The Possimpible

Barney Stinson talks a lot of shit but The Possimpible makes sense to me because I’ve actually had people ask me to look for a needle in a haystack.

Funnily enough, I’ve found the needles too. Twice. 

And who are these people? Why, my own parents! Thank you for asking.

One day my mother sat me down and told me that back in the day when Electric Veng Aizawl had been called Tuitu Veng, she had attended Primary School there. In that school, she had a friend Partei. Partei’s father was a policeman. The memory she has of her is of Partei telling her that her family eats “double roti”. Whatever that was. In any case, Partei’s family decided to move to Champhai and they relocated.

Enter 2017 and me packing to move to Champhai to be Treasury Officer there. My mother said: look for her, look for my old friend. I said yes. She nodded. I was completely being sarcastic but she took the yes as a yes. And so every once in a while, she’d ask me if I’ve managed to find Partei. I always said no. But she never gave up. And then one day (I want to say 2019 or thereabouts) I actually randomly found her! I was talking with the father of a friend and he said his wife’s name was Partei. I got excited and asked him if she’d ever spent her childhood in Aizawl. He said: no, but her cousin Partei did. So I told him the story and he said it was possible that Cousin Partei was also Friend Partei!

And she was.

I told my mother about it and she came to visit me. I’d talked to Pi Partei before and she dropped in. Her house was actually walking distance from my house! She came by and they took a picture together and we ate dinner at Nu Partei’s house (Nu Partei, not Pi Partei by now) and everything. The funny part was that I had already known Nu Partei because she has a school in Champhai that my friends’ kids attended and also because of her son who I’d known for long because he was part of NGOs and we often met at meetings at the office. Small world!

My father got very excited over this result. And so he set me a task of his own. There was a man in Lianpui called Sangthuama. He said: find him, I want to meet him. This was easier. I had a name and an address. It turned out he was a model citizen, which I learned after I talked to the VCP of Lianpui. I had no idea it would be the correct Sangthuama however because Lianpui could have multiple Sangthuamas and whatever my dad knew of him was from a man who was once a guest in our house who didn’t even speak Mizo and who told him the name back in 1999. This was 2023. He could have moved out. He could have died. He could refuse to meet us.

In fact, since the VCP had told him the DLAO Champhai and an ex-IGP wanted to talk to him, he was on his guards. Rightly so, I suppose. He was highly cagey when we first got to his home and we asked him if he was who he was. But it was a friendly visit. We had a good chat. And when we left, he and his wife gave us sticky rice and zawngtah from their garden. That was nice of them.

Impossible? No, more like possimpible.

Speaking of guests, the pair of them have decided that in my next posting in Hnahthial, they want me to find a dead man’s family. They had never asked me to look for anyone in Aibawk but I guess I was home a lot during my Aibawk posting so probably they didn’t think much of it. Anyway, this Hnahthial man had died in Delhi and the family had once been guests in our house the night he died. My parents don’t know his name. Or any of his family’s. All they know is he was from Hnahthial. And that his mother had said he liked the taste of river crabs. So yes. Quite a challenge once more but let’s call it one of The Possimpibles.

Wish me luck.

Funniest Heroine Story I Know

I remember one time Champhai police seized heroine. The driver of the vehicle ran away into the woods.

Now these woods are easy to get lost in. I remember one time a Minister convoy who shall remain nameless got lost in it too. I’d seen them off at 6 in the morning from the heart of Champhai. They had planned to breakfast in Khawzawl or even Saitual. At 7, the PS called me and said WTF we’re back in Champhai! I laughed in the phone because that was highly unexpected and the indignance in the voice was real. It turned out they’d taken a wrong turn, drove through a ‘non-existent’ unofficial road which had taken them straight back to Champhai from the other end of town.

So the heroine story. 

The following day after the police seized the drugs, this one couple was at their Garden and they heard some scuffle. They went to take a look and they saw two men fighting over a phone. 

One was the leader of the road construction labour team. He was holding said phone and the other unknown man was trying to wrest it off of him. And then the other labour guys saw their boss was in trouble so they all bandied together to come to his help, and piled up on top of the man. Once he was incapacitated, they got some rope and tied him up REAL NICE. And then they called the police. 

As you might have guessed, it turned out he was the heroine wallah driver. So the police took him away and booked him. It seems he'd gone off into the jungle but didn't know where to go. And he got hungry. And he saw the bossman on the phone and thought he was calling the police. Which he wasn’t, not then at least. 

So ya. I love this story. I just remembered it randomly today. Sometimes people make a nuisance of themselves and attack people for the guilt on their own heads and end up getting caught in their own web, is maybe the takeaway. And I think people who want to make money from other people’s misfortune will always get what’s coming to them. Karma is funny like that.

An Appreciation of Bamboo

There are no bamboos east of Keifang, I was told when I moved to Champhai back in 2017. I had no idea what they meant because I had never heard of such a thing as no bamboos in Mizoram. The idea did not compute.

It turned out to be largely true, though. How weird is that? Bamboos are so intrinsically a part of Mizo life I had just assumed it was everywhere. I even wrote a term paper on bamboo flowering in Uni because it was that unique to me that Mizoram could be bamboo-less.

But even bamboo-less Mizoram was not totally Zero Bamboo. Not all the bamboos flowered and died, even in 2007. Some variants remained and all the bamboos did not die of old age. The same with Champhai. We still had bamboo, just not a lot. And the forest green was largely because of trees, not bamboos. And when we picnicked by the river, foraging for firewood become a little bit difficult because you actually had to use wood. But we still ate bamboo shoots. And we still used bamboo for buildings. One man even used bamboo instead of iron rods for his concrete building and it became a hazard when the bamboo rotted. Long story.

Side note: do you know how I dont need to google the year bamboo flowered in Mizoram? Because there was a novelty song that came out that had this lyrics: "Sanghnih pasarih mautam Zosports," and it's stuck in my head. Not because of the term paper I wrote back in Uni.

When Cyclone Remal hit Chhimphei Range, I decided to trudge through three mudslides to get to Aibawk from Aizawl – one near Muallungthu and two between Tachhip and Aibawk. In the Muallungthu one, people had made their way on foot before so they had left halvened bamboos on the mud. Atop the mud, that is.

Now I like bamboos. I like their shape and their colour. I like the canopy they leave on the ground, especially on merry little rivers. I like bamboo cooking... and this is a three way street: use it to make fire, use it as a vessel, and cook the shoot! I like bamboos in a stew, with pork, in a salad, pickled, or fermented otherwise. I like bamboos.

Bamboo is awesome for its many many usages, primary of which, I now felt, in the Muallungthu slide, was the gentle springiness, enduring plasticity and amazing elasticity of bamboo that allowed it to bear the weight of full-grown people carrying considerable weight atop a river of mudslide. And just bounce back! In the Tachhip ones, we sometimes slid in about knee deep into mud which made it difficult to trudge across. People had left logs behind, sure, but those tended to roll over sometimes and often they become too heavy so they sink. Taking us with it. Not very fun. And energy depleting.

Always it is bamboo to the rescue for Mizoram. Eat the bamboo. Wear the bamboo. Live in the bamboo. Build with the bamboo. Save with the bamboo. Float on the bamboo. It’s all bamboo.

What an awesome grass, bamboo!

Imaginations. Or Not.

My parents sorely lack imagination. Their thoughts are centred on facts and their dreams are rooted in reality.

Funny they made me.

In one of his in-service trainings, my dad was asked to close his eyes and imagine a completely different life for himself. One of those irritating, time-consuming HR soft skills classes that are designed to throw you for a loop, sure, but he was at a loss. He did not know how to do it. So he closed his eyes and slept. He came back and said: we had a nap today. The story only came out when we pressed for more details because it seemed unlikely that a bunch of senior IPS officers would be gathered in a room mid-day and asked to take a nap.

My mother is no different. She hates people who play dead persons onscreen or onstage. Other than this aversion to playing dead people, she is a terror to watch movies with. She makes nasty side comments all throughout movies. God forbid if the actors cried. She gets really pissed when people act like they were sad when they were probably not. Or vice versa. Acting! she’d exclaim; all lies!

Last year, one quiet afternoon at home in Aizawl, I told them a story about stars and demons. They listened in captive silence for length. Then they asked me where this happened. I said I had not come up with the details concerning locations. They understood then that it was fiction that I had personally made up. They stared at me. I stared at them. We blinked once or twice. Wordlessly, they returned to their chores.

This is by no means an isolated event. One time, dad joined me for my morning walk along the North Khawbung road in Champhai. We reached a beautiful clearing from where we could see a jungle thicket. I remarked how very like a giant broccoli it looked. He stayed politely silent. He did not see it. Talk about failure to launch!

Or there was that time the pair of them saw an old, almost-dead jackfruit tree by the river Siang in Arunachal Pradesh. They made the driver stop the car. Together, they mused about how lonely the tree looked, how much joy it must surely have given so many people in its time, and now it was dilapidated and standing where only the sun would see it. They tried to weave poetic around it and compose a song. They failed. They just got back to the car and left.

I make a big deal out of this because the both of them are deeply religious and spiritual. Whatever difference between the two you want there to be. It is paradoxical to me that someone operating with that kind of faith system should lack imagination to this degree! Or maybe they just don’t want to indulge. Maybe the latter.

I think about myself in respect to them a lot. I live my life in my head and only return to reality when I must. Even so, even operating on such different systems, they’ve supported me swimming in fantasies and helped me build my library of fiction. Only last week they saw my moonwater and were baffled but they simply accepted it as a me thing. I think I still have a lot to learn from them.

Tourism Champhai

There’s no one selling cabbages on the roadsides, was my mother’s baffled comment after travelling the length of Thekte to Vaikhawtlang. Check the map of Champhai district and you’ll realize these are the southern and northern tips of the district. No roadside stalls anywhere on the roads in between villages, selling cabbages or not. Indicative that not many random travelers ply these roads, perhaps.

We found some cabbages loaded on a pick-up truck and bought a bunch of them. She’s been feeding it to my dad and I relentlessly whenever we eat at home – salads, boiled, bai, fried. She says she likes cabbages. We get it.

Spending time with my parents is sometimes a bit like being on a quiz show at the Rapid Fire round. Travelling with them in a closed metal container for hours on end, it was either discuss politics (because, election year, duh!), make a lot of jokes or answer a lot of questions. One topic of conversation (rapid fire) was regarding tourism.

Which is not a surprise because Champhai is loaded with tourism potential. You don’t have to be a genius to figure that out.

I’ve always thought the key to successful tourism in Champhai lies purely with private entrepreneurship. I doubt if tourism in Champhai needs government intervention. Strongly doubt. At least on the small-scale level.

All you really need is a driver and a vehicle and you’re good to go.

Champhai is home to many Mizo folklores. Count them – Lianchhiari Lunglen Tlang, Thasiama Se No Neihna, Lamsial Puk, Tan and Lurh Tlang (abode of Lasi, beautiful nymphs of legend), Kawtchhuah Ropui (actually many villages have impressive menhirs), Laituma Puk, Chawngchilhi Rul Ngaih, Lalruanga Lungkak, and so many others just off the top of my head. Feckin’ hell, we even have not one but two Fiara Tui(s). You can even stretch it further to the gateway to the Land of the Dead aka Rih Dil near neighbouring Rihkhawdar, Myanmar. There’s Vanapa Thlan, Mura Puk, the only two wineries in Mizoram, fascinating Indo-Myanmar border villages and a village with only three occupants. So many places to randomly visit.

If you make a tour package deal and ferry people around, making deals with hotels and/or lodges, I believe it will be decent business. If you can rattle off some tales to go with the places, that would make it special. As an additional bonus, tourists always bring in business for locals – even if they don’t buy trinkets, they still need to eat food and relieve themselves, or somewhere to spend the night. If you have trinkets to sell cheaply, that is decent money.

It is a shame, really. All these wasted potential. The road is good. The scenery is divine. The places to visit are Instagram worthy. Pity I’m not a local entrepreneur.