10
LAST OF THE IGU
The hut was locked and the drunks nowhere to be seen. But the bikes were exactly where we’d left them. Of course they would be: the men might have been plastered, but they were Idu and we were guests, and a motorbike wasn’t worth angering the spirits for. Wondering how we were going to retrieve our helmets, we sat in a tired heap by the hut, swatting off persistent swarms of dam dum flies and, before long, two teenage boys appeared on a motorbike, hunting rifles slung across their backs. They unlocked the hut and returned our unblemished helmets, then rode off with a wave, refusing any money for their troubles. What had happened to the drunks we never did find out.
I dawdled my way back to Anini, giddy with contentment, stopping frequently to feast on the view and imprint its unfettered beauty on my mind. By the time I reached a junction at the edge of town Edi had long ridden ahead of me and was nowhere to be seen. Confused as to which way to go, and distracted by a man on a motorbike who’d stopped abruptly to stare at me, I dropped my bike, swearing as it bashed my left shin and began to pour petrol into the dust. The man, whose rifle, leather jacket and black face-mask had been the cause of my distraction, immediately rushed over to help me, firing a series of questions at me as he did so.
‘Where your guide? Why you alone? Where your permit?’
He was internal security, he explained, once the bike was upright, and I wasn’t allowed to be in Anini without a guide. But it soon emerged that he was Edi’s uncle, and Jibi’s cousin, and related to Tine Mena, and before long we were chatting about how Jibi was, and my time at reh. Afterwards, he escorted me back to the Inspection Bungalow through Anini’s confusing tangle of roads, and Edi – who’d ridden ahead to mend a puncture – was given an avuncular ticking-off for having left me.
Back in my room at the Inspection Bungalow the spiders were still there, waiting, and Shelob had returned to her spot beside the loo. The power had gone out so I filled the bucket with cold water and washed by candlelight, shivering as the freezing water splashed my skin. Afterwards the cook and her sister made me rice and dahl while I warmed myself by the fire in the kitchen. I tried to communicate in sign language and the few words of Hindi I knew, but all I could glean was that they were from Orissa, and the little one was eight. The one other guest was a dull young IT engineer from Guwahati, who joined me by the fire, droning on about the importance of his job at the State Bank of India and how backwards the tribal people of Arunachal Pradesh were. I did my best not to listen.
My brief foray up the Mathun hadn’t sated my desire to travel as far as possible towards the forbidden frontier with Tibet. That barricade of mountains held an almost mystical allure, a disputed, unexplored zone where continents collided and illicit hunters shivered around camp fires in dark forests. I’d asked Edi about accompanying some hunters into the mountains as a means of creeping nearer the border, but strict Idu taboos forbid women from even eating wild meat, let alone going on hunting trips. These taboos extend into every aspect of hunting, varying by clan and region. Before men leave home they must sacrifice a chicken for Golo, the spirit of the forest, and avoid certain foods – usually mushrooms, onions and garlic – and when they return they aren’t allowed to sleep with their wives for five days, nor eat any food prepared by a woman with her period. Breaking these taboos will anger the khinyu, or spirits, and bring misfortune on their family and crops, something most Idu daren’t risk. This fear of supernatural retribution has, for hundreds of years, acted as a natural form of conservation. But I was saddened to hear that in the Lower Dibang Valley Christianity was infiltrating Idu society and, consequently, hunting was on the increase. I’m sure Jesus wouldn’t have approved.
It was after nine o’clock by the time Edi and I rode northeast out of Anini and up the Dri Valley the following morning. The landscape was the same curious mix of familiar and exotic, both redolent of Glencoe and the Himalayan valley it was. Coppery hills plunged towards the river, their lower slopes verdant with spruce, larch and pine, their ridges marbled with the last of the winter snows. Plum trees blossomed pink next to spumes of banana palms and the skeletal, wintry forms of elder and oak. By the roadside curling green shoots of bracken periscoped up from the brown grass, the vanguard of spring’s vivid assault on the land. In the few villages we passed, stilted houses sat amidst gardens yellow with flowering mustard and women walked along the road bent under shoulder-loads of firewood.
After an hour we reached Dembuen, the final village, where the tarmac dissolved to a tantalizing dirt track and a yellow and white stone was painted with the words DEMBUEN END. A lone soldier waved us through a checkpoint beside an otherwise deserted border police barracks, then jogged after us as we rode the last hundred metres of tarmac and stopped the bikes to look longingly up the track. The place didn’t exactly look shipshape or in a condition to jump to the subcontinent’s defence, should China once again invade, but the soldier’s presence made it too risky to try to sneak north from here. Instead Edi suggested we spend the night in Alinye, one of the villages we’d passed through, where there was a guesthouse owned by a shaman.
To my delight and surprise, the man who opened the door of the large hut in Alinye was the chief igu from the reh festival, the man whose chanting and radiating beneficence had made such an impression upon me. He’d swopped his shaman’s garb for a blue checked shirt and black trousers but I recognized him immediately; how strange that fate had led me to his doorstep. He beamed at me, held my hands in his and ushered us into the hut, where we sat on the wooden floor near where an old man was watching television and slurping yu from a dirty plastic jug. The shaman sat cross-legged on a bed in front of us, his cane helmet, ceremonial daos and leopard’s jawbone hanging like museum pieces from hooks on the wall behind him. And there we remained all afternoon, sitting at his feet like rapt infants, Edi translating as he spoke, his stories igniting my imagination with sparks of magic and the unseen.
His name was Sipa Melo, he began, and he was roughly fifty-five. He looked a decade younger, I thought, his brown skin smooth, his long hair – tied in the traditional Chulikata knot – as black as night. His mother had dreamt about the powers of her unborn child while he was still in the womb, but it wasn’t until he was twenty-two that he became an igu and was able to chant and communicate with the spirits. Most of his power came from Inni Maselo Jinu, the supreme creator of the Idu, but, like all igu, he had a number of tutelary spirits whose power he called upon for different rituals, some of whom could be very dangerous. As he was telling me this the television flashed with news images of a snarling leopard that had been caught in central Guwahati, and the old man mumbled something at the screen. It reminded me of what I’d heard about the Idu’s relationship with the tiger, and I asked Sipa to explain this.
Many years ago, he began, a natural calamity, ini la free, befell the world. The temperature soared, the heat of the sun became intolerable and everything on earth was burnt and destroyed. The only people to survive were a father and daughter, who had protected themselves from the heat by wrapping in layers and layers of banana skins. In order to save humanity they married and soon she gave birth to two sons, one of whom was a tiger. The tiger and the boy grew up happily until one day they had an argument about how to eat a deer they’d caught – the tiger wanted to devour it raw, but the boy wanted to boil it first. After a lengthy row they decided to solve the issue with a race, agreeing that the winner would kill the loser. But during the race the boy cheated, climbing a tree to drop an ants’ nest on the tiger as he sped below. The tiger, infested with angry ants, was too itchy to run, and lost the race. The boy killed his vanquished brother with a bow and arrow and the tiger’s body floated down the river to the sea, where his bones and teeth were collected by a bird and taken to its nest. A year later, the bones became a tiger again. Ever since then the Idu have believed the tiger is their brother, and that to kill one is tantamount to murdering a fellow human. It’s believed by some conservationists tha
t these unique Idu beliefs are a key reason tigers still survive in the Dibang Valley, and have done far more for their conservation than millions of rupees of government funding has achieved in Namdapha and elsewhere.
If the Idu don’t kill tigers, what about the bandolier of tigers’ teeth that Sipa had been wearing at reh? The amrahla protected him against evil spirits, he answered, and had been handed down to him through eight different igu. There were very few remaining these days. The teeth were mainly from tigers which had been found dead, but a few were from ones that had been killed; something that happens only when a tiger has taken too many mithun from a village. In these rare cases a powerful igu must lead the village in the same five-day funeral ritual as they would for a human. This had happened four years previously in the neighbouring village of Angriem Valley, when a tigress had been killed and two of her cubs captured and sent to the zoo in Itanagar, the state capital. But the igu who’d held the ritual for the dead tigress hadn’t done it properly, and soon afterwards his house burnt down and he lost everything. When two tigers killed seventy mithun in Sipa’s own village a few years ago, his neighbours had come to him begging for help. He chanted for three days, asking the tiger spirits to leave them in peace, and after that the village didn’t lose another mithun.
The story made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. But this, it seemed, was just one of many magical feats this kindly, quietly spoken man had performed. He continued talking, his eyes sparkling, a smile constantly playing across his features. Four years ago a huge fire had broken out in the village and no one could stop it. It was a clear, sunny day but Sipa called to the spirits to bring rain, and two hours later a storm came and put the fire out. On another occasion, a villager had drowned and Sipa was called to the river to appease the water spirit snake, which is believed to cause all deaths in the river. He waded into the river and pulled out a long black thread, and when he came out of the water he was completely dry.
The room was darkening by the time we unfolded ourselves from the floor to walk to Sipa’s guesthouse nearby. As we left I asked him about kalita, the non-hallucinogenic root used by igu, and he led us behind the hut, past three protesting geese, to an empty pigpen. He bent down and plucked a ginger-like, tentacled root out of the eviscerated mud and handed me a bit to taste. It was bitter, slightly spicy and vaguely reminiscent of ginger. Only igu can grow this, he said, and no animals will touch it – indeed the pigs had stripped the mud of everything else, but hadn’t laid a snout on the alien-like root. And it wasn’t just a powerful weapon against evil spirits. He told me it also had antiseptic properties and was good for treating fever and dysentery.
When Sipa wasn’t overcoming tiger spirits, summoning rain and fighting spirit snakes, he also ran a construction business, and had been contracted by the local government to build the guesthouse he now ran. Since Alinye was unlikely to have a tourist boom anytime soon, I couldn’t imagine who the bafflingly large white building with its grand metal entrance gates and tiled bathrooms had been built for. At dinner we sat in a dining room large enough for fifty people, while Sipa’s wife dashed in and out with delicious plates of vegetable curry, rice, chapatti and dahl. Sipa, whose strict post-reh taboos forbade him from eating garlic, onions, mushrooms or ginger, sat separately and ate just plain rice and boiled vegetables.
While we ate, he told me about another beast the Idu believed to be their brother – the khepa, a ten-foot-high gorilla-like creature that we call the yeti. A long time ago, man had become jealous of the khepa’s superior intelligence and, after winning a rigged contest (there’s a theme here), had made a deal with the khepa that the two would never meet again. To ensure this, an igu performed a ceremony to make the khepa invisible, then banished him to the forest. The Idu still see their footprints, though, and hear their voice in the mountains, and Sipa believed in the khepa’s existence as certainly as he believed we were sitting in front of him. Only six months ago, footprints had been seen near Roing – huge bestial imprints two metres apart. Even the local government officials had seen them, he said.
Of course these could have been fanciful exaggerations of otherwise mundane events, a means of livening long winter nights around the fire. But there was something about Sipa, something godlike. It wasn’t just his warmth and lightness of spirit, or the fact it was impossible to imagine anger, envy or any hint of malevolence ever darkening his countenance. It was more than that. I felt that Sipa was plugged into a different plane of existence to most of us, that he knew things that were beyond normal understanding. To be in his presence was to peel away the blinding veils of Progress, Civilization and Science, to peer into a shimmering world of magic and the unseen, to believe in a world beyond that which we see. If anyone had the keys to another dimension, he did. I’ve never met another human being like him.
But Sipa is one of a disappearing breed. The younger generation aren’t interested in becoming igu, and there are very few of them left. Sipa had four children, sons and daughters, and none of them wanted to learn the art. Or maybe it worked both ways. Maybe television and mobile phones and modernity were tuning the Idu to a different frequency and severing their contact with the spirit world. After all, it was said that you couldn’t choose to become an igu, but that the spirits chose you. Perhaps the spirits were losing interest. When we left the next day, Sipa held my hands in his and thanked me for recording his stories. They needed to be written down, he said, before it was too late.
*
A few days later, at 6 a.m., I was standing outside the Inspection Bungalow in Anini, huddled in my coat, watching as the rising sun dyed the snow peaks a dusky pink and mist rose like steam from the hills. Land of the dawn-lit mountains indeed. A man jogged slowly around a scrubby football pitch below, followed by a pack of barking, gambolling dogs. Minutes later the Sumo I was booked on roared up the hill, a mountain of luggage strapped to the roof. The sisters gave me a handful of oranges for the journey and shyly said goodbye, and Edi – who’d come to see me off – pumped my hand effusively.
‘This most definitely some of best days of my life, Ma’am. I’ll miss you, na.’
At that I hugged him goodbye, wedged myself and my bags into the last space on the back seat, and we were off.
The driver, a thin, fast-talking Nepali with gelled hair and crudely tattooed forearms, set off as if pursued by the hounds of hell. We tore down the hill from Anini, careering around corners and nosediving into potholes, a wake of dust exploding from our bald tyres. Ten of us were crammed in, but no one spoke. Everyone just looked numbly ahead, slammed against each other like ships in a stormy harbour, the most violent bumps sending my neighbour, a well-groomed young Idu man, bouncing onto my lap. Outside, sunlight raked down the hillsides, peeling back the cover of night, and mist whorled and eddied in the valleys. But my head was being pummelled against the metal doorframe and Hindi power ballads screeched out of the tinny speakers behind my ears, so it was hard to fully appreciate the view. Oh God, twelve hours of this, I thought, as the driver yanked us demonically around another bend. But the hours somehow slid by.
At some point we rounded a corner to find the way blocked by a gang of road workers. They milled about, blank-faced and grubby, lethargically moving a pile of rocks from the road. No one complained or harangued them. Instead we all piled out, glad for the respite, and helped move rocks until there was room enough to pass. One of the workers’ children, a tiny girl, sat disconsolately on a heap of rubble, playing with an old shoe, her doleful eyes watching as we worked. I wondered if she would ever escape the binding snare of poverty.
At 5 p.m., in a tunnel of forest just twenty miles from Roing, a wheel bearing went, and we all shuffled out to stretch stiff limbs and pee while the driver assessed the situation. The Nepalis who drive these difficult routes are a band of brothers, bonded by the hardships of the job, and soon two other Sumos had stopped to help. The three men squatted beside the front passenger wheel, elbow-deep in oil and grease, smoking and bante
ring as they worked. There was no sense of annoyance, or impatience. Quite the opposite; they seemed to be enjoying it. I imagined the same happening to a bus in England – the stressed driver, the grumbling passengers, the tutting and time watching, the feeling that this shouldn’t happen, we’ve paid for this, damn it. Our problem is expectation. We’re poisoned by it. We expect things to go our way, to arrive on time, to work as they should. But in India the unexpected is the norm, and with that comes an admirable sense of acceptance. We could learn a lot from that.
It was 8 p.m. by the time the Sumo dropped me off at the end of the dark track to Jibi’s camp. After ten days of scant washing I stank like a ferret’s armpit. In an attempt to rectify this, much of the next day was spent in a rare fever of domesticity: washing myself and my fetid clothes, and scrubbing, drying and repacking my gear. After the dinginess of the Inspection Bungalow my hut by the river felt like the presidential suite at Claridge’s. And oh, the delight of a hot bucket wash!
Jibi was away, scouting a nearby river with an English fishing guide, so that evening I went to dinner with Tine, my Everest-conquering friend, arriving to find her hut spilling with people. Pretty Idu girls sat in a giggling row on a bed against the far wall and a crowd of young men were drinking mugs of yuchi around the blazing engoko. Among them sat Tine and a drunken, gesticulating Indian man who was bellowing instructions at a teenage girl standing nervously on the other side of the fire. It wasn’t quite the scene I’d expected. When I sat next to Tine she explained that she was helping a film director from Mumbai (the drunk) audition girls for parts in a film about the Idu. The director, it seemed, had underestimated the strength of the local brew.
Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Page 14
