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.

Spooky

White people have their October. Us we got August and September – spooky months. Now the calendar reads Thlazing and Mim Kut Thla, but when I was growing up, August and September were taught to us as Thitin Thla and Mim Kut Thla. I don’t know what Thlazing means but the word sounds spooky still.

As for Thi Tin Thla, it just means the month when the Dead departs our world. I’ve always thought it was spooky. Apparently there is this whole ritualistic journey the dead follows before they leave the land of the living. In fact, there’s a whole ritual also of climbing all over the furniture before they leave the house. If the Old Mizo religion is right, I am so going to be lost when I die. I am endlessly directionally-challenged.

In fact I was griping about this the other day. My mother who should know by now that I can get lost on my way home from work still insists on giving me directions in terms of cardinal points. Go west, turn east, she’ll say. What do I know of these? Not even my moral compass point due North. I can make sense of Left and Right, after consulting my Internal GPS for about 5 seconds. I have no head for directions. I am hopeless. If my departed spirit has to do the ritualistic climbing over furniture and heading for Rih Dil, I am so going to be a Lost Soul.

Which is OK. I have people I’d like to haunt.

My parents did not tell us about Old Mizo beliefs very much. They fed us on Christianity. Anything I’ve learned about other religions have been on my own or because of Sociology. Which is good because as a kid who was terrified yet curious about anything paranormal, with an overactive imagination, I’d never have slept for two continuous months in a year. Months when spirits are active? Months when the spirits depart? Months that are consecrated to spirits? Ya, no, thanks.

Unexpectedly, after having spent a lot of years in North India, I’ve become very blasé about spirts and the paranormal. The interest remains, though. Firmly so, I might add. I still devour any literature and art on the mythological and paranormal. But it’s now nothing more than a curiosity. I am far too scared of human beings at this point to be scared of ghosts overmuch. Which is not to say I’d like to meet a spirit. I’ll go to my grave happy never having met or sensed one in any way whatsoever. But there simply are too many concrete real-life people to fear without adding unseen beings to the list.

There’s just three more points I’d like to meet before I sign off.

One, Swifties have August but thankfully, I was not in a frame of mind this August to feel the song.

Two, the Idiot Nation has When September Ends and while it is a beautiful song, I hope to not need to feel this song either this September.

Three, as long as we do the Memory Day thing for dead relatives on 31st December which does not really have a bearing on Christianity, I’d like it very much if we used August/September for this instead. Like how Mexican Christians have co-opted the Day of the Dead in Catholicism which has nothing to do with Christianity at all but everything to do with their heritage and culture. There’s so much going on at the end of the year with Christmas services and this Commemoration service and New Year’s services, then after a few months Good Friday and Easter services. And then silence. We just wait for Christmas again. It might be nice to embroider our culture into our new religion and have a nice Commemoration Service in the months that are sacred to Mizo anyway, no matter how Christian we become. 

Thla Serh, after all. Spooky.