Ye Olde Lunglei

I recently spent two consecutive weekends in Lunglei. Both were unplanned. Which kind of takes me back because I once spent three years in Lunglei.

Not Lunglei town, per se. I was in Luangmual which was where my father was posted, in 2nd Bn MAP. Our family stationed in the compound. We went to school in Sacred Heart School in Venglai so that was a fuck-all of a commute. The officers’ kids all went there so they arranged for a beat-up old sky-blue Jeep to ferry us to and fro. The designated driver was Pa Zokhuma. His mother was Pi Tialdini and she was a proper Hlimsang and I admired her like no one else. I wanted to be her when I grew up. That and a DC, but that was more like an afterthought.

I learned a lot in SHS and one that has stuck with me till today is the poem Ozymandias by PB Shelley. Kids recited poetry at the School Assembly and that was supposed to teach us public speaking, and I think that was a really good exercise. But also, for some reason, Ozymandias got stuck in my head. The poem really resounded with me. Ozymandias was in the 9th or 10th Grade English Lit. class (or maybe it was called English-I? I don’t remember). I only went to SHS for 3rd to 5th Standard but I learned Ozymandias through this School Assembly. And I have loved it since. I can still recite it from memory even today at the drop of a hat.

I also learned to sketch basic human female figures in SHS. There was this kid in my class – Muanpuii. She was this skinny little girl with short hair that was sticking out and wouldn’t really behave. She was an artist. She’d tear out pages from her notebook and sketch hundreds of pictures of girls in various poses on them. Mostly Betty and Veronica-esque. I learned to sketch basic figures from imitating her. I never really developed further than what I learned from her. She had a nice little economic ring going on. The girls in our class would “buy” these sketches from her with more torn out empty pages from our own notebooks which gave her more material to produce more sketches and so on and so forth. 

Classroom entrepreneurship was all the rage. My own forte was writing little short stories in these torn out pages. The pages would be halved and then folded to quarter them. Using my dad’s staplers to clip them together, I’d create mini-books to come up with perhaps four or six pages long story-books. Girls would borrow them with their own torn out notebook pages. That gave me my own next raw material. My little sister was my best fan. She still remembers some of those stories. I don’t.

Lunglei remains unchanged in so many ways. I am hopelessly directionally challenged. But even I could still find my way around. Which means either that my Lunglei memories are super strong. Or that Lunglei hasn’t grown very much and the markers have remained more or less the same. I don’t know. 

I saw Uncle Shoppe where my mother bought us toys, either for birthdays or when we topped our classes. There was the stationery store where we got school supplies. The little shop that we bought Tinkle and Archies from was no longer there; the building itself was gone. The old video rental place was not there anymore either; I had not expected it to be there. VCR Days are long gone. The days when my dad would drive the family over from Luangmual to Ramthar and my uncle in Ramthar, as the Host, would borrow Tom & Jerry VCRs for us are just very old stories that sound nostalgic and out of place today.

Much like me. I feel old today. Ancient, even.

Cat People/Dog People

We have one dog, one cat. But a lot of people are so determined to segregate pet owners into Dog People and Cat People that it often does not register to them that we do have a dog while we have a cat. And neither of them are our firsts.

I might be wildly exaggerating but I think people who do this have a hard time navigating grey lines. They tend to see the world in black and whites. They also like to put people in boxes and generally believe that their impression of people is the truth; that people could have sides to them that they don’t show to everyone is beyond their ken. 

I do appreciate that there is a general divide between people who prefer one over the other. As a general rule of thumb, I believe people who like to call themselves “dog lovers” tend to be of the type I was talking about. They tend to want things to be a certain defined way. They have a harder time reading between lines. And they need to be needed.

People who like or tolerate cats tend to be much more empathetic. This is necessary because cats are very often unlikable. What is amusing and cute to a lot of cat lovers is extremely unwanted behaviour that some people would even call felony. Like cats stealing smoked meat from people’s homes. What do cats know of human criminal laws? They see a food they like that is unguarded; they are hungry; they take it. If you apply human laws on a very tiny, furry creature with a very flat face and highly expressive Manga eyes, it is hilarious. But very often, people who hate cats hate this. Honestly though, how small a human must you be to treat a dumb animal like your equal who must be answerable to you? Maybe one just as dumb? Because cats are dumb.

People who like cats tend to like other animals too. If you can like a cat, it is not hard to like every other animal out there. Cats are assholes. Cats look like they understand you but actively choose not to acquiesce to you. Cats will love you when they want something from you and act like they don’t know you if you met them outside your house. Cats will retaliate if you hurt them; and they have sharp claws and apex predator reflexes. Whatever intelligence cats have is purely predatorial – the curiosity, the problem-solving, the twisting and turning, the parkour expertise… they are ungovernable. 

Meanwhile, dogs can be tamed. Which is how a lot of people see the world – they like the animal that can be tamed, they hate the animal that is free; they like the entity that is dependent on them, they hate the entity that has very clear boundaries.

I’d say generally that dog lovers tend to identify themselves as "Dog Lovers" and cater specifically to that and make distinctions between them and Cat People. People who like cats don't usually call themselves Cat Lovers as such because very often, they like most other animals too and usually do have dogs as well. On this high generalization, I've deduced that, on the whole, Dog Lovers tend to be nicer but “cat people” tend to be kinder. Meaner though, perhaps. Very probably, by the by.

In my family, we’ve buried four dogs – three Bingos and one Noddy. We’ve also buried five cats – Tokio, Lumos Maxima (Momo), Nihawiparmawii (Nix), Rory Williams (Noni), and Chandler Muriel Bing (Pu Lulua). We have two living with us now – Simi and Snowy.

Simi is short for Simple, which is short for Simple Thinking, High Living because she’s a dumb little tuxedo cat who sometimes act like she is Princess Grace of Monaco. Her name on the Vet card is Lola Swift. Ridiculous, I know. Snowy the dog is an honorary cat because having been raised by Momo the cat, she sometimes thinks she is a cat. Dumb, I know.

They’re both dumb. But we love them both.

Kingmakers

My debut into MCS was unceremonious, to say the least. It was a baptism. Of fire or water or hailstones I don’t know but it was one nonetheless. I had no time to pretend to be shy or nice. It was October 2018, 6 years ago October 3rd. A day all Mean Girls know what date it is annually. Preparations for MLA Elections was underway. They said ‘oh good you’re here’ and gave me jobs. The first time I gave training to polling personnel, I had never even seen a polling station in my life, is how unprepared I was. And yet how professional I had to be. Nuff said.

It was all about long, sleepless nights when the Champhai election office buzzed with energy interspersed with long yawns, the smell of coffee from a Nescafé vending machine, loud arguments and/or laughter over the various interpretations of Handbooks we carried like they were holy. Very occasionally, a shout of “Pi Kawlte!” would sail through the air; she was usually the referee for any disagreements regarding election matters.

I like to complain. Which turned out to be an acceptable thing during elections because everyone complained all the time anyhow. There were complaints about materials that did not match the mark, materials that could not be sourced locally (and could we buy them from Myanmar? No?), materials that were not enough, materials that were just simply wrong, materials that were in surplus and materials that made a bunch of officers stand around a table and ask this important question: what is this? There were complaints over being requisitioned for election duty. There were complaints about health, weddings, deaths and the election dates that clashed with them. There were complaints over not being served food, being served bad food and also being served good food in small quantities. There were complaints about people who were too demanding and people who were too blasé. There were complaints about long hours, insufficient compensation, irregular file works and shortage of time, energy and resources. There were complaints about headaches, backaches, lack of sleep and an ever-growing flab around the gut from an unhealthy lifestyle.  

Election stories are gold. Some of them might be too colourful for polite society and decent dinners, perhaps, or maybe a touch too sensitive for public consumption. Which is a pity because they are the best ones. If you think about it, the very best stories really do begin with: “This one time, someone was so drunk…” In Mizo humour, you can also work with, “Tualte Vanglaiah chuan…” I bet the updated version for this in a 21st century Indian government servant’s life is, “This one time during Elections…” 

Anything works.

This one time during Elections, we added 10 to 283 and somehow got 296!

This one time during Elections, there was a ghost in our PS that kept calling out our names.

This one time during Elections, a sock and an empty beer can fell out of the gunny bag handed to me by a grinning PrO at the Reception Desk!

Ah. Good times.

It is an uncanny but infallible routine that every time you think you’ve mastered an art, the Election Commission of India would come up with an addition that will stump you. Something like playing a video game where every time you defeat a boss, a tougher boss shows up. Which makes you want to lowkey maim the wiseacre at your training hall who always says: wE diD iT aNotHer wAy laSt tiMe i wAs On eLecTion dUty. I don’t know about everyone else but it makes me want to count to ten but throw a punch at eight.

In the 2023 General Elections, I found myself drafted into the Postal Ballot Team in Aizawl. The first time the team met together, I was given this general warning: PB Work doesn’t stop until a new government is formed. That gave me pause because I had picnics scheduled into my month because I’d just learned swimming a couple of months before and I needed the practice. In case I drowned.

Our PB Headquarter was the general area around the Addl. DC’s chambers in Aizawl DC Office. It seemed to me like most of the time we were making Lists. Frequently, as we approach midnight or thereabouts, our PB Leaders would say things like: “Pi Es, List Making work is basically Christian work. You can only enter Heaven if you’re on the Nunna Bu List. And you can only vote by post if you’re on Our List”. The constant Nunna Bu equivalency to Electoral Roll still amuses me today.

There was no calendar in the ADC office. No wall clock. And just the one standard red-and-blue office ballpoint pen. A bit barebones, I said. Perfect place to handle postal ballots as it turned out, because what did time matter when you have ballot papers to issue, registers to fill up, envelopes to organize, endless papers to fold, and, most importantly, lists to make? Because Nunna Bu, if you remember. 

Once the work went into full swing, not only did we not know the hour, we didn’t know the date either. Time doesn’t exist in a Postal Ballot HQ. On October 31, I left my house at 10AM; I never returned that month (which is to say I returned home from office at 2AM on November 1; my driver had a good chuckle over that sleep-deprived muse). PB work also required space for many, many trunks and gunny bags so all that space became quite invaluable!

At college, my roommate and I would wait for English Hour on FM Rainbow at 1AM. We did this for no other reason than we did it. There was no rhyme to it, no reason. Perhaps we stumbled on it one night that we were awake and simply stuck to the schedule. Some nights we’d only be half-awake but we’d wait for 1AM for an hour of English pop music on our phone. This was a time just before Smartphones so perhaps there was some rhyme there, I no longer know. What I do know is that the time surrounding midnight is really dicey and your mind becomes hazy and conversations have a weirdness to it. But if you stick through it, around 1AM your mind is clear again; you can even dance if Back Street Boys plays on the radio. The haze settles around 3AM again, by the by; witching hour, indeed.

During election season in 2023, I noticed this once more. The musings around 12 midnight become slightly unreal. We would often sit around holding cups of red tea and marvel at the logistic humour ingrained in say, AVES. Some nights, someone would mumble something about how it didn’t matter if we did or did not do something because a lot of postal ballots end up dead anyway. Or a wise nod about how the grandma we just buried had availed of Home Voting system so there’s some success story there [her nail was painted indelible ink black in the coffin, ofc]. Or discussions over how we were going to get the policemen stationed outside Mizoram who wanted to vote get to vote just in case they died without voting. It was always something very final. The AVES team brought back quirky stories too. A few someones said they wouldn’t vote because they’ve prayed to God about it and there was no need to vote ‘as though I don’t believe in God’; perhaps SVEEP should do a sweep on the elderly population. Or someone had died before poll day; very morbid, AVES.

Another thing I found really interesting was how much people would shout at you when you handle manual registration for voting. My experience up to that point in this regard was Roll Revision exercises. I had braced myself for that exercise and was good by then. Postal Ballot registration was slightly different because they were already in the roll; a lot more temporary but a lot more urgent. I was told to just hear people out. Difficult exercise for my temperament. There was a seeming desperation to vote which felt like a wind of change of sorts; a political awakening, perhaps. After a bit, I began to think, though, that a lot of them were only ultimatums just to get out of poll duties. Even so, it was interesting to speculate how well the turnout would be. 2023 was a few units lower than 2018, as it happened.

The days before and during Elections, you meet all sorts of people. The range is amazing. Some you work with, some you check, some you play nice with. In the end, someone announces the result and the cloud descends and business resumes as usual, except everything has suddenly changed. The King is dead, long live the King? Sunshine and midnight rain.

Sometime before I joined the service, I had been asked: why would you want to join MCS – all you’ll do is make kings of men to rule over you and then deal with land revenue? I haven’t really dealt with land overmuch. I am Election Officer and Settlement Officer in Hnahthial so that’s going to be interesting but I'm still only a couple months in at the moment. I have however been engaged in electing a new government a few times since 2018. Kingmakers of a different order, I suppose. Perhaps in the bureaucratic end. I realise this is honest, solid work. There is satisfaction, albeit sometimes grim, in the way we handle our business. I am sure the Kingmakers of the political order have new business now too. We all live to fight another day.

I dream of writing an article that makes me sound like a Statesman. But you can only write about what you know. And what I know is what I experience and what I experience is somehow always a little unhinged. Like attracts like? So I end up writing about slightly crazy things that make people question either my sanity or my veracity. (Veracity: a nice, responsible sounding word, that I never use in normal days.) Perhaps someday.

It is what it is.

Forced Friendships

Tenzin once decided that Deepti should be our friend. To that end, she announced to us one night after dinner that we were all supposed to drop whatever we were doing and go to Deepti’s room to help her with her NSS decorations. We had no idea who Deepti was. Which was not entirely strange considering that Deepti was in Journo and the rest of us were in Sociology, English and History. Since we were not exactly the ECA kids, we barely ventured out of our immediate circles and didn’t know people from other departments very much. Our initial bond was North-east, college course and Harry Potter; outside of that, we made very less new friends.

On a tangent, Harry Potter was how I made friends with a good number of kids in college. I remember standing with the other freshers outside the LSR Audi for Orientation and discussing with Lima (who I knew from school) the new book which was about to come out. More people heard us talk and joined in and we just sort of bonded. Tenzin, included.

Anyhoo, returning to the main topic, Deepti was very surprised to see Tenzin at her door that night. Which was nothing compared to her surprise seeing myself, Mamu, Gunjan, Atula, Amebari and Mehak standing behind Tenzin. She didn’t know us. We didn’t know her. She and Tenzin barely knew each other from class. But Tenzin, ever the dazzling networker, shamelessly invited herself – and us – in and made herself at home. We helped Deepti make decorations for Diwali fest and we were fascinated by her wit and the sharpness of her brain! 

That was when we understood why Tenzin wanted her to be our friend. Deepti was brilliant. She talked in full sentences with proper grammar and every word was enunciated to their full effect. It was like talking to a BBC correspondent, which I believe she wanted to be when she got out of college. Or a war correspondent. Or something similarly grave but necessitating intelligence higher than the ordinary mortal would likely have.

Deepti never really became a close friend. She was a lone wolf. I suppose it also went with her whole aesthetics and her general ambition. But after that night, we would often find ourselves going to her for advice – from what newspaper to take to what internet dongle to purchase. And always we’d come back to our rooms, marvelling at the things she said and asking each other: what do you think Deepti meant when she said this? She knew some really big words but she used them so efficiently that they never seemed to be pretentious coming from her. She used all of them right.

On her part, Deepti always made time for us, even when we asked her the sort of questions that might appear to her like: what do you think one plus one equals to? She was always patient with us and would often repeat instructions. 

Deepti also agreed to tell her father to tell the then Prime Minister of Japan Shinzo Abe that a group of girls in LSR thought he was hot. I forget what her father did. But she mentioned to us once and whatever politics she was trying to explain to us got lost in the tidbit of information that was: Deepti’s father talks to Shinzo Abe! We bugged her till she promised to relay that information to her dad.

Deepti’s brand of humour did not often coincide with ours. I remember one time she and Tenzin were jaywalking and Tenzin joked that some policeman was going to come arrest them. Deepti looked at her and said, and I quote: Your understanding of the Indian legal system baffles me. Or the time Tenzin and she were on an auto and a beggar woman threatened them with the old “If you don’t give me money, your husband will die!” ultimatum. Deepti looked at her square in the eye and said: That’s his problem, not mine. I wonder what her future husband would think of that. I still chuckle over it.

Of all the things Tenzin forced on us – and she imposed a lot of things on us – Deepti’s friendship was among the best. I mean Tenzin was the woman who came back from some party one night, flung open the door and declared: We hate Shefali! Or some other such name. We agreed because we had no idea who Shefali was and it was not out of our way to hate this unknown chick who had wronged Tenzin.

If we were the HIMYM people, Tenzin would definitely be Barney Stinson. She was crazy and we’d just go along with her craziness. But sometimes she’d settle down for our mundane too. Like how we got her to eat meat purchased directly from a butcher. As a loose-practising Buddhist, she’d never really eaten meat from a source she could identify. She preferred to have her meat highly processed and coming from a freezer. She felt better about meat that way. It is interesting what we take away from each other as friends.

She was always a social butterfly and it was not exactly natural to be our friend. But she was always loyal and non-judgmental, even when nothing about our lives was remotely the same. Or even similar-esque. I liken us most to the grandparents in Willy Wonka, in our beds in the residence hall, eating momos in our PJs, and Tenzin as Charlie who would go visit the chocolate factory! We were there for her to come home to.

Tenzin is in Paris now. I have no idea where Deepti is. The rest of the gang is scattered too. College is now a distant memory, if fond. I believe I learned this from Tenzin best – that if I wanted someone to be my friend, I could just walk up to them, introduce myself and invite myself in their lives. I’ve done it too. And I have a sneaky suspicion I’m in the process again even as I type this.

Thanks, Tenzin.