He has been the Ang, as they call the local headman here, for 25 years. It is an hereditary title, and will pass to his son, provided that son is by the daughter of a fellow Ang, and not by one of the chief’s concubines. I ask how many concubines he has. Ten, comes the answer, after a longish pause for calculation.
He will probably be the last Ang for whom head-hunting was a condition of office. He has taken five heads, he claims. He is now a Christian and was baptized, by total immersion, in a nearby stream. When he was young, he says, the village was ruled by fear; now it’s ruled by the fear of God.
I still can’t get used to hearing such Sunday School sentiments from a group of people who, with their bleary eyes, boar-tusk head-dresses and monkey-fur decorations, look like every missionary’s idea of the unapologetic heathen.
Tonight a huge thunderstorm breaks over Longwa. Torrential rain rakes the tin roof like machine-gun fire and a mighty rushing wind sets doors banging, dogs howling and curtains blowing. Good weather to lie in bed to.
Day Ninety Two : Longwa to Digboi
After the rains, the dirt road out of Longwa is heavy-going. We’re in reconditioned Second World War jeeps. Comfort is sacrificed for nimbleness and they’re alarming but agile on the slippery stuff. Our driver puts on a dusty cassette of Beatles hits. ‘Help!’ could have been written for this trip.
Shingwong’s daughter, Pang Nou, shares the car with me. She’s just completed a Master’s degree in English Literature at Delhi. Her theses were on Plato’s Concept of Love and the Book of Job. She tells me that, though in Delhi she felt her homeland seemed unbelievably far away, the Indian government is taking Nagaland very seriously. The roads are free, they pay no tax and the benign attitude to local culture is all part of the greater worry that Nagaland might fall into the clutches of the hated enemy on the other side of the border. Not Myanmar, but China.
After some 40 miles, the town of Mon appears like the new Jerusalem on a hill ahead of us, its Baptist church perhaps the largest and longest of the great white mini-cathedrals that rise above the palm and thatched terraces of the Naga Hills.
Our jeep, which has skated through the mud so athletically up to now, slithers to a halt at the last quagmire and we take a while to get started again. Our driver, chewing on the betel with grim determination, does his best to make up time, narrowly avoiding an ‘After Whiskey Driving Risky’ sign, but by the time we reach the church, the service we’ve come to film has long begun.
The Konyak Baptist Church is as big as an aircraft hangar, and every seat in the gallery and the body of the church is taken. Shing-wong estimates there are 2500 worshippers here. The church was built in 1952 and the services are invariably packed.
The preacher is a Konyak who has been working as a Baptist missionary in Bhutan for the last nine years. In that time he’s made fewer than 100 converts, which, I must say, makes me want to go to Bhutan right away. He speaks at great length on this and related matters, then everyone stands to sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ in Konyak, after which the congregation, largely passive up till now, is exhorted by the pastor to speak their minds and give thanks to the Lord.
A sedate, middle-aged lady next to me is transformed into a wailing ecstatic. As the prayers flow, her voice rises to a near scream. Stretching out her arm, she begins to rub her hand up and down my back.
‘Hallelujah, Praise the Lord!’ she screams.
The pressure from her hand increases and it moves up to my head, ruffling my hair one way and then the other.
‘Halle-LU-JAH,’ she crescendoes, leaping to her feet, arms flung wide above me, eyes tight shut.
‘PRAISE…THE…LORD!’
Day Ninety Three : Digboi, Assam
Another night in a government guesthouse, this time on the plains of Northeastern Assam, a fertile salient pushing up into the tail of the Himalaya. The tropical lushness of these gently rolling hills is the work of the heavy monsoon rains that are channelled up the Brahmaputra valley. Overflowing flower beds almost reach up to the door and the guesthouse boasts the only 18-hole golf course in Assam.
The money in Digboi comes from oil, discovered here in 1889 and commemorated at the Digboi Centenary Museum of Oil, at which it is obligatory to remove your shoes before entering.
Also commemorated a few miles northeast of Digboi is the Indian end of the wartime Burma Road. Having so recently stood at the Chinese end, in Kunming, I’m interested to see what’s left here.
There is very little. A strip of the old tarmac, which soon gets lost in the undergrowth, is all that remains of the road itself, and beside it is a patch of garden, complete with concrete furniture, that’s called the Stilwell Information Park. The main feature of this display is a 20-foot-high hoarding with a painted map of a section of the route, named after the American General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell, who pushed this supply line through.
On top of the map, an unequivocally modern message is delivered. ‘Rejuvenate our Life Line, Revitalize our Relationship, Reach out Beyond the Borders,’ it reads. A reminder that if you look at the geography of Assam you will see that its border with the rest of India is only a few miles wide, but its borders with China, Tibet, Burma, Bangladesh and Thailand run for 3700 miles (5900 km), and Beijing is as close to Assam as Delhi. But nothing much seems to be happening out to the east today. For now, it looks pretty much as if everything stops here.
An hour’s drive from the oil town of Digboi there is a coal mine. This isn’t itself surprising, given this fossil-rich little corner of India, but Tipong Mine is a singular place indeed. A red-brick Nottinghamshire pit village in the middle of a jungle.
It’s a still morning and shreds of mist have not yet dispersed. A smell of sulphur hangs in the air and the jungle gently steams. Miners are arriving on Hercules and Hero bicycles for the first shift of the day. I join a group of them on a narrow, cable bridge, which bounces like a trampoline as we cross. Below is a 40-foot drop into a sluggish river, transformed from a mountain stream into an industrial sump, stained with oil streaks and oxides.
The men have lamps and hard hats but the rest of their clothes and equipment are flimsy. Sandals, flip-flops, old gym shoes, vests and torn trousers are the order of the day. Before going underground they gather round a brazier made from pipes and old railway parts. There seems no sense of urgency.
A priest in dhoti and thick, knitted sweater moves among them, offering a plate of sweets and a prayer. He gives me a tika mark on my forehead. I want to tell him that the last one I had was put on by the King of Nepal, but he’d only think I was mad.
The protection of the gods is taken very seriously. Built above one of the mine entrances is a small, pink temple to the goddess Kali (alias Parvati, Sati, Uma and Durga), and as she is the consort of Siva the destroyer, she must be constantly propitiated. When the motley group of miners does eventually enter the mine shaft, I notice each one first touch the tunnel entrance, then his forehead and then his heart.
No sooner have they gone down than a greasy cable stiffens and begins to turn. Out of a second tunnel emerges a line of wagons filled with slack. As they reach the top of a low rise they’re grabbed and pushed on by a work gang largely composed of elderly women in grimy saris. These ladies roll the narrow, coffin-like wagons down a short slope and assemble them into a train. When enough are ready they are collected by a very old saddle-tank steam engine called ‘David’, built in Lancashire in 1864. Its boiler is now so caked and encrusted with deposits that it resembles a moving fossil.
Our host, Mr Das from Coal India Ltd, won’t allow us to film any of this until we have an armed police escort, and they haven’t turned up yet.