The Place Where the Rivers Meet

By Yumlam Tana

"Revenge is a dish best served cold." Who would understand this better than the ancestors of the Nyishi tribe of Arunachal Pradesh who lived in a vicious circle of revenge. A slave falls in love with the favourite wife of his old master. A pair of hornbills courts each other and seeks a nesting place on a tree deep inside the canopies of a tropical forest. A shaman who has been bested in love by a village bumpkin let loses a bloodbath out of spite for his rival in love.

A young man taking advantage of the development process with the coming of the Hariangs (non-tribals) wants to embrace modern life after availing good educational opportunities.
Their lives get intertwined in the version of the story narrated by one of them; where the quotidian and bizarre, natural and supernatural are blended together in this surreal and cautionary tale of love, longing and existential angst under a changed circumstance of the tribe's history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Point Six Technologies Pvt Ltd
• Release date: Jan 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9789389759280

Yumlam Tana

Yumlam Tana belongs to the Nyishi tribe of the state of Arunachal Pradesh. He is also a former member of the General Council of Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi and his poems have appeared in anthologies such as First Proof-4 by Penguin India (2008), Anthology of Poetry from Northeast India by Northeast Hills University (2003) and Border Lands of Asia by Cambria Press, Amherst, New York,2017. Besides, he has to his credit two books of verse ‘The Man and The Tiger’ and ‘The Wind Also Sings’ and two volumes of comics on Nyishi Folk Tales. At present, he lives in Jully village, Itanagar with his wife and three children.

Book preview

PART I

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

CHAPTER 1

Commoner: In the end, you can’t understand the things men do.

Commoner: It’s Human to lie.

Commoner: It’s Human to lie.

Commoner: It’s Human to lie. Most of the time we can’t even be honest with ourselves.

- Rashomon (1950), Akira Kurosawa

The Lion with a Cunt

Yapams are a race of mischievous, vile, and shape-shifting beings haunting our lands and forests from the time of the early dawns. We all know they exist. So long as we steer clear off their path, no harm shall befall us. We are, so to speak, safe within the perimeters of our human world where the Uyus, the evil ones, don’t trespass.

Nyubs are the great Shamans of our tribe. They are dying in their numbers today. They tell us that many moons ago the humans entered a pact with the Uyus to settle the boundary dispute that we were having with them. In the ensuing parley, it seems the humans outwitted the Uyus and gave them a raw deal. As a result, the evil ones got banished to roam the Badlands and haunt the deepest pockets of the forest forever.

The Uyus agreed to leave us alone, our homes and spaces too. In return, we agreed to indulge them with rituals whenever we entered their domains in the wilderness to hunt for games. We also agreed to offer them sumptuous sacrifices and observe every taboo whenever the Uyus hex and blackmail us by making us fall ill.

The stilt houses of our villages shield us behind their strong bamboo walls. They are cosy and make us comfortable within their warm confines. But occasionally, when some unlucky souls cross paths with the Uyus—godspeed their sad fate; they don’t return. Those that do are never the same. Some wits like to believe that I got abducted by one of these mysterious beings in the form of an obnoxious Yapam.

My name is Patey Kiki. Patey meaning Lion—the king of the forest—and Kiki, I don’t know what it means in our tongue, except that it is our family name, an ancient one. I’ve also come to know that in Tagalog, a Filipino dialect, Kiki means cunt. Therefore, to me, the sum of my name is ‘Lion with a Cunt’. Not a name one could be very proud of, or is it?

Well, as my name suggests, I must sound like a nincompoop, the oddball with a hilarious name. Yes, all tribal names sound funny to outsiders.

CHAPTER 2

Enemies are upon us

Enemies are upon us

Armed with their bows and arrows

Armed with their bows and arrows

Fair, fairest is our land

Fair, fairest is our land.

— A Nyishi singsong of unknown origin.

The Botanical Garden

One fine day, our villagers woke up to the astonishing fact that the land on which they’d lived for ages was no longer theirs. It belonged to this unknown entity called the ‘Bharat Mata’. Strangers came up to their villages and told them that. They also went about opening schools for our people. In these jerry-built schools initially, teachers came from the Assamese lowlands. They taught our people Bihu songs and dances and the fine art of eating the Tamul Paan. They also tried to teach our people their delectable tongue, but before they could finish their job were unceremoniously replaced by new teachers from the cow belt and the south of the country. They came in droves and with great enthusiasm to serve their country. They brought with them the Gita, Ramayana and the flavours of Bollywood. They sanitized every trace of the Axomiya, and converted our people to a race of pidgin Hindi speakers.

These public-spirited teachers taught our children that the ‘Bharat Mata’ was like a huge botanical garden, where men of various colour, creed, caste, and religion grew like variegated flowers to add beauty and splendour to her kitschy glory.

I learned to sing the national anthem like everyone else but my favourite patriotic song was the song sung by Rafi Saheb in the 1965 classic Sikandar-e-Azam:

Jaha daal daal par sone ki chidiya karti hain basera

Vo Bharat desh hai mera

And after 15th August 1947, everyone (including a few of the locals who worked with the outsiders to curry favours from them) with smug faces looked forward to the possibility of golden birds singing paeans, perched on top of golden boughs amidst golden trees in the huge botanical garden: depicting a rosy picture of post-independence India to bask in and expect, in contrast to the poverty and uncertainties of our short and brutish tribal life.

Cartographers depicted in the new political map of India our land as part of the undivided Assam, looking very much like the oversized thyroid gland of an old lady, with the future new states like Nagaland, Mizoram, Meghalaya and our very own Arunachal Pradesh as just another small lobe that contributed to the multiple swell of a gargantuan goitre.

I was born many years after that in 1965. 15th August, to be precise, according to my maternal uncle. He was the only person who knew a bit of reading and writing in the family—from a seedy government school. He could recognize his handwriting, when many years ago a strip of paper fell out of an old purse found inside a huge wooden trunk, filled with old papers and knick-knacks: the only few things owned by the family. The mouldy scrap of paper had the figures 15-08-1965 written on it. That was the day, month and the year you were born, my maternal uncle had cared to enlighten me afterwards.

The year 1965 is an important landmark for our people, because that year administration of North-Eastern Frontier Agency got transferred from the External Affairs Ministry to the Home Ministry. So, the local magistrate turned the Independence Day celebration into a colourful occasion and had arranged a few spectacles for the townsfolk and the villagers who came from the far-flung areas.

Everyone gathered in the lone football field, the only open space in town large enough to accommodate a few hundred people; it held almost every official functions and local festivals in it. The primary school children, dressed in navy blue and white uniforms, walked out into the midst of the huge gathering and staged an action song in Nyishi. They sang a song that said India was the most beautiful country in the entire world. The little singers then raised an alarm: the enemies of India are marching against her, armed with bows and arrows; but they said nothing about defending India’s frontiers from her rapacious enemies, who were armed with sophisticated assault rifles and ammunition and not some crude tribal weapon. A few bigshots spoke on the occasion too. But no one understood the scrappy voices put on the air by the PA system. The old machinery didn’t work properly.

They say old people are bad with their memories. Now and then, they needed little hint—like notches on trees—to help them trace the past where their stories loafed around in the crepuscular lights of ambiguity and doubt and needed to be coaxed to come home like our salt-licking Mithuns, our state animal.

My mother worked her memory hard, but it yielded no significant information. She was unsure about the exact time I was born. Mists of the bygone years had smudged many details of her past life, so that they had lost their vividness and clarity now. She barely remembered that it had been a very important day; there were lots of activities in the football ground and people in droves witnessed all the official charades and shenanigans on display.

She also remembered she had left the program early. She’d been carrying in her belly a nine-month-old foetus. It made her uncomfortable when the baby kicked in the womb. The road leading to our house then passed through a stretch of a half-mile of forested area. She was walking alone there. She stepped into the woods for a bit of the wee-wee thing. And by default, there right in the middle of a thin stretch of trees, amongst bracken, climbers, an assortment of coarse grasses and below a clump of bamboo stubs my mother delivered a healthy female baby. Or so she thought, as the newborn’s sex seemed indeterminate to begin with. She parted the two tiny legs and saw the plain face of the area around the crotch. She cleaned the layers upon layers of slavers, gooey tissue and blood, and found the tiny piece of protrusive male genital wilting in a pensive lull there.

There were no goo-goos and gee-gees. It was a quiet affair, all quiet at least on the ‘natal’ front. Then the lump of pink flaccid tissues tumbled out of the womb to examine the trappings of the disgusting new world in which it found itself. It puckered up its itsy-bitsy mouth as tiny nose sampled the intoxicating aromas of the wet, brown earth. Its large owlish eyes dopily scanned the foliage forming a filigree of chaotic traceries and minute granulation about the few columns of timber; the mild afternoon sun straining through the meshwork of vegetation creating delightful patterns in gold, auburn, beige and various other hues of the avocado. This exposure morphed the monochrome world of the womb into that of a full-fledged Eastman coloured celluloid. And through the treetops, the sky looked like a small blue orb on which cottony clouds swirled and scattered.

In the wonted topography of incubation, the sea was so near to him. The sea then spoke to him in a soothing voice. It now receded from him. Overwhelmed by a cacophony of voices, smothered and distant.

Once out of the womb, the newborn’s ears like an old Murphy radio tuned in to the specific frequency of existential angst broadcasting the everyday drab, dull and monotonous noise. It impaired his autistic ability to listen to the sonorous music of the womb: lapping of million waves, the roar of high tides, and breaking surf on the reefs and rocks of the spiritus mundi.

At a later date, in his boyhood, the neonate was to learn that the sea was far, far away. And up to that point in time, the boy toyed around the notion that Bambu Seley (the place where the rivers of the earth mingle) was a giant pit of fathomless depth, located just to the south of his native village.

A dimwit who chanced to visit our little Type-I quarter, after I got brought back to the safety and comfort of a regular home, said that the child has seeing eyes.

The staring black pupils, unprotected by its nictitating membrane, will have the power to see the unseen and unearth the hidden for the common ken, the charlatan declared.

The prognosis hinted at was that I was born with special abilities, a future Nyub (Shaman) or Nyijek (Wiseman) material.

He also said that it was a foreboding of bad times to come. That happens when you lose your footing in life. That happened to us; the old world in which we lived ended and a new one emerged, right there in front of us.

CHAPTER 3

The Pioneers

A lot of things were happening those days: new settlements sprouting like wild mushrooms in the rains and people flocking there in search of adventure, money, cheap booze, and women—the good life. Some of these places then grew into shantytowns with considerable population, clout, and acreages.

The hopeful migrants to these little towns were the newcomers. They called themselves bahar ke (outsiders in Hindi). It bemused us to see them at first. We’d never seen such a motley crew of people from so diverse backgrounds in our lives before. These people had turned up in such large numbers with the setting up of new administrative centres and the consequent expansion of services in the North-East Frontier Agency.

There was a great demand for all sorts of services in NEFA: roadside gang workers, teachers, casual labourers, bureaucrats, shop keepers, clerks, doctors, engineers, and capitalists. They were needed to strengthen the political and administrative control of the Indian Union in the frontier state.

My mother used to tell me not to trust these outsiders. She used extreme caution to avoid running into any of them whenever she went to town to meet father. He worked there, in a ragtag Primary Health Centre. It was as if she got spooked by them. The villagers fed her stories that the non-tribals eloped with our beautiful but naïve village belles and later tortured them or sold them into sex slavery in the mainland. I remember once I accompanied her to town to meet father; I’d just taken my annual examinations for class II and had come home for a month-long summer vacation. For a change, we used the new road under construction. The Border Roads Organization took it up to build it for us. This road passed from under the traditional walk used by our people since ages. Both intersected at some point, where the wide, bulldozer-cut road seemed to just swallow up the puny dirt track. Along the way, we came across a group of women bent over a huge deposit of boulders and stones. They were breaking the larger stones into aggregates using their muscle power and armed with small sledge hammers. In the soft afternoon sun, they looked dull and impassive. Their clothes were worn-out and mangy. Their children, covered with wounds and scabies were playing about nearby. Their men folk were nowhere nearby; perhaps they were on another site.

Mother didn’t lift her head, afraid of making eye contact with them. She dragged me along at a brisk pace, trying to get away from them, as fast as humanely possible. She cautioned me that these outsiders kidnap children and chop off their heads to bury them in the foundations of bridges newly constructed over big rivers that called for human sacrifices.

But, they were no strangers to me. I was already familiar with coloured people. Where I studied, there were many of them: they came from the tea estates nearby, where their parents worked. A few of them had become quite friendly with me too—Pasna Koila, Mathias Chowria, Victor Lakra, some of the names I can recall to this day.

As she pulled me away from them, I couldn’t help thinking about how vulnerable they seemed to me then. There were no hospitals and schools for their children. They lived in a pathetic condition in temporary lodgings, jerry-built with the help of cardboards, tin sheets and tar drums: all jumbled up together. In that miserable condition, they battled day in and day out the elements of nature minus the survival skills of us jungle folks. Anyone could come up and slaughter them to pieces. And that too for no rhyme or reason at all. After all, the place was wild and the locals barbaric and feral, who wouldn’t hesitate to severe your head from the body with their dreaded, pare sala. In such a scenario, the law took days to get their ass over there. Most painfully and slowly.

Listen! my mother said. Do you also hear something, boy?

Yes mother, it’s a vehicle. It’s a thing on four wheels for carrying goods and people from place to place, I replied.

I know what devilry lurks in it. Don’t look at the thing or those that travel in it—it will bring you bad luck. Get yourself over here. She beckoned me over to a tree on the roadside where she could hide us. Clutches of tall brushes surrounded it. The girth of the tree was large enough, and it hid us both well.

The earth shook a little as the vehicle approached us from a bend. We couldn’t see it but heard its metallic clangour and its engine’s sonorous drone. It was a Mahindra Jeep loaded with the new arrivals in its rickety bulk. No one talked in the vehicle. The men who rode it looked solemn-faced and glum. Their thick brows knit together into a V on their foreheads. The Jeep stopped by the place where we’d left them, the stone crushers. Perhaps the men were talking to their women. We couldn’t hear anything above the din of the running