travel the road

I never made it to the wish-fulfilling stupa. Jules was in a hurry to get back to the city. And now that he was with her, so was Mona. Besides, there was much in our own group of villages that seemed to interest Jules greatly. He asked Hoxo and Rakut for places that he should visit.

Rakut said, ‘There is one place you must take your friends to. The village where the migluns had gone.’ He had an ancient kinship with the village, he added, and he could accompany us there.

The village where the migluns had gone. This, of course, was a figure of speech.

The early decades of the 20th century were times of great upheaval, when even our remote hills were opened up to the world. In 1911, a British political officer set out from the plains of Assam on a mission to explore the course of the river Siang flowing through the territory of the Adis. Noel Williamson was well known in the region, with twenty years of experience in dealing with the tribes in the hill tracts of the country. This time, however, his tour ended in tragedy. An angry Adi struck him down in the village of Komsing. Other men of his tribe joined him and then there was a massacre.

No one is quite sure what provoked the attack. Some recorded evidence suggests a communication gap: the tribe feared that Williamson would bring troops to destroy its villages. Another version says that the white sahib had insulted a man who later followed him to Komsing and killed him. There are also accounts that tell of a scandal some years before this attack—a story of seduction and romance between a local woman and another white man following the course of the river. He had made her reckless, and fearless like a hawk, and the tribe had meted out terrible punishment in retaliation. Perhaps it was the memory of this event that was the cause. Everything is conjecture.

What is certain is that besides Williamson and his friend, a tea-garden doctor named Dr Gregorson, forty-seven sepoys and coolies were also killed. Only three men survived to tell the tale.

News of the massacre sent shockwaves across colonial India and resulted in the punitive expedition of 1912, which became known as the Abor Expeditionary Field Force. It was a fearsome column that hacked its way through the chaos of virgin forest to capture the culprits and send them away to prison in the Andaman Islands. A memorial stone to Williamson was unveiled in Komsing, where it stands to this day overlooking the village longhouse. The villagers still look after the stone, just as the British had instructed.

It was an arduous climb to reach Komsing, Rakut said, and that the village headman, an old and pensive man, believed that maybe it was because of the massacre that they were still without a road.

On the day of the journey, the first rains pelted down and changed the landscape right before our eyes. We started out at the crack of dawn, driving through the mist and shadows and water. We passed Pigo town, through a terrific din of hard rain on tin roofs. We crossed rivers and streams. We crossed mountains of mud and slid across purple slush that made the car slip and slide frighteningly. When we reached the long bridge, Rakut signalled for us to alight. From here we would have to walk. We looked across at the dense canopy of trees and wondered where the path was that would lead us to the village.

Jules carried his camera wrapped in plastic and Rakut lugged our bags. He looked at my shoes and rubbed his hands together and laughed. It was not the best footwear for the hills, yes, but I said I would manage. I clung to the hard knots of cane as the bridge swayed wildly and threatened to overturn and spill us into the river. In my other hand I held up the green plantain leaf that Rakut had fashioned into umbrellas for Mona and me. This is the longest foot bridge across a river, and here, if you look down too long, you can feel the mighty Siang trying to pull you in by its very silence.

Rakut led the way and in the panting haze of rain-soaked clothes, streaming faces and trembling muscles we crossed the bridge and began the long trek uphill. Halfway up to the village gate we met a group of children marching back from school. They carried bright umbrellas and school books under their arms and watched us with interest. ‘Hey!’ Rakut shouted. ‘Who is your teacher?’ They said a name. ‘Hah! I knew it. He’s still around, is he, the old goat!’ The children laughed and stood to one side pressed against the trees to let us pass.

There was an air of excitement as we reached the village. They had prepared the moshup, the village longhouse, for our rest. They had lit a big fire in anticipation of our stay and for the long night of stories, when myth and memory would be reborn in the song of the ponung dancers.

They have not slept for many nights. If they close their eyes for a minute, if their souls stray, if they miss a step, then the journey will be over before its time and they will return to the present overwhelmed with a sorrow that will haunt them to an early death. The man who leads them is dressed in a woman’s ga-le and wears the dumling, an intricate hair ornament that swings with the rhythm of his chanting. He is the miri, the shaman and the rhapsodist.

Tonight, the dancers have arrived at the crucial point in the narration of their history where they will ‘travel the road’.

A man, running through the forest.

He was following the narrow trail, running barefoot and bare bodied. Now and then he lurched to the right or the left, keeping to some hidden path that would take him to his destination faster. He crashed through the undergrowth and sped down a hill. Then he was running on flat land, then rising up again, and his breath was like that of a horse, whistling through his nostrils. This was all he could hear, his breath in his body like a hot wind that would suddenly fill every pore and vein to bursting and blow him away in an explosion of blood and bitter darkness.

He reached the village after midnight. The longhouse was ablaze with the hearths of every clan burning brightly. The faces of his kinsmen turned to him as he stood panting by the door.

‘They have crossed the river!’

Now the women dancing the story move their hands in unison and clap softly.

‘Where are they now?’

‘They are camped by the ridge.’

Those other men who had crossed the river were officers and their soldiers. An enormous mountain blocked their view of the world. But they had to struggle ahead. They were armed with guns and they led a line of porters who carried food and weapons and helped the force hack its way deeper and deeper into the jungle.

Softly, softly, they must follow this terrible journey.

‘Where are they now?’

‘They have reached the Aing Alek.’

The force had reached the great forest of bamboo that surrounded the foot of the hill on which the village was perched.

A white man had been killed. A sahib who had come to the village bearing gifts. And now the soldiers were trampling the sad, disquieted hills and hunting the killer with all the might of the universe. Everyone knew it was the fault of the cowardly men who accompanied the officer. They had laughed in the face of the poor villager and said that he was a wild beast eaten up with disease who would never receive the attention or sympathy of the white officer. Why should anybody insult a man who was not looking for sympathy? Why should anybody look at a man with disgust when he was a man of the land and the other was a visitor trying to conquer the villages with lies and bags of gifts? Why should anybody who had spat on a man’s face live? It was only a matter of time before the migluns learned that all men were not afraid of guns and loud voices.

All night the men in the longhouse stayed awake and waited.

All night, in the camp below, the officers planned and instructed their troops.

(One officer wrote in his notebook: ‘The forest is like an animal. It breathes all around us and we never know when it will suddenly rise up like a green snake out of the decaying vegetation or descend on us like a mantle of bats reeking of blood and venom. The trees are enormous and sinister. They stand all around us and you can feel them looking down and waiting. One fears to move. The pile of rotting leaves and clumps of fern are hideous traps, and yesterday the stakes that fly out from there injured three of our native men. Their feet have been slashed open and they are screaming that they will die because these fire-hardened bamboo panjees are sharpened like blades and the points are dipped in poison. It is a terrible war and I wish I had never come to record such terror and suffering.’)

It was not yet light when a long shout echoed off the escarpment. A sound like thunder roared over the soldiers’ heads and a hail of stones and rocks crashed down on the bamboo grove from the village. The bamboos exploded in a burst of white dust as their stems cracked open and snapped into jagged splinters that could gut a man like a knife. The soldiers began scrambling up the rocky path. The stones slid under their feet and they grabbed desperately at roots and creepers.

The path was steep and treacherous, but the determined men were already halfway up to the village when the roosters turned their perplexed eyes towards a still invisible sun.

The sun had once cursed mankind: ‘Every morning, when I rise, someone in the world will die.’

Now the dancers sway and moan.

When the soldiers marched into the village, the waiting men rose and stepped out to meet them. It was bitterly cold. The men of the village were wrapped in their white homespun and emerged out of the mist like silent, sorrowing spectres.

They saw the weariness etched on each other’s faces. Where had they come from, each wondered of the other.

(Before the assault on the hill, one young soldier had remembered that it was almost Christmas day. Across the ocean he heard the city of his birth tinkling with music and gazed at the lights arched above the shops from where people hurried home to fulfil the dreams of their children. It was snowing in his city. Here, the ice glistened like steel and flashed on the village from the tips of the mountains. Here, even the town across the river from where they had launched their boats was so far away. The jungle cloaked everything, the twisted ropes of creepers and giant trees entangled in insidious embrace. Sometimes they had needed dynamite to clear the way. What world was this, and why was he here?)

An officer spoke an order. A gun blazed into the sky behind him.

The dancers are still, and hold their breath. The stone ramparts are poised to fall in an avalanche of boulders.

Surrender is a kind of peace. The men of the village closed their eyes and recalled the symbols of peace: a broken arrow, a bent sword; the penitence of men who cut their bowstrings and threw down their spears to the ground.

When daylight disappeared the headman of the village called his people and they stood in a group before him. It was a sad instruction he had to tell them. Every day, from today, they would stand in line and pass stones forward, from one hand to another, until they had raised a tall cairn to the memory of the white sahib who had been killed. Soldiers pointed with guns and the villagers assembled every day to mark the exact spot where the incident had taken place on the slope above the longhouse. A stone tablet with letters was placed on the stones, and for the first time the villagers heard the cry of bugles as the strangers presented arms and honoured the dead.

The killing happened here, but the killers were from another village. But they were of our tribe. Yes, perhaps the white man was a good man; perhaps he would have been welcome in the village. But destiny was written long before he came to these hills, just as destiny was written for the man who struck the first blow. He was captured and taken away in chains to the island prison across the black waters.

Two men. Like an exchange of souls, one was surrounded by the brooding mountains, and the other by the restless sea.

It is almost dawn. And the dancers are still swaying to the words of the last invocation that claims all their attention:

In a house by the river a man and a woman awoke with the dawn breeze. Every day they had lain together and lived within old walls, shielded by the movement of big events that nurtured their strange love. Now time was running out, slipping away through their locked hands, escaping with the breath from their pressed lips and the light from their eyes.

The man had come to map the wilderness and trace the source of a river. He was a political agent on a survey mission, and all he had discovered was that the river was a woman and that his soul was now forever drowned in the jade heart of water.

What would come of this meeting? What exchange could be made? Lines would be traced on paper. A new picture would appear. Words would be written. A story would come to life in song and shining ink. But no one would ever know the other words, the secret whispers, tender, intense, spoken at first light.

The price of adultery was a bamboo stake through the heart. But the lovers had tasted everything already; the thrill of union, the pain of separation, and the unforgettable entanglement of the senses that was like a memory of dying.

The dancers sigh and wipe their eyes. The fire burns brightly and the shaman is a shadow man leaping up larger than life. He has sung of the beginning of the world; of the sword of five metals that ignited the bonfire of the villages. He has sung the story of his brother, the one who killed a man and became a martyr; the story of the hawk woman who defied a community to live in a house by the river. These are the stories, rhapsodies of time and destiny, that he must guard.

In the end, all we have is remembrance. The sword rattles and the dancers sing in chorus. They have travelled so far, like a line of devotees following the path of a sacred song across the ancient valley. It is a language that never ceases, and they sing because the hills are old, older than all sin and desolation and man’s fascination with blood. The journey is almost over now. They are returning like a silent flight of birds. The shaman cries out. The beads in his hair glisten: the beads of the snakes; the beads of the woodpecker; the beads of the first man and woman. From the beginning of time, one by one the beads were crafted!

Later, the old headman said to us, ‘They think we are a village of horror, but it is not true! The leaves of the orange trees glisten. The hills are radiant with the light of the sun. The laughing children tramp to school down the same steps of stony earth that the soldiers marched up. These days many visitors are finding their way here and you can hear their voices asking the way, the curious migluns shielding their eyes and asking for help to enter the maze of stories that the miri remembers and restores to life…We are not a village of shame.’

When it was time for the miri, the great shaman, to depart, the dancers put aside everything that they were doing and gathered to see him off. They had been together for so many days and nights, travelling the road, guarding memory, and some of the younger dancers wept to see him go. Before he left, the shaman showed Jules and Mona the beads in his hair and explained that these would be removed by his wife when he reached home. It is believed the beads of the dumling accompany every shaman in his travels during the long dance and protect him from a misstep and from faltering in the narration.

Before he left, the shaman chanted a last spiritual verse in honour of the visitors. ‘So that they will understand our dance and why it is important to remember,’ he said to me. We sat before him to listen.

In the beginning, there was only Keyum. Nothingness. It was neither darkness nor light, nor had it any colour, shape or movement. Keyum is the remote past, way beyond the reach of our senses. It is the place of ancient things from where no answer is received. Out of this place of great stillness, the first flicker of thought began to shine like a light in the soul of man. It became a shimmering trail, took shape and expanded and became the Pathway. Out of this nebulous zone, a spark was born that was the light of imagination. The spark grew into a shining stream that was the consciousness of man, and from this all the stories of the world and all its creatures came into being.

‘We are not here without a purpose,’ the shaman explained. ‘Our purpose is to fulfil our destiny. The life of a man is measured by his actions and his actions are good if their origin is pure. From nothingness we have come to be born under the stars, and almighty Donyi-polo, the sun and the moon, whose light shines on all equally, is the invisible force that guides each one of us. All life is light and shadow; we live and we die, and the path of destiny is the quest for faith.’

Then the miri took the road out of Komsing under a sky bristling with stars.