With the Danish couple long gone – they strode off at dawn with their guide they couldn’t remember the name of – I ate my greasy omelette and chapatti alone and stewed with resented anxiety. Pull yourself together, I reprimanded myself. It’s only twenty bloody miles. More than anything I resented the person I felt I’d become. Where was the girl who’d ridden the Ho Chi Minh Trail alone? I wanted her, not this quivering wimp.
Determined not to show Japang my feelings, I thanked him, pressed some notes into his hand and swung my leg over the bike. When he shyly asked for a selfie I pulled my mouth into a smile then rode off with a wave, hoping I wouldn’t go arse over tit until I was at least around the corner.
What had been a challenging road yesterday was now a vile slippery sludge. I slid and paddled and splashed and ground, my legs shin deep in mud. Keep going, keep going, keep going, I urged myself through gritted teeth, churning slowly on. An hour later I reached the elephant station and the worst was over. I hadn’t fallen off, or died, or been eaten by a leopard, or any of the ridiculous things Fear insisted would happen. The collywobbles beat a hasty retreat: nerves became elation; fear became joy.
This was the point of adventure, I reflected: to remove the coddling net of certainty and lob a few grenades of risk into your life; to face your fears and carry on despite them; to realize, every time you overcome these real and imagined obstacles, that you’re a little bit stronger than you thought you were. I was still learning to trust myself after the previous year; trust that I wasn’t going to come screamingly unravelled in the forest. This morning’s victory over Fear was a vital step forward.
I was heading next for Wakro, a small town in the neighbouring Lohit district in the southern part of the Mishmi Hills. Described by Verrier Elwin as ‘the most formidable in the whole of India’, the hills surrounding the Lohit and Dibang Valleys were renowned for their terrible climate and extreme inaccessibility. Because of this, and their proximity to Tibet, they attracted more early explorers than anywhere else in the Northeast – soldiers, surveyors and missionaries wanting to pit their egos against the wilderness and proselytize the local tribes. Perhaps embittered by failure, their reports of the Digaru, Miju and Idu Mishmi tribes – the hardy Tibeto-Burman inhabitants of the region – were unanimously vile. Lieutenant Burton, the earliest known European visitor to the area, reported in 1825 that the locals were ‘very averse to strangers’. They were ‘excessively filthy’, grumbled explorer William Robinson in 1841; as ‘rude looking as could be imagined’, snubbed Lieutenant Wilcox, a surveyor, in 1827. Major John Butler, never one for complimenting the locals, dismissed them as a ‘very wild roaming race of people, capable of the most remorseless reprisals and massacres’. Another visitor scorned them as ‘deceitful and bloodthirsty devils’.
They didn’t only kill each other. In 1854, while travelling into the hills with crosses, a flute, a sextant and a medicine chest, two French missionaries, Fathers Krick and Bourri, were brutally dispatched by a Mishmi chief.
A century later, opinions had shifted little. In 1926 Frank Kingdon-Ward wrote that he’d seldom ‘come across a tribe so uncouth and unsophisticated’ as these ‘almost naked savages’. The sanguine Elwin, writing several decades afterwards, was alone in his praise of the Mishmi. To him they were ‘beautiful, cultured and hospitable’ with ‘quite wonderful coiffures’. Good old Elwin, the English vicar’s son who forsook his faith and culture to live among the tribal people of the Northeast.
‘You can’t go alone,’ said Phupla, sitting in a plastic chair marshalling Sanjay as he packed boxes of noodles and loo roll for a group of birders from Mumbai. I’d be riding fifty miles northeast along a skein of trails that weren’t on any maps, into the opium-addled Mishmi Hills. If a desperate addict didn’t leap out of the trees and rob me, I’d certainly get lost. My map of Arunachal – the best available in England – was largely fiction, he added, casting it aside dismissively. The towns were misspelt, the roads in the wrong place. Nor would the offline mapping application on my smartphone be of any help, since the area I’d be riding through was an ominous white blank. Then there was the question of what the police would do if they found a stray foreigner riding alone.
Phupla, in all his princely wisdom, was right in one respect. If it hadn’t been for the strapping Chakma youth he recruited, along with his bike, to guide me, I might have vanished without trace. A moon-faced boy with shades, gelled hair and denim shorts, Karan led me along a convolution of foot tracks, weaving between bamboo houses and paddies until we reached the wide, stony corridor of the Noa-Dihing. We crossed this alluvial hinterland for miles, twisting between grey boulders, thudding over rocks, splashing through streams and crunching through drifts of silvery sand. Impassable during the rains, now the foaming remnants of the river were forded by a pair of flimsy, slatted bamboo bridges that swayed and cracked ominously under our wheels. It was tricky riding but Karan, on a shiny new 125cc sports bike entirely unsuitable for off-roading, led with aplomb.
North of the river, a broken tarmac road snaked through two Chakma villages. Here women in red and blue sarongs walked with silver urns of water on their heads, little boys wobbled along on oversized bicycles and naked, pot-bellied urchins squealed excitedly as we passed. Just as in tribal Laos, wrinkled old folk sat outside their huts drawing on bamboo bongs. Only a government school, where girls in blue and white uniforms hurried across a dusty yard with textbooks on their heads, reminded me that this was still India.
Beyond, the road ran due north, decaying amidst the encroaching jungle. Not high on the government’s road improvements list, the rough, weedy surface was strewn with fallen leaves, and drooping thickets of bamboo threatened to garrotte the unwary traveller. At some point we crossed into Miju Mishmi territory, an invisible boundary where the Miju gather once a year to sacrifice a chicken and ensure good luck for the community. Now the bamboo huts were longer, lower and surrounded by cactus fences, and the men dragging lengths of bamboo along the road stouter and darker-skinned. By noon we were nearing Wakro and I bade goodbye to my guide. He’d be back in Miao by sunset.
I was staying at the only lodgings in Wakro, an overpriced ‘eco resort’ with hard wooden beds, its own organic tea garden and a young Miju manager with dull eyes and slow, deliberate movements. The absent owner, a wealthy Miju, was a contact of Abhra’s and, like Phupla, seemed convinced I’d get raped, robbed or lost.
‘My manager will look after you,’ he’d instructed down the phone from his government office in Assam.
Upon first impressions Wakro was a drowsy, pleasant-seeming town, a fecund oasis in the crook of the misty hills. Long, squat Miju huts and neat concrete bungalows were dotted between dirt alleys, their gardens bursting with yellow mustard flowers, chillies, onions, peppers, banana palms, roses, hibiscus and sweet-smelling verbena. Orange trees grew in neatly planted orchards, tea bushes sprung in emerald rows and flame of the forest bloomed brilliant and red. But Wakro’s idyllic veneer hid a poorly kept secret: behind the wooden fences, away from the blind-eyed glances of the law, grew another crop – the opium poppy. Interested to know more about Wakro’s favourite product, I asked the manager to introduce me to one of the town’s many addicts. With around ninety per cent of the households growing poppies, we didn’t have to go far: five minutes later we were taking off our shoes on the wooden steps of a neighbouring longhouse watched by a herd of ragged, curious children.
We walked in, the bamboo slats springing and creaking under our bare feet, and sat cross-legged beside a square, smoking hearth in the middle of the house. Above it, chunks of meat were being smoked on a suspended wooden tray, the slats of which were shiny with grease. Looking around, I felt as if I’d been teleported to another world, one that I thought existed only in the books of Victorian explorers. The main thing was the skulls – rows of them. They hung along one wall, the charred heads of at least fifty animals, tufts of singed fur clinging to the bases of large, conical horns. They were mithun, Bos frontal
is – the large, semi-wild bovines indigenous to Northeast India, parts of Burma, Yunnan and Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts. Highly prized by most of the tribes in Arunachal Pradesh, the number of mithun a man owned traditionally signified his wealth, and they were still used as dowries and payment in the settlement of village disputes. Many were sacrificed as offerings to the spirits, and their skulls smoked and hung in the huts of their owners. It was the first I’d seen of them, albeit far from alive. On the other walls hung sheathed daos, baskets made from cane and woven bamboo, and a few grubby items of clothing.
We weren’t alone. On the opposite side of the hearth was a sinewy old man in dirty tracksuit bottoms and a traditional Miju red embroidered waistcoat. He lay limply on a thin mat, the small door near his head punching a rare slab of sunlight into the dark, smoky interior and throwing it like a blanket across him. Only when the manager addressed him did he seem to notice our arrival, peeling himself off his mat to sit shakily upright. I could see now that he had short, greying hair, a gentle face and wide-set, watery eyes that looked unsteadily out from behind wire-rimmed spectacles. His right eye, I noticed, as we shook hands, was swivelled stubbornly to the side, giving him the goggly look of an old salmon. Bizarrely, under his waistcoat, he wore a faded black T-shirt bearing the words: ‘London City of Dreams’.
Pouring himself a cup of tea from a blackened kettle, he talked quietly in Miju, the manager translating in turn. His name was Ajidu Chakwa, he said, and he was a priest and tribal elder. He had been an opium addict for forty of his sixty-one years. Like many of the older Miju, he’d originally only used the drug for bartering, trading it for salt, cloth and matches in the market at Sadiya in Assam, four days’ walk away. There’d been no roads then, just jungle, and so much wildlife he’d once seen four tigers in a day. Had he shot any? I asked.
‘Oh yes,’ he replied, looking wistfully into the embers; he was once a great hunter. He’d shot four – all of them in self-defence. The last one had been when out hunting deer seventeen years ago. Sensing something behind him, he’d turned around to see a tiger stalking through the undergrowth. It was huge, he said, shaking his head at the memory, the biggest he’d ever seen, and it was coming for him: if he hadn’t shot it, it would have killed him. He always ate the tigers he killed; the meat was delicious, tasting like strong beef. Afterwards he’d smell of tiger for ten days and none of his goats would come near him. But he hadn’t seen one since that time seventeen years ago.
As he was telling us this, he pulled a small plastic bag from under his pillow and unwrapped it to reveal a ball of sticky black kani, opium, and a few strips of brown rag. He usually chewed on the rags – nettle fibres impregnated with the potent poppy sap – but occasionally he smoked the drug too. At this he picked up a small bamboo bong, packed it with a ball of kani and lit it using a glowing ember held in a pair of bamboo tongs. I watched as the opium hit his bloodstream, searching for any visible signs of altered consciousness, but there was no change at all. Decades of addiction will do that.
Now, for research purposes, of course, would have been the perfect moment to have a few puffs on the bong myself. But after my last experience of the drug I thought it a bad idea. Crawling out of the door, puking as I went, wasn’t the way I wanted to end this meeting. I’d tried opium years ago in northern Thailand, you see, as a naive backpacker fond of getting high, and had spent the night projectile-vomiting over a veranda while my companions wallowed in semi-comatose bliss. Suspecting it to be a simple case of beginner’s bad luck, I gave it another bash the following evening, lying on the bamboo floor while a shrivelled creature dosed me up with his thin silver pipe. Beyond that my memory is blurred, but as I hung over the veranda, my body convulsing in emetic rebellion, I recall wondering whether it was time to dial the emergency helicopter evacuation included on my travel insurance. Thankfully I didn’t, although the experience was enough to put me off opiates for life.
But addiction isn’t much fun, and maybe I’d had a lucky escape. At the beginning the drug envelops you like a lover’s warm embrace, but it soon becomes jealous and demanding, the opioid receptors in your brain insisting on regular and increasing supplies. Ajidu didn’t enjoy it anymore, he hadn’t for years, he said sorrowfully, blowing pillars of blue smoke out of his nose while taking short sips of tea, but it was too hard to give up. He’d tried a few times, but the shaking, fever, exhaustion, vomiting, diarrhoea and insomnia were too much to bear.
‘It’s the English’s fault,’ he said matter-of-factly, poking the smouldering opium with a strip of wire and taking another drag. ‘They gave it to us.’
He had a point. Although no one’s quite sure where the tribes here first got a taste for the drug – whether it came east from Assam or west from Kachin and Yunnan – the British certainly played a part. Indian-grown opium financed British rule on the subcontinent, its sales to China accounting for twenty per cent of the Raj’s revenue and, in turn, underwriting much of the British Empire. Opium generated the cash for Britain to trade throughout the Indian Ocean, and in China the money bought tea and silk.
But it didn’t all get packed into tea caddies and shipped across the Bay of Bengal. Knowing the tribal taste for it, canny British Political Officers like Major Butler used it as a pacifying gift, dispensing it to village chiefs on their flag-waving tours. It was bartered more than smoked back then; the virile tribesmen were far too busy slave-raiding, headhunting and meting out clan justice to lounge around in an opium-induced haze. Ironically, with ‘civilization’ came a surge in production and addiction. A hundred years ago men like Ajidu would have been warrior fit and constantly alert, but nowadays there is no need. Life in this isolated corner of India can be brutish and boring. Food is often in short supply, medical help is far away and employment is scarce. The pipe offers relief from monotony and pain, and the sale of it gives families much-needed income.
After an hour or so Ajidu looked tired and lay down again, so we decided to leave. But the problem of how to say thank you and goodbye had my British sensibilities all aflutter. For, as well as having no written script, the Miju have no words for hello, please or thank you. Instead they greet people with a ‘How is your health?’ and take their leave with a perfunctory tai min, ‘I am going now’. But please and thank you are the pillars of the British lexicon, the very foundations of our stiff-upper-lipped reserve. Without them we feel rudderless and stammering. In the briefest of transactions at the supermarket checkout the average British person says thank you at least six times. We write thank-you letters and cards and send flowers to show our gratitude. Strolling out with a casual ‘I’m going now’ just didn’t seem enough. Instead I repeated tai min moronically and threw in at least four thank yous – just in case.
In the small garden behind the house the naked green pods of Ajidu’s poppies bore the scars of the recent harvest. They were barely hidden from passers-by, but no one seemed worried. More illegal opium is grown in Arunachal Pradesh than any other part of India, with Lohit and neighbouring Anjaw being the centres of production. But the Indian government does precious little about it: the problem is too big, the area too remote and the resources to deal with it too limited.
That afternoon the manager and I walked along the dried-up bed of the Kamlang River. A troop of monkeys swung invisibly through the trees on the riverbank, branches swishing and bouncing as they went, and birds fluted and babbled in every tree. We passed several furtive-looking boys, catapults in hand, craning their necks towards the canopy in search of feathered prey: incorrigible hunters, there are few wild creatures the Miju won’t eat. Hunting, like opium, is officially banned by the government, but few of the tribal people in Arunachal Pradesh take any notice. As far as they are concerned, both opium production and hunting are legitimate traditional practices and they’re not going to stop. Whenever I pulled out my Collins Handguide to the Birds of the Indian Subcontinent to identify a flash of blue or a nearby call, I’d casually ask the manager if he’d eaten it. T
here was my friend the blue-throated barbet, the choirboy of the high branches, a gorgeous creature resplendent in jade and azure plumage.
‘Miju like eat this bird – he taste very good.’
The looping hoopoe, with his jaunty crest, was another tasty little number. Morbidly interested in seeing the extent of the Miju’s culinary tastes, I pointed to a selection of species in the book. Hornbill, hummingbird, bulbul, Himalayan barbet, roller – no bird was too small or too rare; he’d dined on them all. Trying not to look like Disgusted Vegetarian of England I nodded and turned the pages. Who was I to criticize after all? The British hunt foxes and hares, kill badgers and shoot rabbits. As horrified as I was, it wasn’t my place to barge in with my wagging-fingered foreign values and tell him it was wrong.
After a disturbed night of dreams about hunting small birds, I packed up the Hero to the glorious accompaniment of the owlish, see-sawing hoots of hoolock gibbons. Despite the protestations of the resort’s owner, I’d be riding alone from here, heading east on the only road towards Walong, a Mishmi town near the Tibetan border. Winding through an otherwise impassable tract of the Mishmi Hills, bordering southeastern Tibet and Burma, the road had grown out of an old tribal trading route; the Tibetans coming west with furs, silver coins, musk and rock salt and returning east with cotton, silk and, later, cigarettes. J. P. Mills, a British Political Officer who led a wartime mission to establish British outposts in the un-administered parts of the North East Frontier Agency, travelled this way in 1943, describing what was then known as the ‘Walong promenade’ as ‘atrociously bad’. Beyond the road, he said, it was ‘extremely difficult country in which to move . . . the rivers are too steep to be fordable or navigable . . . and the high, steep trackless ranges which flank them make lateral movement almost impossible.’
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 8
