Ing-Lees

In Mizoram, as is in India, as is in most post-colonial countries, English is a measure of a certain echelon of people. Class, they say. Very often, it is a measure of success and intelligence, however misguided. And so we continue to judge people by the way they speak a foreign language.

It is what it is.

As it stands now, whether or not it is good or bad, it is the language I was educated in. And the language I read the fastest in. It is the language I use for numbers. It is the language I express myself with. It is also the language I watch TV.

I am not alone.

I do not know how good or bad I am in it. What I do know is that I am not that much better expressing myself in my own mother tongue. Not because I don’t know Mizo but more because I am not often the most loquacious.

Loquacious. What a pretty word. All Q words are pretty, I think.

As far as accents go, I think my English is accented by TV, Kerala nuns and North Indians. It depends where I've learnt of specific words and phrases and the way I've mimicked them. Sometimes I do try to enunciate but when I do, it sounds a little weird and forced. And if I repeat myself time and again, words start to sound strange. I mean... say food. Say food out loud. Say food again. Say food ten more times. Just sounds weirder and weirder. Or any word. All words sound strange if you repeat them enough times.

Even a word as pretty as picturesque. Why are all -esque words so pretty? I don't know. Maybe because they have Q in them.

When English isn't your first language, the languages you know bleed into it. English is very accommodating. So all these words start to blend into a strange and exciting new accent.

Like loquacious. I first heard of the word as spoken by Emma Watson in an interview and I loved the sound of it. In my head, loquacious is spoken in a British accent because that's where I heard it first. If I use it in a sentence, I might come across as trying to speak in a British accent. Truth is, I just learnt of it one way and that's how it's stuck in my head. Of course the rest of the sentence would be in Mizo accent so the difference might be jarring.

I think I strive for a neutral accent. Like the kind spoken by the old man who had a bookstore in Connaught Place in Delhi, whose shop we often visited as college girls because we had a crush on him and his neutral English.

And after we visited his shop, we’d go across the street and buy McVitie’s digestive biscuits. It was the only place we knew at the time that sold the snack. And my friend loved it. I forgot what I was talking about.

Of Society, Gods and A**holes

Society is a weird god. Like a really weird fecked up god. Like our own cells level god of functionality and marching to its own rhythm. See something you don’t like? Kill it. But it’s part of the body! Don’t care; don’t like; kill. Conversely, see something you like? Grow it! But it’s going to kill us! Don’t care; me likey; grow it.

God – with a small g, I guess – rewards and punishes. Society really is not that far different. Setting the spiritual aspects of religion aside, as we do when we study religion in Sociology, society is pretty much rudimentary religion. It is birthed from the collective of humans banding together but once born, it takes on a life of its own and becomes, in the words of Emilé Durkheim, greater than the sum of its parts.

You never feel the full force of society as when you go against it. I would not recommend. Especially in a society as rooted in the community as the Mizo society, you never want to stand out. You want to blend in, live in peace and do your bit.

Society does not seem to ask for very much. Say hello to your new neighbours with a gift if you can, or offer to help out. Drop your life and go to comfort grieving families. Throw a feast when you come into good fortune. Maybe, for example. In return it does a lot for you. It would lend unpaid helping hands when you need, celebrate with you when the going is good...

It also acts as a gatekeeper. This is probably the area where we have the most rules. It probably started out as a means of keeping the community safe but again, rules take on a life of their own. In time, societal rules become all about In-Group versus Out-Group. You have to be like the people in your group. You cannot stand out. You cannot.

What can society do to you? Realistically? You are not entirely sure but you never want to find out. Ostracism, I suppose. That is not a sanction you want imposed on you, believe you me.

Chhura in our folklore went to Mawngping Khua. I often use the phrase Khaw Mawngping because there are multiple villages in Champhai where the road ends (usually in the village fields). I never really gave it much thought but on my walk this morning I thought about how amusing the phrase was – Khaw Mawngping: Village With A Closed A**hole? Not the same as the one in Chhura’s travel diaries; Mawngping Khua: Village of Closed A**holes? I don’t know. Literal translations are hard for me. TikTok and internet memes say at one point, we were only a**holes and our whole bodies develop from there. They slyly suggest some people never grow out of this beginning phase. And they are the ones who gatekeep the most.

You can’t do this. You must do that. Why? It’s the way it’s always been done. Scary words. No reason. No logic. Just “the way it has always been done”. Surely that’s how fundamentalism is born.

Take language, for instance. Speak Mizo! You use too much English! Stop acting hoity-toity and speak proper Mizo, and speak it the way I know it. You’re not better than me just because you speak more languages than I do. Mizo must remain pure. Don’t pollute it with English/Hindi/Korean! I mean holy shit, not even Shakespeare’s English has survived unblemished! Language must grow. It must evolve if it is to survive. I’m sorry but unless it is organic, you can’t impose words on people and expect them to willy-nilly use it. And unless Mizo organically comes up with words for say Science or Technology, to name just two words, Mizo must adapt and adopt other languages and fit it in our mould. Damn, we don’t even have the group word for ‘colour’, do we? I’m pretty sure “rawng” is Mizo-ised Bengali for colour. This is the way Mizo will survive and thrive, not by gatekeeping it via fundamentalism. Change is the only constant.

True you can’t take a hot poking iron and start poking holes in people’s bodies hoping it will heal and become functioning a**holes. As Chhura did to the people with no a**holes. People will die. If change is not gradual, it leaves wide cultural gaps in its wake. Perhaps that’s how we have so many junkies and undesirable diseases everywhere civilisation reaches. Of course, the best laid plans of men and mice and all that so culture gaps are something of a given wherever societal change occurs.

Plus, if you do successfully operate a**holes into people, don’t be surprised if shit comes out it because that’s what a**holes are for. That’s how regular people say they hate feminism because simply put, feminism is just a belief that women are people too and they deserve to have rights as human beings, and not be limited simply because of their body parts. But feminism is a modern concept. When you posit it in a society that has operated in “the way it has always done”, of course this new thing is challenged and spat upon and people don’t want to be associated with it. Remember the man who was nailed to a cross because he challenged the status quo?

You can’t have the good without the bad. It is a world of the binary, no?

Society really is a fecked up god.

Holy Humorists

I should probably say Jesus but if asked about my favourite character in the Bible, I’d probably say Jonah or Elijah. Jonah, most likely.

He’s just funny.

Consider this. You are a prophet. One day you receive this word to go tell some people that they were going to burn. You don’t want to do the job but you’re kind of married to it. So you try to do the “follow the spirit but break the letter” kind of deal and you get up and set out, seemingly obediently. But you shift routes because you figure God thinks you’re on the mission; so you’ll do some mission… just not that one.

But your employer is all-knowing. So God creates an obstacle so you have no choice but to do the OG mission. Resigned, you say fine, I’ll go do it. And you finish the mission.

Suddenly, you feel really important and great that you have done what God asked you to do, the fact that you’ve actively strayed from the mission in the first instance completely slipping your mind by now. So you get up on a hill and set yourself down where you could best view the city burn.

Meanwhile, the people you’ve just condemned decide to sincerely repent so God forgives them. And then you get really angry about it because you’ve missed a great show that God had, in your reckoning, promised you.

I don’t know – Jonah is amusing and at the same time, not too amusing because in his life, I see a pattern I am all too familiar with. My own, if I was being too subtle.

As for Elijah, he is just the stuff that heroes are made of, all that dry humour and everything. Probably Marvel.

A major drama queen, I like that he gets hangry too. At one point, he threw a tantrum at God asking God to just off him and God had to tell him to just go take a nap and eat something. Which he did and he felt tons better.

Elijah has one of the strongest personalities in the Bible. He is a bit violent, yes, but he does it with flair. His introduction is abrupt and his departure is enigmatic. He is sarcastic and snarky, but also his faith is unshakeable.

Elbert Hubbard, I heard, had said that it is counter-productive to take life too seriously because you’re never going to get out of it alive. Even when things get very serious – like Jonah’s doomsday message or Elijah’s constant war with other gods – there is a way to consider situations without losing your head over it. I am hopeful to navigate through this life even just okay.

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.

Love Languages

Nutrichoice is my dad’s teatime snack of choice. Anyone who has ever visited him in his office during his service can attest to this. He’ll serve you red tea and Nutrichoice, even if he shouts at you a little bit. Or (full disclosure) a lot. Nutrichoice should consider him as an ad actor. They wouldn’t need to pay him cash; just a regular and constant supply of their biscuits. Which he shall consume with delight and force feed to anyone who visits him.

And I do mean force feed quite literally.

When we were growing up, we were not allowed to fast. Even for prayer. We would have been problematic Muslims, for sure, had we been of the faith. As it was, even for Christians, not even for Lent, not even for anything else. No fasting.

Because my parents’ love language is food.

A lot of people don’t eat when they’re sick. It’s just how sickness works sometimes. But when you show your love for people through the act of feeding them, this becomes frustrating at a whole other level. When you are sick in my household and your appetite is depleted, my parents will fuss over you in ever more increasingly desperate attempts to feed you the more you resist.

It’s also what we learned, although we are nowhere near as bad as they are. In my family, you just buy food to show people you cared. That’s where all my pocket money went when I was still getting pocket money from them. They’d ask me constantly if I were eating well. I always said I was. And I really was. All my pocket money when I was in Delhi went in chicken momos, auto fares and paperback novels.

It is April 10 in Champhai today. My parents had visited me and been with me from March 29 through April 8. In all that time, my house was overflowing with so many foods no three people could reasonably consume. As they were leaving, my mother went with me through the food she’d left behind for me – some food I always consider very adult choices: a pot full of bawngsa ruhkawl chhum, some thingthupui and aidu, hmarcha and a few other food that are staples – cabbages, brinjals, tomatoes, garlic, onions, tons of eggs, bekang um, sangha te, bananas, apples, passion fruits, etc. And dad had peeled off a half kilo of ginger and left it in the fridge. I mean – wut? Oh, and two litres of milk that I specifically told them I don’t consume because I drink my coffee black. All these after I told them not to leave smoked beef and rice behind because I’d eat roti and eggs. I’m still eating through the food they left. I honestly don’t know if I can finish them all. I have given up on a lot of the bananas and they’re sitting in a jar outside, fermenting. I’ll drink them later.

Once they left, I found ten packets of Nutrichoice biscuits in my tuck box.

I understand and I love them for it. But I do know that if I ever give them grandchildren, those kids are going to be fat.

On Kindness

Esau and Jacob were twins and yet one was loved and the other, meh. When not even twins in a biblical patriarch’s household can attest to having the same parents and upbringing growing up, I believe it is safe to assert that people live different lives than us. They have different experiences and we can’t possibly claim to fully understand all that they think or do. It is not an understatement to say you never know what someone is going through. So we should maybe ease up on the judging.

Easier said than done, though.

One time my cousin asked me to help him solve a Maths problem. This was lower level Maths so I helped him. I explained the steps and he kept understanding it, so I exclaimed: You already know it, why did you ask me?! My sister smacked me on the metaphorical head and snapped: You explained it to him and that’s how he understood it; he didn’t come to you having already understood it! I laughed because I felt stupid; once she said it out loud, it made sense.

It was basically a case of having all the numbers but not knowing how to add them up. A lesson I am still learning today, by the way. Sometimes you know all the variants to a situation and yet you just never put them together until it is too late. Or until God intervenes and pulls you out in a lowkey dramatic cowboy swerve. That’s when you think: hey, prayer works!

Another story for another time.

I understand how much my position of privilege has defined me, but I do not want to be limited by it. I want to be more, never less. I want to be kinder, nicer, more empathetic and wiser – a list of challenges that always feel Sisyphean because I seem to be very bad at it.

Sometimes I don’t know if I even try.

I think what I want as my default is to remember that people are different from me. They did not have parents, for example, who did not seem to think that learning to be independent was gendered as many parents seem to think. Yes, I missed out on many things many young ladies learnt from their homes but they also missed out on what I had. Who is to say who got it better or worse? Not me, for sure.

I want to remember that I cannot judge people from my own life experience. Of course, I shall judge them mercilessly and sometimes callously with my best friends but that should not bleed into Life Outside Of Idle Gossip. Very hard to remember to do, but this much I am trying.

I sign off this time with these words from Doctor Who: without hope, without witness, without reward, be kind.

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.