a short span of our services, virtually all of us have faithfully clung to our roots and remained a force in preserving our unique identity. We have survived and still remained so of our own self. The reason to me is that every one has his or her Pherzawl as the Jews have their Jerusalem to cling to. A person who is certain of his or her identity can withstand and absorb any cultural onslaught, howsoever powerful that may be.

(December 5, 1999, Delhi)