Now That The Dead Are Gone: Mizoram

I scored 92/100 in Lushai in ICSE 10th Standard Boards. For someone who routinely scored 63/100 in MBSE Mizo, and that too under proper tutelage, that was something to brag about. To make it clear, I had no Mizo teachers in Roorkee. The school administration gave me the reading list for Lushai Paper-I and Paper-II. My mother sent me Pipu Len Lai, among others, through the Indian Post and I read this tiny cyclostyle book alone and gave the exam thus. I’m telling you, I am proud of that score.

Pipu Len Lai (appearing in the syllabus as Pipu Lengai, by the way) taught me about Mim Kut, and the path the dead take on their journey onwards. In later years, I would learn more nuances. But much of what I remember about how the Mizo think of the dead are from that book. And where my memory is faulty now, I can’t help it. I think about the Mizo dead, I think about Pipu Len Lai.

When you die, as a Mizo I suppose, maybe pagan Mizo, you go to either one of two places – Mitthi Khua or Pialral. Your soul leaves your body out of the top of your head (your ludip), stretches and straightens itself up I guess on the bedpost (your tungchaw), and then perform some acrobatic exercise along the cross-beam (your khanchhuk), passing over the wall plate (your liang), and then leave your house through the thatch roofs (your ditip). I think maybe the dead are not supposed to set foot in the house again. Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never been dead before.

Your soul knows instinctively that it has to go to Rih Dil. Afterlife bureaucratic nerve centre, perhaps. Hopefully it can tell directions because you can’t communicate with anyone anymore to ask which way to go. Let’s assume it does. So it travels eastward and reaches Rih Dil. Interestingly Rih Dil exists in earthbound geography so perhaps Afterlife Admin Centre is in another realm but in the same general location. Let’s assume it is. There’s something called Mitthi Kawtkai, something like an Entry Gate for the dead, some stone with an overhang that the souls step on and it makes a bopping sound or something. Very haunting-like. I think of it as an announcement system. When I was posted in Champhai, they told me someone had broken up and taken the actual stone (the Lung Rah Buk) to the Aizawl museum. Hopefully this does not affect dead traffic if it is indeed an announcement of arrival of a newly dead soul. Maybe this announcement opens up the portal into the Other World because herein we enter mythical geography.

Now that the soul has done the necessary paperwork and the shock of being dead is now processed, it travels on. But it starts thinking about the Life it left behind. Afterlife diaspora, you could say. I bet nobody is more Alive than the freshly dead. In due course it reaches Hringlang Tlang, some hill from where you have a good view of the Land of the Living. There your soul sees a beautiful flower, the legendary Hawilopar, and it has a strong urge to pluck it and wear it on the hair or the ear somewhere. Once it wears the flower though, the view means nothing to your soul anymore. Then it continues on and sees a little stream of sparkling water, I imagine, the famed Lungloh Tui. The water is very tempting so of course you drink it and once it touches your lips, you not only not care about the Living anymore, but you forget them altogether. Anesthesia and Medicine, I’d say.

Then it reaches a junction. One road is to Mitthi Khua – the Land of the Dead, which is pretty much the same as the Living one, except fishes in the Mitthi Khua are dry leaves in the living world, something of that equation, makes no sense, supported by no logic. The other road leads to Pialral – paradise, where you can rest. To get to Pialral, you need to have been rich in your life. Either that or you need to have killed a shit ton of animals because the Guardian of Pialral, this dude named Pawla, is apparently a Loki-like demigod who delights in torturing souls just for his amusement. But he lets the Thangchhuah people in. Those would be the elites, the rich who’d thrown grand feasts in their lifetime. Or if you as a Great Hunter (Pasaltha) has killed your necessary quota, those dead animals escort your soul towards Pialral and Pawla steps aside to let your soul pass on. Everyone else he shoots with a pellet bow (Sairawkherh) with pellets the size of hen’s eggs and it takes a long time for the maimed soul to heal to even make the journey towards Mitthi Khua. Ass.

If only all you need to do to get to heaven in Christian Afterlife is to throw a feast, too. No? But we have St Peter, and not Pawla, guarding the Pearly Gates. And a book of accounting to deal with. Christian Heaven has a lot of paperwork. Bureaucracy survives. Did we trade up? 

Apparently your soul hangs around your house for forty days after you die. So some people set out plates for their dead relative. I think that is creepy. I think there is also a theory where souls hang around until Mim Kut season – your August and September – and then they leave. Maybe the journey to the Afterlife is not taken alone. I don’t know how to feel about that. The company would be nice but complete strangers during such a momentous event? I don’t know.

I think about the dead hanging back sometimes because twice in my life – once in Aibawk, and once in Hnahthial – when two persons I know died, there were firm knocks on my door. One time I was roused from deep sleep by the knocking, and I was sleeping inside my locked bedroom some few feet away from the main door. The other time, we were watching TV and my dog barked in warning/welcome and I flipped the curtains open but no one was there. Creepy. If you die, please don’t visit me.

I think about all these today because for October 1st, it is a gloomy day. I needed headlights to make it through the Durtlang fog at 8:30 in the morning. The rain was beating down. It took me an hour to make a 7 kilometre journey to my office. August and September can be gloomy all they like. They are Thla Serh, unquiet months when the dead hang around. But after September moon, they should have left. But what do I know?

Yep.

Of course, I jest on the first para. ICSE Lushai was ridiculously easy. It had nothing on the escape room of an evaluation as in MBSE Mizo. Funny because otherwise ICSE was tough; when I switched to CBSE in eleventh grade, I never needed to study very much till 12th grade Geography because we’d covered most of that syllabus in 10th grade. Anyhoo. 

I do remember in the exam hall, (and I hope the statute of limitations has expired on this little ethical conundrum, if any), the invigilator, this small Anglo-Indian gentleman, with a fine ass mustache and impeccable English formals, glanced at my paper (it must have been Paper-II: Grammar), saw all the English words in it, because even then I was writing in Minglish, bent and said: “If you translated all those English words to Lushai, you’d get more marks.” I did a double-take. This was marvelous tip, especially for someone like me who venerated teachers and their words. I changed every single English word to Mizo; my “telephone” became “biakhlatna”. Literally none plus none per cent of the population uses “biakhlatna” in vernacular. But it was there in my paper. 

Nine-two, babes. That was cool.

Problems

I think about it often and I’ve come to believe that if you want to rule over a people, you have to create a problem first, a solution to which only you can offer, and then offer it to them at a price.

It works like a charm, albeit you need to be a little charming to pull it off.

If you’re in government service in Mizoram working in rural areas or really anywhere outside of Aizawl town, I feel like at least one time this thought would have crossed your mind: that we should have less villages than what we have now.

It’s not a feasible solution unless you want a revolution on your hands. People are attached to land in a way that they aren’t to anything else. We are very concerned about where we get buried, sometimes even more so than where we live. Recalling a nice philosophical tangent of heaven here and now versus heaven in the afterlife, but that’s a topic for another day.

846 villages spread across 11 districts, where some villages only have 20 households. Twenty! It would be a different story if they were big producers of some item and they don’t really need the government. Like Liechtenstein which is tiny, land-locked and didn’t even have its own Post Office till 2000 and even now only has one prison, but is also the world’s leading producer of dental products. If Liechtenstein wants to have multiple tiny villages with tiny population, they can afford to!

But not Mizoram, not today.

See there’re so many problems today that could completely have been non-problems. If we had lesser villages but concentrated population in bigger geographical areas, a lot of the problems we have now would automatically be fixed and a number of systems would fall in place. 

Take education, for example. India cares for its citizens, especially kids. So we need to have primary schools accessible for children within a 1 km radius. When the population is spread so thinly, but you still need these schools, and yet you can’t increase fund flow, it follows that the schools that do exist are under-staffed, under-funded and under-developed. It is a zero sum game. It can’t work another way.

Following from this, even the high literacy rate we have in Mizoram does not seem to translate into everyday empowerment. We still allow ourselves to be ripped off by every smooth-talking salesman that crosses our paths. Sometimes in my most cynical moments, I believe that the only reason we have such high literacy rate is because we are Christians and we need to read the Bible and the hymnals. We don’t seem to use the skill for much else. 

We don’t even use education to think to put things in writing to secure our stance. Or to ensure that opposing parties remain trustworthy. Even in finance, the low level of financial literacy as operates in the state is something that will ensure that your flabber is properly gasted.

We don’t like to exercise our mental faculties and instead choose to wallow in poverty of the mind. Even our theology is centred in the pious suffering and pain of Good Friday and not even nearly enough in the buoyant joy of Easter. Because while Good Friday is passive acceptance of a sacrifice someone made for us, Easter demands that we live and to live means we engage with the world we live in, which also essentially brings with it problem-solving. We would always choose to dream of Pialral or Vanram where problems are absent rather than play an active part in the Here-and-Now where we set about finding solutions to the problems we have.

I suppose the crux of this blog is an epiphany that we are content to be passive in our approach to life. We will take what comes, complain if things get rough, rough it if we must, but to actively engage in a solution-finding mission for its own sake isn’t innately in us. If we have always been this way or whether someone realised this about us and employed it as a means to keep us under all this time, and everyone else also just maintained the status quo, I don’t know.

But I think we willingly keep paying the price to keep us chained.