Micro stories 1

The following was written during my stay in the Bomdo village in Arunachal Pradesh in May 2015. While writing loosely-connected short anecdotes, I drift a lot between stories but try and return each time. You may notice the influence of Brian Doyle's book Mink river here. Given that there was no electricity, phone network or internet, I wrote quite a bit! So I post it in parts. The first part is here.

21st May 2015
1130 hours

Of a big meal and curry leaves, pressure cooker and a Bose speaker!

The story could start anywhere because the story is made of smaller stories, all linked, linked by the fabric of continuity and relevance. Like, for instance, after a few days of having small meals of Ragi huri hittu, I decided to prepare a big meal this noon. The people here call it 'Baara baaji khana', the 12 O clock meal, perhaps the most important one of the day for them, since they work hard in the fields. I will not drift into other stories right away but it is difficult to stick to a narrative since everything is linked, and everything is interesting, to me. Anyway, the big meal.

The inspection 'bungalow' I stayed in, in Bomdo village, Upper Siang.

I make a fire, that's the start of every meal here. I cut strips of the discarded cartons someone left here, thin strips. I scrape few strips of bamboo, and over these I will later put thin pieces of wood and lastly big ones. Over the years of staying here, I've learnt to light a fire as well as I light a candle, and nine out of ten times, I make a fire with one matchstick. I light one. The matchstick flame lights the carton strips light the bamboo strips which in a few seconds transfer the fire to the small sticks, which in a whiile light the big ones.

I decided to cook dal (lentils), I wash the dal, cut onions tomatoes, chillies and then remembered the curry leaf tree (Murraya koenigii) at my friend Kubbo's home. I had brought the seedling all the way from Bangalore. A small bag of mud, three small seedlings with only two leaves each. The seedlings were on a train first, then a bus, then a Sumo (four-wheeler), then a bike ride followed by a short walk, it was a long journey; seven days! When I sipped water from the bottle, I also watered them during the journey, but only one survived. Now, four years later it is a small tree, already flowering. I took the short walk to Kubbo's place and brought back a few leaves for my dal. After the dal is boiled in the pressure cooker, I will season it with onions and curry leaves. I've asked Padi (Uncle in Adi) who is presently working in the field adjoining my camp to join me in the meal, for the 'Baara baaji khana'. He has been weeding his field for a couple hours but now its raining, pouring even. So he sits by the fire drying himself.

Padi, uncle, weeding his field.

The pressure cooker just whistled, it used to be a new sound for the village even few years back. When Kubbo bought a pressure cooker and it whistled with pressure, his mom almost fell back and broke some wind too and we all laughed. Now, most homes have pressure cookers and it is a familiar sound, of the cooker whistle.

Roy and I had two 2.5 litre cookers; one for rice and the other for dal/meat. By now, we know the characters of these two cookers. Usha was an old style one, faithful and loyal and after about 15 minutes would usually whistle. Hawkins had a lot of attitude, it was of a newer generation, she just sits there on the fire with no reaction, giving no indication of an upcoming meal while we stare hungry. Then, suddenly it would spew out steam. Sometimes the Hawkins had so much attitude that it wouldn't whistle over a small fire. But we soon figured the trick; adding bamboo strips after fifteen minutes. Bamboo fire is short but has much more heat and then the Hawkins would be satisfied and whistle. Several days when we don't have bamboo, cooking with the Hawkins was a pain.

Papad roasted on charcoal tastes better!

Just now we finished eating our 12 O clock meal; dal, rice, fire-roasted papad and Gongura pickle my mom sent from Bangalore. Mom always packs intelligently, things that last, pickles and powders. I always carry mom-made Sambar powder and Roy and Agar bhai would say 'Dalo dalo Maa ka pyar' (put some motherly love). Once after a peg or two of rum, Agar bhai said 'Dalo maa ka doodh' by mistake and we all roared into a laughter. That joke will live forever!

Which brings me to another joke. Agar bhai and I were doing field work one day and in my field bag I was carrying a lux meter, to be used for measuring light intensity. It almost looks like a phone contraption, complete with a light sensor connected with coiled up wire like a phone receiver. I started the joke. I pretended that I was speaking to my mom using the digital device reaching far out with the light sensor for better signal connectivity. After about two minutes of pretending to speak I gave the lux meter to him to speak. Agar bhai was suddenly all shy and the word he said first was 'Maaaa', a bit stretched version of 'Ma' (mother). This is funny because of two things; the village has never had any phone network and perhaps will never even have and Agar bhai is ten years older than me and my prank had transformed him into a child calling out 'Maa'. Unable to control myself any longer, I broke into a loud laughter and he joined me soon!

Padi and I finished all this dal with rice in one meal!

The other day another friend Tabu bhaiyya was about to cut my expensive Bose audio speaker into two with his knife, very brave. This is why. I had bought a wireless bluetooth Bose speaker to field to listen to music. I can play music or sound from my phone even 10 m away. The IB, inspection bungalow, I stay in has four rooms. Two rooms are mostly dark and seem haunted almost! The Adi never go alone near the IB in the night since it is built over a graveyard. But I need not worry they said, they are Adi ghosts that haunt Adi people, besides there is the language issue, fair enough, I said. And after a year of getting used to sleeping alone here, they reaffirmed to me that anyways only kids who passed on were buried here, not adults, and I really had nothing to fear!

From the game called 'Angry Birds', I had downloaded sounds of pigs grunting and laughing. The sound is quite scary in a place like the IB and the Adi are anyway trigger-scary of ghosts. I could play the sound from my phone in the pocket and pretend I had nothing to do with it. I set it up. In the night over spirited conversations, I told Tabu bhaiyya about the sound from the dark room and that it scares me. Then, I played the sound. While initially we was surprised, he soon ran towards the sound with a Dao (machete), I then had to shine my torch and declare to him that it was just a harmless speaker. We burst out laughing!

Another day when I played this even in the daytime, a teenager kid Kebo, who was talking to me casually, having heard the sound suddenly started sprinting away from the IB. Feeling guilty, I ran behind him with the speaker to tell him that the Bose speaker was responsible for the sound, he ran harder away. When he came back I explained it all to him and he was still shivering in fear! He said nearby the dogs were running too and he was convinced they had seen or heard something scary too.

More micro-stories to follow.

SMS without a phone or network or even electricity!

The Adis have lived in the remote hills of the Upper Siang in Arunachal Pradesh at the frontier of the country with Tibet for centuries. Electricity is intermittent, phone network completely absent and evenings in the village are fueled by lively conversations. As a city-dweller, I also realise staying here the importance of conversation, of communication of even the most trivial matters to the more significant ones, daily micro-story-telling around the evening fire.

Evenings are also the time when work for the next day is fixed; some are seeking the physical help of others in the fields, some are seeking partners for fishing in the Siang river or its tributaries, some looking for bikes to take them to the nearest town and so on and so forth. While communication between households happens through short visits in the evening, communication at the village level is another story.

Decisions made by the village heads could be regarding the start of a traditional festival, the start of a communal hunting session, the settling of a dispute between households, the start of a communal farming activity such as fencing the fields, to announce that young boys in the village need to go far into the forests and bring back cane required for fencing the fields or for a game of tug-of-war and several such village-level activities. Now, once these decisions are made, how does one get them across to each and every household in the village. Thats' where the short messaging service in the village comes into play. Young boys in the village are summoned and sent out in three different directions shouting the announcement loud enough for every household to hear and comply. During these announcements, all conversations within homes come to a pause and attention is paid to ensure that the message is clearly understood.

Such messaging service is also used during summers between march and april when fire accidents are likely since every home has a central fireplace and the homes are built of easily combustible material such as bamboo, palm leaf-thatch, cane and wood. Two members from two households in the village are recruited every day to stay in the village and shout 'Kolonkoy Hoy Hoy' throughout the village, which translates to 'Ahoy, watch your fire'. The rest of the villagers are busy in the fields undertaking shifting cultivation, with few old members in the homes taking care of small children. From Bomdo, there is a story of how long back folks who were supposed to watch over the fire got drunk and could not prevent a fire accident, were banished from the village.

More than one and a half century ago, Father Krick, who was referred to as a plucky missionary wrote about an interesting interaction with the Padams, a sub-tribe of the Adis. Krick visited the Adi villages alone, equipped with his cross, flute, sextant and his medicine-box. This story is best conveyed in his own witty words in this rare article; 'Whilst the villagers were away working in the fields, the village took fire. On hastening to the spot, what was my surprise to see standing on the top of each roof one or two men brandishing long swords, and endeavouring to kill the fire-demon. "Fetch water", I shouted; but they were obviously too busy with their quixotic performance against the devil to hear me; so I told off the women, who were quietly admiring the valiance of their husbands, and forced them to fetch water; and as they saw what the water could do, they all rushed back to the torrent. Even our Don Quixotes, seeing that their sabres were not half as effective as water, soon exchanged their weapons for the water-jars...all acknowledged that the demon of fire dreads the water, though some felt inclined to blame me for not having foreseen and prevented the accident'.

In Arunachal Pradesh, inter-village messaging service has also existed in the past. In Tirap district in Eastern Arunachal, massive log-drums were used by the Nocte community to announce festivals, enemy attacks, community hunting, among other such communication to the neighbouring village. Such effective wireless networks indeed!

...and friending the fern

This post follows from the previous post 'gilding the lily', do read it if you haven't already...

The Adis from Bomdo village seldom clear an interesting plant from their shifting cultivation fields since it is believed that the plant retains moisture in the fields. Locally called Asi Gebinyé (the one that brings water), Helminthostachys zeylanica has been reported as a medicinal plant from other sites. The fronds are reported to cure acute back pain caused by sciatica, and are also used as a laxative, intoxicant and painkiller whereas the rhizomes are used in treating dysentry, sciatica and malaria. However, the Adis retain the plant as they believe it helps their agricultural production by retaining soil moisture in the site and are oblivious to the medicinal uses of the plant!

The fern species Helminthostachys zeylanica (Image sourced from Wikipedia)

This year, the rains in Upper Siang district were relatively poor and the Bomdo villagers were concerned about their crop harvest. Then, about five weeks ago, a group of villagers went deep into the forest and cut a particular plant, locally called 'Alu layan' which is believed to cause rain. For almost a month after that it rained continuously!

To me this worldview of a remote farming community within which different plants are used based on the community's knowledge or belief systems tailored to the local needs is very interesting and I hope to document many more such adaptations. There is the Aconitum ferrox plant, locally called 'Omo' traditionally used as poison for their arrows used for hunting, there is the tree, the bark of which is used as fish poison, a palm as well as a tree fern, the pith of which was traditionally consumed during times of food scarcity, lots more to write about and you will soon find information about these here in the blog.

Gilding the lily

To a first time visitor, like it was to me four years back when I came here, the landscape around the village may seem like a random hotch-potch of currently cultivated and regenerating shifting cultivation fields, palm, citrus and bamboo plantations and wet rice cultivation fields. A closer inspection however reveals a well-defined landscape with almost every patch, in fact, every tree and even a stream owned by a particular individual or a family or a clan in the village. Such is the intricacy of the landscape around an Adi village in the Upper Siang district in Arunachal Pradesh in north-east India.

One may even wonder, how a patch is demarcated in such a heterogenous landscape that seems to seep in from one landuse to another like in a painting made with coarse brush strokes. Thats where the lilies come in.

The Bomdo village is located close to the Siang river, the river flows around the village owing to the terrain. In late April every year in the Bomdo village in Upper Siang, eight species of cuckoos constantly call, often two or three of the calls overlapping, like cuckoo clocks that need no rewinding. This time of the year, the shifting cultivation landscape around the village features tiny spots of lilies flowering at the boundaries of individually owned patches. Flowering of this lily is also a trigger for the Adi community here to sow rice in their fields. The importance of this lily however goes beyond ornating the farming landscape or providing an indication to the farmers to sow their rice.

Crinum amoenum is a plant that is used by the Adis here to demarcate individual plots within a larger shifting cultivation mosaic. The plant is fire-hardy, is slow-growing and propogates through tubers. The plant, locally called Riksu Sodok (literally translated as a boundary ground orchid) is used to resolve boundary issues between shifting cultivators. The size of the tuber of the individual plant provides information regarding when it was planted and therefore how old the patch is, or who it belongs to. In the past, the local institution Kebang in the Bomdo village has resolved patch ownership issues based on the location and the age of the Crinum plant in the fields.

A newly cleared field with the Riku sodok flowering (photograph by Anirban Datta Roy)

There is much more detail to the way the Adis manage their shifting cultivation landscape. I just learnt last month that there is a fern that they retain in their fields since it leads to water retention. They clear all the trees and shrubs in a secondary shifting cultivation site but do not cut this fern. More about this and others soon! Watch this space!

Notes from the Aran festival

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At 3 am I woke up once hearing the sound of pounding pestles; the Bomdian women were making 'Ittings', rice cakes for the 'Aran' festival. The men were perhaps still sound asleep, for their work begins much later. At 7 am, the men are now busy, gathering palm leaves, bamboo poles and tree boles, each one in charge of slaughtering mithun, pig or chicken. Today is the 'Aran' festival, although it is a hunting festival, it marks the beginning of the farming season. Overall, 15 chickens, 8 pigs and 1 mithun will be slaughtered in four households of the Bomdo village today. The meat though will eventually trickle down to every family in the village either from the clan or the clan-in-law portion. For instance, the Medo clan would divide all the meat among the 10 Medo households with the biggest portion for the household that owned the animal. These ten households will further distribute their portions to their in-laws. This year, although only two clans; the Medo and Duggong households slaughtered animals, the meat will be distributed among the seven clans in the village.

The Aran festival itself has had a herculean effort preceding it. The Bomdian men have been making fortnightly visits to their hunting camps, a day's walk (at least 15 km up and down the hills! link) from the village since last November. All the meat is smoke-dried in their camps and brought back to the village just before the Aran festival. On the day of Aran, the sisters would make rice cakes and offer it to their brothers who in turn would offer them dried meat; this could be of wild pig, serow, barking deer or even, rarely, the takin.

On this particular day, everything went on like clock work. It began with the pigs in the two Medo households followed by the massive millet beer brews. The smoked squirrels on the sides of the Phrynium leaves are supposedly put to bring balance to the brewing filter. And then I went to Kangong Duggong's home, where a huge Mithun was due for sacrifice. This one needed tugging by at least 20 folks and the Mithun actually broke two of the bamboo steps made for strangling it.

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Then, there was an unexpected sad news. Bamut Medo, my field assistant's mother had passed on. This was particularly melancholic since I had sat beside her in the morning and someone had checked her pulse, she was alive when I was there. Now, an hour later shes gone. And gone with her are the experiences she has had in this landscape over a century, yes she was over a century old. She had been to Tibet thrice in her younger days, when salt was still bartered with the Tibetans in exchange for rice, rice beer, rice wine beads and cane artefacts from the Bomdo village. This is no mundane experience since the Tibet border is at least ten hills away, some of them snow-peaked. She used to bask in the sun every morning in Bamut's house and on my way and back from field she'd tell me she can't see me but can clearly hear me. With the broken Adi that I know I used to ask her if she had eaten, and she kept telling me it doesn't matter since she will be gone someday soon.

Half hour later I sat for a while with her body, while a tear unchecked made its way down my cheek, I saw her daughters and sons gathered for their final goodbyes. An old man was talking to her like she was alive, maybe she did hear him still. Couple hours later, some meat trickled to the place I stay in too and the day ended with some major notes and one major minor note.

An ode to Bomdo

This was written on an evening before I left Bomdo. There had been no electricity in the village for almost a week, and I was preparing to leave the village after a seven month stint. The only thing I could do more than mentally bid a bye to Bomdo was write about what I felt, so here goes...

"The evening sun creeps behind the green hills and darkness spreads, ever slowly,

there is no moon yet and I can't turn on any lights, there are none to be.

But I feel sublime, for, there is a glistening spark inside me

a glint of my spirit that ignites the embers within.

For a while, there will be no humming water springs, no more gush of the river below,

no more flowers that paint an entire hill, no orchids that rouge a tree,

no more humbling mountains, no more tall trees to gaze upon

and no more rain that forms cascades ever anew.

No more butterflies that paint the day, no more fireflies to flicker the night,

no more birds to add sounds to a silence

and no more clouds that move as fast as the river in might.

Yet this journey has now hardly come to an end.

After few days in the place I belong,

where the skies oft turn black from smoke, where refuse oft fills the lakes and soil,

where time will be spent racing with time itself, and days are not as long,

here I shall return where nature is unbound and where still stands time."

Incidentally, the day I left Bomdo was the biggest festival of the Adis, the Solung. The significant activity during this festival is that of sacrificing Mithuns. Five Mithuns were hung in the morning and I meticulously videotaped two of them. Millet beer was served for everyone and a dish made of fried Mithun stomach. After a stomach full of stomach, I packed up and left on my bike and was contemplating the day and the field season while I was slithering down the winding road from Bomdo to Yingkiong. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realised why Mithuns are so important for the Adis, not only are they a major protein source, they are also an essential part of all the rituals and festivals that go on throughout the year. My mind kept ringing 'The king is dead. Long live the king.'

An eight year old Mithun, she gave birth to many  successors

The meat being distributed to the seven families who bought the Mithun

Medo Karthik

I have been visiting Bomdo village for a long time now, since February 2008. But never have I felt a part of the village as much as in the last few weeks. There are eight clans in the village; Nyodo, Duggong, Yalik, Panga, Lanchong, Dungmik and Medo. The Medo clan has now unofficially included me in their clan; I explain here how.

The customs of the Adis are quite interesting. Among the clans, whenever any members hunts a wild animal, he gives a piece of the meat to closest relatives of his clan. Some meat is also distributed to close relatives among other clans; for instance, to the in-laws. It is quite surprising that there is no fine if somebody doesn't do this, but this tradition is now going on for several centuries. Nevertheless, distributing meat among clan members ensures supply of meat throughout the hunting season at least. So, the last time a barking deer was hunted by the Medo clan, I was called to my friend, Bamut Medo's home for dinner. He casually remarked that I was one of the Medos now, I didn't believe him then, but protein is not in an abundant supply in the village, so I happily obliged.

Today (6th Feb), a Mithun was cut in the village. In this case too, the meat is distributed among all the Medos. I was not only invited for dinner, which was mainly Mithun stomach boiled and rice, to three houses, I was also given a small chunk of the meat! Now, I believe I am one of them! 

On another note, I have fortified the camp I stay in the village (the inspection bungalow) with all the essentials. I now have a Chang (a smoking place above the cooking fire), a small almirah to keep all the stuff needed for cooking, a pestle, an aluminium mug, a small backup cylinder, a backup electric stove, a solar charged light, a radio, the works, take a look. Just now, I also made sure the fire goes on for a few hours so the Mithun meat gets smoked. That way it can stay for several days without getting spoilt. The way the Adis smoke it, the meat apparently lasts for five years!

Burning one (fire) down!

The pestle that brings lovely flavour to my food,
made of Jackfruit tree wood

My kitchen, its all there!

And finally here is the mug that I picked up from the market; its uses are several, heres a list of things that I have made in it; fried eggs, fried fryums, tea, coffee, boiled water, soup, dal, drink tea/coffee, chatni with the pestle, measure rice to cook with it and the list goes on. In fact, I call it the invincible mug because we had taken this mug on a trip to Mouling National Park and it was the only vessel we carried besides one large vessel to cook dal and rice. So in the five day trip, we used this mug to measure rice to be cooked, to make tea, to smash boiled potatoes, to serve dal and again the list goes on. I call it invincible because when we camped by the Sidi river in the Eggong camp, a Mithun had stepped on it to make it quite oval in shape. In the middle of the night, someone screamed saying my mug was gone. Calmly, I woke up in the morning and brought it back to shape by hitting it gently with a rock and the mug is back in use! Well, this is the one thing I rate as most useful ever in field.

The invincible mug!

So, I sleep today convinced that I am not only a researcher in the village, but perhaps also one of them now.