Medemla

  I am both shocked and amazed at what has happened to Martha. In a way I am glad that my father is not here to face this; he died suddenly when Martha was in her fourth class. Now that everything is out in the open, these two youngsters have become inseparable and openly display their love and desire for each other. I keep asking myself: what is it that pulls a man and woman together and makes them so irresistible to one another? Why did I never feel that way with Imsu? And when I think back to the time after Imsutemjen’s rejection of me, I realize that whatever sense of dejection and abandonment I had felt at that time, it was somehow not personal or intimate; but more like the disruption of an order of things that ought to happen in a woman’s life. And after this debacle, I decided that I would have nothing to do with any man, ever. This has often led me to ask myself: Am I abnormal or just a different kind of woman?

  Lipoktula

  Medemla came to tell me about Martha’s pregnancy and ask me what should be done. I told her that we should now formalize their relationship as soon as possible. And then she did a strange thing. In the middle of our planning for the home ceremony, she blurted out, ‘Mother, I don’t understand why they had to do it before marriage. Could they not have waited? What is it that drove them to it? I can tell you now that I never felt like that with Imsu even when we were alone.’ How could I explain to her why the law of attraction between a man and a woman could not apply to them, and why she had not felt that way with Imsu? Even an old woman like me still remembers and understands the inevitable force that draws a man and a woman towards one another. Since she had never entertained any other man’s overtures, Medemla would never experience the impulse that draws a man and a woman into that kind of intimacy.

  Though I have told you that I was raped by Merensashi long ago, even now, when I recall the encounter, I remember, much more than my sense of outrage, the absurd power of his sex in overcoming my initial protest. Just as my mother did, I too have asked myself many times why I had not run out the moment I understood what this intentions were that day. But each time, I only recall how contagious the crazed passion of the man was and how an inexplicable reaction of my body turned my feeble resistance to participatory submission.

  Epilogue

  ‘Push!’ they urge her, and she tries one more time to heave but nothing happens. Her scream rings out in the night and Apok comes rushing in, only to be pushed back outside. ‘Stay there,’ is the command, adding, ‘if you can’t bear to hear her cry, go far away.’ But he hangs around; the labour has been going on for almost twelve hours and even Medemla the experienced nurse is despairing: would it be a tragedy for Martha also? There is a short lull in between the pains and Martha asks for some water, but before she can gulp down the first mouthful, a massive wave of pain overtakes her body, making her almost arch convex from the cot. The growl she emits is like nothing these women who have participated in many deliveries, have ever heard, and as the last hiss leaves her throat, one of them shouts, ‘I see the head, one more push, baby, just once more.’ Martha hears her and with an ultimate effort gives another push and the baby slithers out of her exhausted body. The baby’s wet and slimy contours as it surges through the passage produces such a sensuous effect on Martha that she will always remember it as more sublime than the transient ecstasies of sex.

  The new mother slumps on her bed totally spent, while the other women busy themselves with the rituals following a birth. When the child is brought to her, Martha looks at it with awe, and thinks with a deep sadness of her mother who has never experienced the pleasurable pains of motherhood. The grandmother is watching Martha all throughout and gives her a knowing wink. She picks up the baby and holds it out to Medemla. The new mother turns to look at the two women as they encircle her child in their arms. She thinks, they too, are mothers in their own ways and now she has joined their ranks. The mother and the grandmother come to the bed where she is resting and ceremoniously lay the baby next to her, in a ritualistic acknowledgement of her motherhood.

  Apok, the new father, who is watching the activities of the women from the doorway, now comes forward, directing his gaze towards the bed in order to have a closer look at his just-born son. But his vision is obstructed by the daunting circle of the women, these three different kinds of mothers, standing as though mesmerized by the miracle of new life. He is reluctant to break the spell and, feeling like an intruder in a sacred ceremony, slips out unobserved.

  A Simple Question

  Imdongla woke up that morning with an uneasy feeling; she was sure she’d had a bad dream but could not remember what it was about. During her morning chores she tried to recollect it but without success; so she turned to her husband and told him of her foreboding, ‘Listen, I’ve had a very weird dream, something bad will happen today. So don’t shoot your mouth off like you always do and stay at home only.’ He simply grunted at her and muttered, ‘You and your dreams!’ But Imdongla insisted, ‘Just be careful, today is not a good day,’ and left for the far-off field.

  Imdongla was barely literate, able to read the Bible and the Hymn book only. But, she was otherwise a worldly-wise woman, knowledgeable about the history and politics of the village. She had grown up in a household where discussions about these were daily fare because her father was a gaonburah. Her husband, Tekaba, was also a gaonburah, and they had four healthy children. The gaonburahs were appointed by the government from the major clans as their agents to help maintain order in the village, and were issued a kind of uniform: red and black jackets and red blankets as symbols of their status. They worked in tandem with the traditional village council, also founded on the principle of clan representation. Set up during the British days, the system continued even after India gained independence.

  If, during peacetime these elders enjoyed a privileged status, they became the most vulnerable ones when hostilities broke out between the Nagas and the Indian state. On the one hand, they were held responsible by the government if any young men from their villages were reported to have joined the rebel forces; on the other, the underground forces ordered them to identify young men representing each clan to join their army, failing which they threatened to burn down the village granaries. The forced ‘conscription’ was soon followed by ‘demands’ for material support like money, grain and livestock. Though the gaonburahs were supposed to inform the government about the activities of the rebels, they were under tremendous pressure from the underground forces because every move they made was monitored from close quarters. There were instances when certain elders suspected of being ‘with’ the government had been summarily executed. For the gaonburahs it was an extremely untenable situation.

  The demand for ‘taxes’, as they were termed by the underground, started innocuously enough. The very first time it was Re 1 collected from every household to pay for the travel expenses of the rebel leader going to foreign lands to plead for Naga independence from India. At that time, Imdongla, though reluctant to part with hard-earned cash, however small the denomination, gave in without much protest. But as the years went by, the demands grew, and reluctance or protest was met with by severe beatings, not only of the person involved but of the gaonburahs and the elders as well. Several times it was Imdongla’s presence of mind which had saved Tekaba from being beaten. Once the collectors had gathered in front of her house, and were berating a villager for bringing less rice than he was supposed to and asking him why he had dared disobey the command. The petrified villager could not say anything in his own defence. Imdongla was watching the unfolding scenario from the house. Then the leader turned to her husband Tekaba and said, ‘What do you have to say about this?’ At this point Imdongla decided that if she did not intervene both the men would be beaten mercilessly. Dashing inside, she grabbed a basket of freshly husked rice and came out shouting, ‘Hey, Toshi, why don’t you tell this man that I could not return this rice to you this morning as promised. Remember you lent it to my son for the age-set feast? Here it is.’ So saying she set the basket on the ground and turned to the collector, ‘You can see, brother, this is more than what he has to give, please take the lot and go, otherwise you will be caught in the rain.’ The sky was indeed turning dark with rain-clouds. The man looked at her for some time, gestured to his soldiers to gather the rice and left the village at a running pace, leaving both her husband and the villager dumbstruck.

  Very soon the entire land was gripped by terror unleashed both by the underground forces as well government soldiers. Within a couple of years of the commencement of hostilities, the army had established camps in strategic villages with regular patrols mounted every day for the safe passage of more soldiers into the interior of the land. Even in their village, an army camp was built on a hillock. Ironically, it was Tekaba and the elders of the council who accompanied the Deputy Commissioner of Mokokchung to officially hand over the prime site for the soldiers to set up their camp. As soon as the soldiers moved into their camp, a new sense of foreboding settled on the village. Whichever village allowed the setting up of army camp became prime suspects in the eyes of the underground and, as a form of punishment, were taxed double the amount. Resisting the coming of the army on the other hand was not an option because then the government itself would initiate measures to punish the un-cooperative village: all able-bodied men would be forced to work (without wages or food) in government projects like levelling a hillock to build a football field or clearing up to two hundred metres on both sides of the highway so that the underground soldiers would not be able to ambush army convoys, a regular occurrence. Villagers who persistently resisted the setting up of army camps would be forced out of their villages; their houses and granaries would be burnt and they would be relocated along with other recalcitrant villagers in a ‘grouping’ zone and kept in fenced-in areas, not allowed to cultivate their fields, their movements monitored and under constant surveillance.

  The situation was steadily growing worse: from the meagre harvest the villagers had to meet with the demands of the belligerent ‘collectors’ of the underground. Now the taxes were in all three forms; rice, livestock and money. Sometimes all three would be demanded at the same time. Imdongla could see the effects of the terrible pressure on her husband; his hair had turned white, his face was gaunt with hunger and apprehension, and his eyes had a furtive look. He spoke little and tossed on his hard bed by the fireside all night. He even thought of resigning but Imdongla pointed out that if he so much as mentioned it to anyone the government would suspect him of being a sympathizer of the rebels and arrest him. Besides, she pointed out, everyone would call him a coward; how would he like that?

  The double tax of rice from the underground brothers came during a particularly bad year; they had already collected the tax from the first harvest in August and now demanded another one from the winter crop. After the earlier lot had been paid, the army chaps led by a fierce-looking Havildar had come around asking all sorts of questions. The villagers pleaded ignorance and got away lightly with only some choice words from the leader. The second demand coming so close after the first put the elders in a quandary. They met in Tekaba’s house and debated long into the night. Imdongla forcefully butted in to advise resisting the so-and-so’s from the jungle. Tekaba tried to hush her, ‘Keep quiet, woman, you know nothing.’ At this she flared up, ‘Know nothing? Well, who saved you the last time when you stood there like a statue about to wet your loin cloth? Just think how our daughter will feed her children if they take away what’s left after paying their debt to the uncle!’ And turning to the other men she continued, ‘And you venerable elders, where is your wisdom? Your courage? Can’t some of you go to the jungle and talk to the leaders? Plead with them? Haven’t we always given them what they wanted? Ask them for time; instead of rice offer them some pigs and chickens. We can do without meat but we cannot live without rice. Don’t you see what’s happening to our children and women?’

  The day on which she could not remember the bad dream of the previous night, Imdongla walked to the field thinking about the debate: she was sure that her dream had something to do with this. She resolved to tell her daughter to repay only half of what they owed so that after paying their due to the underground they would have enough rice for themselves to last till January; then her husband could look for work on the road-building projects or even in the army camp where they constantly needed labourers to mend fences or carry loads from the big trucks which brought supplies for them regularly. But when she reached home in the evening she was told that a group of soldiers had come and dragged all the elders including her husband to the army camp on charges of giving supplies to the underground. It was a cold night and to her surprise she saw that her husband’s red blanket was lying in a corner. Knowing how susceptible he was to cold, she grabbed it along with his red and black jacket and started for the army camp. When she was leaving, her daughter came out of the inner room and said, ‘The army man pulled it off father’s shoulder saying that he did not deserve to wear it because he was supporting the jungle men.’

  Imdongla walked resolutely towards the camp with the warm clothing bundled into a tight packet. When she reached the gate the sentry would not allow her in but she began to shout at him in her dialect pointing to the captain’s hut and saying, ‘Sahib, sahib.’ The sentry gave in to her insistent muttering and thinking that she might be an informer, let her through. When she entered the hut there seemed to be no one around but she heard voices from a room beyond a partially open door. She peeped in and saw an enclosure of bamboo stakes where all the elders were being held captive. Only her husband was in a separate enclosure. As soon as she spotted him, she threw the blanket and jacket through the opening between the stakes. She was so quick that by the time the captain realized what was happening, Tekaba had put on the jacket and wrapped himself in the blanket. The captain turned to his soldiers and started to shout at them asking who had let this mad woman into the camp. He made as if to open Tekaba’s cell but Imdongla jumped in between him and the make-shift lock-up, talking rapidly. The captain turned to someone in the shadows and asked him to interpret what she was saying. He told the captain that she had come to take her husband home and would not leave without him.

  The captain saw that short of shooting her, there was no other way of getting rid of her. She sat in front of Tekaba’s enclosure and when the captain approached her, she stood up and made as if to take off her waist cloth which he knew was the ultimate insult a Naga woman could hurl at a man signifying his emasculation. He turned round and went out of the room. Imdongla again squatted on the earthen floor and pulled out her metal pipe with a bamboo nozzle and filled it with home-grown tobacco. She saw a box of matches on the captain’s table and crossed over to snatch it. She lit her pipe and dragging on it deeply, sat down to continue her vigil, tucking the matchbox in the folds of her supeti. She then stationed herself at Tekaba’s cage-door. She had concluded that as long as she was there the soldiers would not dare beat up her husband and the other elders.

  Outside, the captain was mulling over the other things the interpreter had told him. Imdongla had said, ‘Look at them; aren’t they like your own fathers? How would you feel if your fathers were punished for acting out of fear? Fear of you Indian soldiers and fear of the mongrels of the jungle.’ But what affected him most was one single question that Imdongla had repeatedly asked: ‘What do you want from us?’ For the first time in his tenure in these hills, this apparently simple village woman had made him see the impossible situation faced by the villagers. Abruptly he turned to his adjutant and told him to release Tekaba and escort the couple beyond the perimeter of the camp. He however decided to keep the others overnight as a face-saving ploy for the army.

  After the couple left, he felt restless and wanted a smoke to calm his nerves. He began looking for the matchbox he had kept on the table and which Imdongla had earlier appropriated. The captain was puzzled at first but suddenly remembered seeing the old woman smoking her pipe and concluded that she had stolen his matchbox and was freshly perturbed. The petty thievery which would normally have been ignored, once again reminded him how a coarse and illiterate village woman had managed to unsettle his military confidence by challenging the validity of his own presence in this alien terrain.

  Sonny

  I came home that fateful summer, out of a sense of filial duty, to spend a month with my ageing parents. Another reason that helped me decide on this journey was the apparent cessation of hostilities between the conflicting forces, maintained by a fragile cease-fire agreement. But there remained the bitter and violent rivalries among the different groups of freedom-fighters which often resulted in senseless deaths of leaders and cadres alike, creating a new sense of terror in the minds of the general public. The nagging misgivings about these sporadic killings notwithstanding, I came to my home-town, little knowing that the murky politics of a contested land would once again rip apart my assiduously restructured life. I also knew that Sonny had been living there with his wife and children since the declaration of general amnesty, but I came nonetheless, convinced that I was ‘cured’ of Sonny.

 

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