12.5.2025 Untitled

Isn’t it sad to grow up and realise 

the world was never as big 

as you thought it was?

And my! How even houses shrink 

from childhood memories, 

revisiting them again today; 

Everything tinier 

and less impressive 

from memories of yesteryears.

Nowhere to hide, 

no place to run away,

All your battles stretching out before you 

in a never-ending war.

Eternal Tuesdays 

stretching out to Thursdays,

trapped in an ever-lasting mundane.

Give me lazy days to watch the grass grow,

To make me see again

Just how big this world is.

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.

Japanese Cat Stories: An Appreciation

The Japanese tell the best, most convincing cat stories. I think it is in parts because of how much they seem to know cat behaviour from observation and obvious adoration. 

I also like how with Japanese stories, it’s never black and white. Not even black OR white. When they tell a story it is just... a story. You think people have agendas that are good or evil. But sometimes they’re just agendas. Like in real life too. It’s all about how hunger can look like evil from the wrong end of the fork. Sometimes people just are. And it’s just timing that reveals them to be good or bad in our eyes and in our lives. Barring psychopaths, perhaps.

Fiction usually makes sense. Fiction usually ties up loose ends. But Japanese fiction isn’t always, or even often, structured that way. They make sense in parts but then you move the story along and then you get to the end of it and you get asked what it was about and all you can say is: well, it’s about this person. If they ask, what about this person? Sometimes the most you can say is, well things happened to the person. It’s weird, you think to yourself, because at a point, their story had made so much sense to me but now I can’t really recall anything specific. 

Just like in real life.

Memories work that way often. At one point life made so much sense. But then time flows and life moves along. After you cross a certain amount of checkpoints, that clarity starts to blur. You start to wonder: what was that epiphany? Sometimes you can recall a faint trace of that dazzling, magnificent pellucidity. But it’s not the same. You are different now and your memory is all you have; if you’re lucky, you might turn into a story. But that really is about It.

The Japanese seem to understand how this works. Their stories often start not at the beginning but more like the middle. If a backstory is important, it is added later, almost as an afterthought. You are simply immersed in the story from the first scene. And the funny part is, the story never really moves very much. The climax is often less than orgasmic. But you’re left with how the story made you feel – loss, warmth, love, pain, whatever it was about. And the story often doesn’t even end. The Story-Teller just stops telling the story. 

Like a memory.

Perhaps that’s why they write such brilliant cat stories, after all. Cats have their own logic. They operate on their own schedules and their own business. The Japanese don’t fit cats to the stories. They just tell the story around the cat. So while Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman cat was amazing, it was very much an anthropomorphic cat, despite it never taking human shape. Madara/Nyanko Sensei from Natsume Yujinchou, the Mask Seller from A Whisker Away, all the cats from The Cat Returns, the black cat from Kafka By The Shore... very decidedly cats, even when some of them took on human forms at one point or the other.

The morals of a cat aren't built on the same standards as the human's. Which makes it amusing but also makes sense in a weird way.

So yes, the Japs tell the most brilliant cat stories. Although why is the fat male cat always a calico?

Photoromances: Kiss and Darling?

Luigi Alfieri was the handsomest of the lot, hands down. But the others were not half bad! I mean think of Marina Santi, Maurizio Vecchi, Gordon Gray, Andrea Wayne, Chris Olsen, Sonia de Gaudenz, Anna West, Alberto di Stefano, Bruno Minniti, Ombretta Piccioli, Ornella, Susie Sudlow, Dan Green, Richard Dennis…

It occurs to me as either unobservant or ignorant (I can only hope it was not bigoted of me, fingers crossed!) but I had once blindly assumed they were American. I don’t know how that happened because come on, read the names! Blatantly Italian, most of them! And their faces and features were deliciously Italian as well. Not to mention that the English was crap and cringe. Although I suppose I didn’t much give importance to the actual literature because at the time, I was reading a lot of graphic novels and comics and most of these are more concerned with colloquialism than grammar, more focused on vernacular and dialogue than in deliverance of great prose.

Plus, with Photoromance, it was mostly about how good they looked, no? On that score, they did deliver.

I still love big hairs on women mostly because of them. I mean come on, think Ornella! Or curls – think Anna West. Or sheer black stockings and slim cut jeans – think Ombretta Piccioli. Or well-placed jewelry – think Marina Santi. Or huge thick jackets with woolen collars on men – a lot of the men wore those. Maybe Italy is cold.

The language though, oh dear lord the language. So cringe as to actually make you squirm, but I plowed through them all. And today, it is a source of ready laughter to be found in memories for me and my sisters. Islands in the Sea of Love, Angel Without Wings, My Mirror is a Lonely Place – oh feck, those were bad. And the taglines – “A Haunted Love: his love saved her mind… and her life”, “Love Under Blue Skies: he couldn’t love her – but she could – and did – and how she did – love him”… I mean, that last one is a mouthful and a half!

It mattered not. Because they were beautiful people. Drop dead gorgeous, most of them. I first read them from my cousin-in-law U TPi’s collection in Kulikawn. After school was over in Mary Mount but St.Paul’s had not yet let their students out so we had to wait for my sister. That or wait anyway for my younger sister who often got detention.

I enjoyed them. And today, the stories and pictures remain gently buried in memories to be dug out at choice moments. While my no-longer-re-read private copies rest in a cubicle in my bookshelf in my little Bookarium, only a few steps away from my bed. 

Memories of a 90s Childhood

In the mid 90s, I was a young kid growing up in a remote police battalion area. School was 30-minutes-on-an-old-blue-jeep-ride-with-no-traffic-anywhere away. Church was a Sunday only activity. TV was only enjoyable for two hours in the evening when Star Plus rolled out kid-friendly shows, your Disney cartoons or sitcoms like Small Wonder, The Wonder Years, and Doogie Howser M.D. I forget what channel played Timeless Tales on Sundays. It was a world in a bubble, in a time before the internet. There was nothing to do on holidays.

Okay I lie. There were a lot of things to do. We climbed hills and giant water towers. We played house atop a giant replica of a table and chair set. We played The Future on a giant broken weighing machine. We swung around on giant swings. (Okay why did we have so many sets of giant things? Hmm.) We biked around the battalion compound with nothing on us but BB guns, pocket knives, water bottles and, if we were lucky, candies. Sometimes people fed us DIY treats in the form of roselle flowers and sugar in little bamboo containers; that was good then and they remain good memories now. Sometimes we had money for Ruffles chips; these would be Ruffles Lays and then simply Lays later. We ran around playing hide and seek with grasshoppers and the family dog. We messed up our stomachs eating stolen fruits aka unripe figs and passion fruits that grown-ups specifically told us to wait for till they properly ripened . On good days, we cooked random food on empty cans of tinned fish and enjoyed half-cooked vegetables out in the sun.

When there was electricity, we listened to and bloody memorized few audio tapes – Preeti Sagar’s Nursery Rhymes, and choice Mizo audio dramas: Hamlet, Genevieve (which was pronounced Jen-eh-veev by the team; who cared about French names?!), Teantisnery and about four comedy skits by the Mizo comic Thangkura drama party. If by good fortune we had broken video or audio cassette tapes in the house, we unwound and threaded the ribbons all over trees just to get that ghostly melody as the strung magnetic tapes hummed in the wind.

It was on New Year’s Day that the little town bustled and came alive. The air still bristled with Christmas cheer and the festivities really began in full swing, Christmas being largely a Christian affair that non-Christians didn’t fully engage in. (Plus there’s a lot of church during Christmas; not a lot of fun time.) Large, colourful shamianas get set up on the parade ground. A host of carnival activities begin taking shape – cotton candy parlours, tombola tables for grown-ups, a range of games and activities for kids, cheap toys to be won and given away.

The evening prior, we would have all met and waved Old Man Of The Old Year away, hoping he takes with him all our old year issues so we can make a fresh start tomorrow, hence the good feeling on New Year’s Day. [Side note: I say Old Man Of The Old Year in the hopes of making it sound cute but really we just called him Kumhlui i.e. Old Year, and he was a man dressed in dirty rags and we all heaved abuses at him and cheered for him to go away already. No one wanted to play him in later years, saying it was a cursed role. I wonder why.] Father Christmas, however, had apparently hung around for this fete and he came with a sack of little toys wrapped up in shining paper which he distributed to people; sometimes, he threw candy up in the air and we all scrambled for them. In the evening, we feasted communally in traditional Mizo style on large banana leaves.

My family moved around a lot, following dad as he got transferred. But childhood for me will always be cocooned in that little faraway, forgotten era in a tiny campus with airs of either a large village or a small town. Luangmual, Lunglei is no longer like this. I am told it is modern and technological and stuff now. A lot of the places I knew then have been altered. I don’t want to go back. But three years. Three years we were in that place. Considering I never really grew up even with all the years I have accumulated since, it is amazing how three years stretched out and defined a whole childhood for me!

All of this, by the way, being my very roundabout way of saying I am feeling rather nostalgic today.