Thanks to Nino Zhasa (who runs Explore Nagaland) and her extensive contacts in the villages of Nagaland, I decided to take the plunge and travel to a few villages not many people visit or, hell, even know about. V, who was my contact from the village of Phusachodu, rescued me from the dusty bowels of the N.S.T bus station at Pfutsero where I had spent many an hour drinking tea and having monosyllabic conversations with the owner of the N.S.T Hotel. V was a small, young, wiry and an extremely enthusiastic man who worked as a school teacher in Phusachodu and had previously done a course in Tourism from an institute in Sikkim. Phusachodu was 8 kms from Pfutsero, an hour’s drive through steep hills, thick jungles and terrible roads, ample time for V to fill me in on everything that he felt I had to know about his village.
Villages around the village
The first thing I learnt (and this delighted me no end) was that I was to be the first ever home-stay guest in the village. People had visited the village before but they ended up staying in the cushy confines of the Speaker’s House. No one had ever stayed in an actual home there and V wished for me to experience “the raw everyday reality of life in the village”. I replied guardedly pessimistically that “we don’t have to go that far”, a sentiment that was greeted with mocking laughter.
The second thing I learnt was that there was a hunting ban in effect in the village, but (and this distressed me no end) that it had been lifted for the week I was visiting because of a “Children’s Feast Day” where all the children in the village would go to a house of their choosing and be served the animals and birds hunted by that household over the course of the week. As a result, the whole village was out hunting in the thick jungles surrounding the village.
Our first stop was V’s house which was close to the entrance near the top-most part of the village. His was a modest 3 room house, with one kitchen, one living room and one bed-room which, he declared very proudly, was built all by himself. While we were drinking tea and eating wild apples that he had knocked down from a tree in his courtyard, he showed me his “lucky hunt” of the day – a white-cheeked barbet and a squirrel. I had been traveling and hearing about the legendary tendency of the Nagas to hunt everything non-human that moves but this was the first time I’d actually seen a hunt and a part of me died inside. I try not to judge people while traveling and have a “to each his own” attitude wherever I go but watching a colourful blood-soaked dead bird hunted not for lack of food but for some cultural sport did spoil my mood greatly.
Mithun horns welcoming visitors at the house I was staying
We stopped by the local ground and the cathedral on the way to my “home” in the village. Christianity came here on 10th December 1948 and “achieved” full conversion on 9th August 1989, said a plaque on a monolithic stone here. V was highly proud of the Church and I tried to feign enthusiasm to keep him happy but didn’t have to try to feign anything when we climbed to the awesome views of the village and the hills beyond at the top of the Church. The village was a cluster of tin-roofed houses, many of them beautifully traditional in all their wooden finery, some adorned with colourful verandahs surrounded by eye-poppingly colourful flower gardens. Concrete was slowly but surely creeping in, though, with some ugly tenements dotted among the splendidly crafted houses.
The view of Phesachodu from the Cathedral
My hosts lived in one of those traditional wooden houses and had a gallery of mithun horns at the entrance to welcome its visitors. In the “hall” adjacent to the kitchen, V pointed towards an elongated wooden board with massive circular holes punctuating its length and said, “This is your bed tonight.” I laughed, patted him on the back and complimented his sense of humour to which he stared incredulously back at me and said, “I’m serious. This is where you sleep tonight.” As we sat by the fire in the kitchen drinking copious amounts of tea, I asked him, very nervously, “But don’t they have a ‘bed’ here?” “That is the bed. You can keep your luggage in the room and sleep here”. “Ah!”, I said, perking up, “So there IS a room I can sleep in if I don’t want to sleep here?” “Yes,” he said, “but I want you to sleep here to show you how we people really live. I want to give you the genuine experience of life in a village. I want you to feel how difficult life is in Naga villages compared to big cities like Mumbai. I want you to go through the hardships we go through.”
The “bed”
I took a few steps towards the wooden board to test my prospective couch, which I learnt was not a couch at all but an instrument to grind millets and grains. I lay down on it and found my terribly out of shape spine getting entangled in one of the holes and crying for mercy. When I turned to the side for a demo of how uncomfortable it could possibly get, I found my lips sticking to the board and the attendant dust and grime with it. This wasn’t a place to accidentally find your tongue sticking out drooling in the middle of the night. I went up to V and said, “I’m okay with this trip being not all that authentic. Can you show me my ‘room’ please?” We went up a concrete one-storey building right next to the wooden house, one that I despised earlier for being ugly, walked into a room to find a splendidly clean and comfortable bed provided with acrylic blankets and a little bathroom at the back. “Wonderful”, I said, “So what’s for lunch?”
Lunch and beyond shall be chronicled in the forthcoming posts set in the quaint, old village of Phusachodu.
Traveholics 