Infections and Infectiousness: Naga Diaries 2

He was part of a vast conscience industry that tried to salve the various sores of the Naga society; most spawned in the intersection of modernity and an ancient way of living.

From NDTV’s Guwahati correspondent we had heard about Medzephema, and discovered that the place is very close to Dimapur. But we had no other coordinates, so Amlan set about getting them from whosoever was willing to help. It was while he was calling somewhere that he saw a woman close in the phone booth saying that she could take us to Medzephema. She was from there.

Her name was Aienla Kemptor. She was an Ao woman, and was running the Nagaland Centre for Human Development & Information Technology. From our talk, I gathered she was into education in rural areas, and a human resource development consultant.

When she overheard Amlan seeking out details about the Keralite GaoNbura of Medziphema, she said she knew the man. He was not a GaoNbura, but a member of the town council. Once she said she would take us there, we were willing to do anything. One thing that talks without preconditions entailed was we trooping into Joe Ngamkhuchung’s North Eastern Drug, HIV/AIDS Training Centre, or NEDHIV. Close to our hotel, just like the Deputy Collector’s home, Ainla’s sister was working with NEDHIV’s section for truckers affected by HIV.

It was here that Aienla put up her naughtiness. Joe was a venerable man, of much dedication, as we found out. Ainla trooped into his office and said grandly, “These boys have come to meet you, and were calling up to locate you, when I caught them, and brought them here.”

Joe, taken aback that some unknowns should seek him out, and setting out from Mumbai to do that, insisted on knowing why we were looking for him. Amlan was caught in another fix, and he spun a story of calling up St Joseph’s school, where somebody told him to meet Joe. Joe quized Amlan for sometime, and then launched into how he had been with the school as a teacher, and launched into his story of how he started off from that school, and eventually got into working in the area that he chose to.

Visibly relieved, Amlan was at his wits end, when my reporter’s habit came to our rescue. I asked Joe about the AIDS and drug abuse situation in Nagaland.

And he started off on his pet subject. The stories were heartrending. The Nagas’ natural instinct and its fraying in the light of modern ideas of AIDS prevention. The liberalism that was part and parcel of the tribal value system, where a child was the most revered thing, was also fraying. Sex among youngsters is not considered a moral issue. Like so many people bound to the soil still observe, it is accepted. We were told stories of how inter tribal love affairs had blown up into battles, but after the battle, once peace was established, and usually within strictly humane time frames, life just continued. Sex between unwed is a non issue among the tribals. But that social attitude to sex, where love as felt is considered good enough reason for sex with anyone without exception. Even Christian morality has had little mitigating effect on this outlook. But it was an explosive ingredient, when mixed with some other, more toxic elements of modern life.

The economic fault lines opened up like uncovered severs and many victims who fell were a weird cocktail of young girls, boys, drug addicts and upcountry truck drivers. That sex was not taboo helped quicken the spreading of the poison. AIDS was rampant, shot directly into the blood vessels of the people. As much due to unsafe syringes as with unsafe sex.

Many young girls contracted AIDS from their boyfriends. Joe told us the story of a girl who was pregnant when she discovered her boyfriend had the disease. Out of fear rather than shame, she abandoned her newborn outside a Church. It was Joe’s job to find homes for such abandoned, unwanted children. He was part of a vast conscience industry that tried to salve the various sores of the Naga society; most spawned in the intersection of modernity and an ancient way of living.

Aienla accompanies us to Medzephema. Along the way we run into all those famous motifs of Nagaland from coffee table books and illustrated schoolbook geography. A ferociously noisy river, much like a Naga warrior, small in size, but deadly in effect.

We see the Moreng. The ceremonial wooden hut where Naga youngsters are blooded into manhood by the village elders. They have a huge wooden plate, actually a small carved boat, which is where the entire village partakes of food on special days. The Morengs are also richly carved with tribal motifs, mostly of animals, hunting and wars.

We reach Medzephema. Aienla instructs the auto driver straight into the house of CK Muralidharan. He was an agricultural scientist deputed by the central government to teach cultivation techniques to Nagas in Kohima. Far from his coastal Kerala, he promptly fell for the bank clerk he met monthly. He married and stayed.

And then Ainla's takes us to her home, which is across the fence to Murali. We meet her parents, her father all wrinkly in the face, especially when he smiled, but he had his dao stuck to his cummerband. We are invited for tea, when we hear a child crying.

“My daughter, she has woken up. Wait I will get her.”

In minutes she returns with a negroid baby little more than one. She had a Kenyan husband she met in Ahmedabad she had told me, but not that she had a black baby in Medzephema. Outside with pictures and goodbyes, the baby cries. Murali, who is with us offers to take her. The baby promptly defects in a series of smiles.

“She thinks he is her uncle.” Aeinla’s shot at Murli’s dark skin.

Back to Dimapur. We hire an Indica to Kohima. Along we see sights of Naga llife. A Naga streetside bazaar.

There are exotic, fantastically coloured birds hung by their beaks on a line. Some weird animals, a cross between a rat and a pig’s snout. A flying cat with flanks like the dewlap of a cow, again hung from that line of string.

Along the way signboards say Assam Rifles Friends of the Hills. And BRO- Border Road Organisation.

We also see a Shaktiman truck spill its contents from its tarpaulin hood: Army fatigues, draped on undersize men, some with guns, they look like picnickers with a very bad taste for fancy dress; not a sign of nervous armymen patrolling strife stricken land mined by guerillas.

Amlan begins his work shooting the Naga women sitting in a row, some playing ludo, others squeezing the sap out of bamboo shoots and then packing it into plastic covers, while the sap itself is filled in bottles and displayed.

We find a mongoose and a squirrel hanging from a string before two of the vendors. One also has a pair of birds with bright plumage strung from the beak on the string. Before Amlan gets that on camera, a couple of women buy the bright birds, and walk off into their car. A great shot was hijacked away right from under our noses.

We wind through sense numbing greenery, all knotted and thick jungles on both sides, one undulating carpet relieved by the defiant wild plantain leaves that fan out in a serial row, randomly scattered.

We reach Kohima, check into a hotel. Eventually, I and Amlan move towards the telephone, we both have a series of numbers. Amlan gets through to Theja Meru, the owner of Dream Cafe, Kohima's most happening place. A hangout for college kids, but when we land there the first gaggle I see is all schoolgirls in their uniform pinafores, ties, and schoolbags.