The monk was from Burma and had come
over to India in the late 70s. A long flowing
grey beard, a pleasant smile,
broken Hindi and a constant peacefulness
characterised him. People from far away come here to take his
blessings. I was in Devakota, nestled in the verdant hills, encircled
by the Yang Sang Chu river in the eastern section of Upper Siang. A
bit of background.
Last year's January, Roy and I
were headed to the Singha village at the edge of the district close
to the Dibang valley district. The trek from Tuting to Singha was to
take us about two days, maybe three. The 70 odd km is often traversed
by the Membas, Adis and Mishmis in the region in a single day! At
Tuting we crossed over the Siang to the other side on a long cane
bridge and passed through a few Adi villages; Nyameng and Jido being
the first.
Most of the first day's trek was along
the Yang Sang Chu, a river that cared a little about directions; it
is a river that owing to the terrain, flows from South
Easterly to North Westerly
direction to meet the Siang close to Tuting. Somewhere after the Jido
village, Roy exclaimed “this much forest can hurt the eyes!”. And
he was right, in all the directions we could see there were beautiful
forested hills, some of them with snow toppings. Since in the
landscape we were in settled cultivation along the Yang Sang Chu
valley was more common than shifting cultivation along the
hillslopes, the forests in the hills looked fairly contiguous.
We figured we had just covered a third
of the distance to Singha in the first day and Togorey our Mishmi guide took us to his
sister-in-law's place in Nyering where we would rest the first night.
Nyering is a village that has a mix of Adis, Membas and few Mishmis.
The following day, prayer flags welcomed us to the Memba village
Payengdam from where the view of the Dibang valley side was stunning.
The mithuns reared by the Membas looked
relatively smaller than the ones reared by the Adis, and as it is
looked a bit different and there were horses here too.
As I climbed down from Payengdam gazing
at the prayer flags of Mankota, my knees gave in and I decided that
going till Singha may not be a possibility. And if the pain in the
knees stayed the trek back to Tuting would be even more difficult.
Which is how I spent three days with
the monk at Devakota, a little distance away from Mankota! Devakota
has a Buddhist temple and two houses beside it where the priests
stayed. The monk I stayed with, the head priest, was different in
many ways. Firstly, his wife, he belongs to the sect of the Buddhist
priests in which marriage is allowed, offered me a mug full of millet
beer with a bamboo pipe to drink, which is the Memba style. Of course
in the three days I was there I never saw him drink any.
Also, between his prayers at the
temple, he often goes to collect firewood or to do some chores. One
of the days I went with him and he was intent
on clearing a path for bringing back a huge log of wood from the
banks of the Yang Sang Chu. When I
figured he was tired, I took over in clearing the forest path, and
after five minutes he took the Dao back unhappy with the way I was
doing the job!
We chatted about Buddhism, about life in Bhutan and here in India, life in Devakota and he also told me that the Government was not sending enough funds to maintain the temple. The monk's wife was very interested in the bird book I was carrying and spent more than an hour going through the pages and telling me the local names for the birds. Later that day the monk told me to take a picture of him wearing his priest robe with his wife and asked me to print it and send it over whenever next possible. This will be possible next month since Roy will be going back.
People
from all over Arunachal and even from other states visit Devakota to
the Buddhist temple here to do Kora of the temple itself and the hill
on which it is located. For me the three days spent there taught me
the importance of being idle! I had carried no books to read, there
was no electricity and no one to talk much to. But I enjoyed that
feeling too. Prayers of the monk in the temple, a constant hum of the
river flowing closeby, calls of several birds in the background,
colours sprinkled into the day by butterflies, conversations with the
monk and his wife filled my days.
