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The evening air is quiet,
a silence that is warm, not empty.
I sit beside Papa,
the glow of the TV flickering across his face—
an old Bollywood movie, familiar, soft.
We do not talk much,
but we do not need to.
Some silences are not hollow;
they settle, like an old song—
comforting, known.
The winds had come, uprooting the trees, the ageing bamboo fences, and even the roofs of some houses. It signalled the end of winter, but the rain hadn’t arrived yet - the rain that would rejuvenate Sibo-Korong into a stream again. At times, the stream would eat into the fields on its periphery, moving humongous boulders from the mountains and rolling them so vigorously that they turned into small, smooth pebbles and scattered the rocks in its path. The stream originated in the lofty hills and ended its rocky trail at the mouth where it met the Siang - a name the locals of Pasighat know the Brahmaputra by.
It has now been four months since my mother passed away, all the relatives and friends like migratory birds have returned back to their own world. In my family of two older brothers and my father, no one talks about her anymore. The verbal denial of her death now stages our everyday interactions, as acknowledging her absence would bring about a cathartic pain of grief that is slowly unfurling and recoiling, underneath the shroud of willful amnesia.
I have not been able to process her passing, and with each passing day, the tentacles of grief seem to now rapidly subsume the comfortable facade of denial. Over time, the grief has now cemented itself around the periphery of my throat, making me unable to utter words without bursting into tears. I can feel it swirling inside my stomach, screaming with pain and indignation, aching to be released from the confines of my body. I had to come to terms and face the new reality.
She was riding pillion, and I was aware of her knees brushing against the sides of my thighs at every bump and every turn. She was holding onto my shirt; I told her to circle them all the way around my waist. The road to safety was long and rocky, and it felt like there could be an ambush at every turn, either by her kindred or mine. We were only sixteen, but we were in love, and we were above the divide—Kuki, Zomi; none of that mattered to us.
When we were little, my sister and I
had a small, cardboard box
filled with stickers.
Treasure chest, we would call it.
Of glittering stars and tiny flowers,
cartoon faces grinning up at us.
Nestled within the embrace of ancient mountains, their peaks adorned with clouds and where thick forests weave a tapestry of green lies my hometown like a wildflower, the home of the Aos - one of the tribes amongst the Nagas. Here, the air is thin, life is monotonous, time is slow and the mountains bring a sense of peace. In this Naga Hill at India’s periphery, the memory of our headhunting past lurks in every corner and because of this, I am a curiosity, an ethnic specimen for those beyond the borders of North-East.
This cruel maniac has crept in our town,
Wreaking havoc from the corners of our street
To the utmost glorious sanatorium of our time;
Young leaves littered our street on borrowed time,
As they sniffed plume of sacrilege powdery mildew.
Who will be vigilant to console the Inconsolable?
As precious soul shimmers in this crazy hallucination—
Our homes have become a mournful dwelling sanctuary.