The lesser known paradise

Hibu Dindie

Ziro a place well known and yet not well known enough to the wider world is where I set off on a three day trip. It is the land of my ancestors or the home of the Apatanis, an Arunachalee tribe known to the outsiders for the seemingly bizarre yet unusual custom of tattooing and nose-plugging of its womenfolk in the past.

I set off on a four hour journey from Itanagar. We jolted, bumped and shook inside an angrily roaring sumo tuned all the way to Bollywood hits of the 70s as the mountain roads crawled its way up to Ziro and as we zigzagged across green rainforests, meandering streams and cascading waterfalls en route, I doze off and lo! I reached my destination in a jiffy. The much anticipated tri-annual festival of Myoko has just passed by and I have missed out on the month long festivity, the merry atmosphere, the singing and the dancing, the free-flowing rice beer, the spicy ‘Pikey’ and ‘Pila’ and the ‘Hulyi’ the smoked pork bacon, but nevertheless a three-day bike tour made up for some of the losses (if not all!).

My uncle, an enthusiastic guide made me sit on his pillion and took me to the lesser known places of this little hill station where time and tide is better allowed to flow by lazily, where stress is a word to be found in the dictionary and where nature is at its tranquil best, undisturbed and unexplored. We took a Hapoli- Siiro- Manipoliang- Hong village- Old Ziro and back to Hapoli route.
The first stop from Hapoli was in Siiro, a small farming village and as we zapped by, women carrying rice saplings and spades in baskets slung over their heads passed us greetings as they made their way to the paddy fields with plastics slung over their shoulders to keep out the rain. Young future Baichung Bhutias and David Beckhams splashed about with their footballs in water-logged meadows and small urchins with their faces painted with mucus and their cheeks red with cold posed wide-eyed for the camera; cattle grazed lazily and a short walk away lies a salt-lick and luckily we saw a beautiful, young mithun standing there guzzling the minerals as it unloaded itself at the same instance unfazed by the women busy catching fish in the stream nearby.
Then we jerked along to Manipoliang, a very scantily populated area dotted with greens, round hillocks gently overlapping each other under the canopy of the blue sky, so soothing to the eyes and a perfect elixir for the weary soul while the crisp wind blowing there tingled my senses with its cold yet warm feeling. A diversion in the road leads to the Pange and Talley forests, a place wherein the first Apatani ancestors settled down but owing to the extreme weather they migrated to the present site and let me tell you, people have encountered spooky incidents over the place and our elders tell us that those are the ghosts of our ancestors who died on the way due to hunger, accident, mushroom poisoning and so on.

Then we enter Hong village, the largest in Asia and here the Apatani culture and society is mirrored in its truest form. It is the sowing season and nose-plugged oldies and the youngsters on a hired basis go about their daily business – cleaning and sowing the saplings and releasing fingerlings into the flooded fields, while some fields stand solitarily among the planted fields decorated in religious symbols, drowned in water for the priests have prayed to the spirits of the fields for a bumper harvest and an abundant stock of food. Kids play around in the village with creatively invented bamboo-cars, bamboo-stilts and wooden sleighs mounted on wheels of empty, tobacco tins.

The Apatani villages are very congested and confined to a limited space but this has been an advantage, for the people’s close proximity has made the society able enough to resist the intruding, alien cultures brought by the outsiders but the society has moulded itself according to the changing times while retaining its originality. So, you never know which crumbling, greying, old bamboo hut may own a colour TV or a vehicle or two. Old folks dressed in dirty rags carry their small grandchildren from the cities dressed in branded wears on their backs and visit each others houses, talking of the good, old days, enquiring about each others health over a quarter of brandy brought from the towns, while tiny children gather around their grandmas and listen carefully to the folktales about Gods, Goddesses, and the most popular hero ‘Abotani’ and his misadventure (the ancestor of the Tani group of tribes: the Apatanis, the Nyishis, the Tagins, the Adis, the Galos, the Miris and the Mishings). A person gets sick and he takes his medicines as prescribed but will always call the priest to chant the ancient prayers to the deities and offer them chickens to appease their wrath. To some people it may appear pure superstition but this is the way the people have adopted to keep the prayers and the rituals alive and save them from turning into history.

It is the fertile season and my grandma has stuffed a sack full of Chinese bamboo-shoots, maize, bacon, lettuces, some sour wild fruit and a bottle of home-made rice beer for me to take back home to my parents.We do a further round of the Hari, Bulla, Hija and all the villages and the congested Old Ziro area and glided back to Hapoli to stop by and look at the local market. The market is abundant with wild vegetables, herbs, spices, wild catches, local carps, wild fruits, wild honey and what not; you name it and you get it, be it a wriggly silkworm or local yeast to ferment beers etc.

After three days I half-heartedly make my way back to the blistering heat of the foothills of Itanagar in a sumo jolting, bumping and shaking to hit Bollywood tunes of the 70s and as I turn back to look at the blue mountains turning smaller and smaller behind the clouds I know that, if there is a place called heaven this is where it is supposed to be…the lesser known paradise.