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At 5am, as it’s almost light, our bus gets to the border checkpost. The police come on board. We’re in front and I know I don’t have a chance of them not noticing me. A cop with a huge moustache, initially threatening, asks where I’m from. I tell him. He breaks out into a grin, shakes my hand and says, in what sounds like a bad American accent, ‘welcome to Nagaland!’
Once in Nagaland, it no longer feels like India. Nagaland has its own history and culture, a separate territory on the edge of India, geographically in, culturally out. Politically it’s contested – with separatist movements fighting for decades for an independent Naga state. While today it is peaceful, albeit with well-armed military forces stationed at every turn, it hasn’t always been so, and this is one reason why its not open-season for tourists, why foreigners like me have to play by different rules to elsewhere in India.
We have to leave the bus and end up sitting at the checkpost for over two hours, cursing everybody who said not to worry, and we call Ela and Mrs Humtsoe, the women we’re meeting in Nagaland, waiting for salvation. The cops are all friendly, offer us tea and whatever, but still.
Ela arrives and persuades them to let me through and allow me to stay at a hotel in Dimapur, where I promise not to step outside until I can get my papers. While they’re ironing out the details, the moustachioed character buys me some Naga cucumbers as a gift.
It seems phone lines in Nagaland are down most of the time, which makes it hard to get the fax I need. I finally do get it in the afternoon. The saga is not over, though, because although I now finally have the paper, the 10-day permit, that I'd worked so hard to obtain, expires that very day. I can’t leave for Kohima, our next destination, without an extension. Mrs. Humtsoe makes some more calls and first thing next morning a fax arrives at the hotel with the extended PAP, for five more days.
At last, I 'm in - the end of such a struggle to get to a place, you’d swear you’re trying for North Korea or the moon. Nagaland is a restricted area for foreigners, which means you need to get a protected area permit (PAP). Even Indian citizens need an ILP (in-land permit).
Back in Delhi I'd gone through numerous bureaucratic dead-ends to get what I needed. At one stage, a guy at Nagaland House in Delhi told me, after disappearing from his office at the time he promised to hand over the papers, and leaving the secretary to take two hours to fill out the wrong forms (and those incorrectly), that if I wanted to argue, well then I didn’t have to go to Nagaland at all, as far as he was concerned.
Undeterred, when I did eventually get the paper, I then had to take it to the Ministry of Home Affairs. Inexplicably, rules state that if two married foreigners or a group of four foreigners want to visit, their papers can get processed immediately at Nagaland House in Delhi. If it’s one foreigner and one Indian, however, or any combination other than what is specified, then they need to go to Home Affairs as well. So here I queued for hours in a sweltering room with no fans due to a power failure. I submitted my papers, only to be told to come back again after 5pm to find out they would be accepted. Upon doing so, I get told it will take another 2 months for the application to be approved. ‘Standard procedure,’ I was informed, for the first time.
But thanks to some persistence and useful contacts, just over a week later, the commissioner of Nagaland House had sorted it all out. By the time I found out, though, I was out of town, only to get back to Delhi late on Sunday night, due to leave 7am Monday morning and spend the next 35 hours moving east to Siliguri in West Bengal. So I had to leave paperless.
Forces were conspiring against me. At the train station in Siliguri, I was informed that all trains for Dimapur were fully booked for the next four weeks, without the guy even checking on the computer. No direct buses either. We went to the hotel that does flight bookings, and the guys there managed to book train tickets to Guwahati in Assam the next day, from where we could get a bus to Dimapur. Apparently foreigners aren’t exactly given priority when seats are limited, and bribes can help to grease the wheels the a little. Good to know.
So back to the present and you can appreciate my jubilation at my arrival in this out of the way place. We take a private taxi to Kohima, a two hour trip. It’s the capital of Nagaland, up in the mountains, much cooler and rainier than Dimapur, which is lower down on the plains.
There’s something magical about the place, especially here in the mountains, part of India, yet with its own separate culture. Here, there are no castes. Historically, tribals used to be headhunters and apparently in the farthest district on the NE border, called Mon, one can still see skulls on display. Today everyone, more or less, is Christian, and churches are everywhere, a legacy of the American Baptist missionaries who came here in the late 1800s. English is widely spoken here, as is Hindi and Nagamese, with every village speaking its own variation. Most significantly, people identify themselves as Nagas, not Indians. And really, even though you’re spending rupees, you might as well be in a different country.
In Kohima, we meet Beny Humtsoe from the Naga Mother’s Association face-to-face after innumerable phone calls. NMA is one of the oldest and largest NGO’s in Nagaland. They focus on women’s rights, education, combating HIV, facilitating dialogue between the government and the poor, and providing drinking water, through rainwater harvesting in rural schools. Beny’s passionate about what she does, no doubt part of the reason for the organisation’s success.
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We visit the market, then go to the WWII memorial on a hill in the centre of town, up in the clouds. It commemorates the hundreds of British and Indian solders who died fighting in Nagaland during the war.
The Nagas who died fighting are conspicuously absent. The memorial is beautiful and well looked after. It offers the best view of the town and it’s a popular place for locals to hang out.
People in Nagaland, and the North East in general, look more Asian, especially the women. In Kohima there are lots of trendy kids out shopping for new sneakers, fashion conscious in a way one associates with Japan rather than India. Even the sweets sold on the side of the road are more likely to be from the Far East than 'mainland' India.
Love him or hate him (you better hate him), Enrique Iglesias’ new single is ubiquitous here. In the restaurant where we have lunch, it literally plays every other song. And on local TV it’s on a cell phone ad that runs twice during every ad break. This though is about the only bad thing about the day.
Beny takes us to Cradle Ridge, an Aids orphanage run by the NMA. There are six HIV-positive kids living there, most getting ARV treatment, education and love. We have tea and grenadillas and they sing for us. I feel guilty for rocking up, taking some pics and leaving, but I think the kids enjoyed our visit and we brought some happiness and variety to their day. So a great experience for all.
We say goodbye and head back to Dimapur as it gets dark. Thanks to some insiders, friends of the hotel staff who work at the railways, we’ve managed to push back our departure date to buy us some more time. If we had tried ourselves (we did) it wouldn’t have worked (it didn’t).
We want to go shopping the next day, but we discover the town shuts down on Sundays. Hotel room service won’t even serve ginger beer, because drinking beer on a Sunday is a sin, isn’t it. We spend the day watching American TV and avoiding Enrique ads.
Monday morning is spent shopping and wandering around the endless second-hand clothing stores across the road from the Hotel Avilyn. Then we catch a rickshaw to the Hong Kong market in the centre of town and buy some gifts for the kids at Cradle Ridge – a toy keyboard, harmonica, dolls, nail polish, animal toys, all for only Rs 1000 (approximately ZAR165.00 or USD23.00).
In the afternoon we hook up with Losa and Suninji from Prodigals Home. Like the NMA, Prodigal’s Home is another prominent Naga NGO, primarily concerned with the rights of women, prostitution, drug abuse and HIV/AIDS, as well as drinking water. They take us to their drug rehab centre just outside of the city. Here residents (they’re not called patients) bide their time sharing their stories, doing yoga, praying, growing vegetables and making lemon grass oil.
We drive around some nearby villages, see some rainwater harvesting tanks in rural schools without electricity or desks, and stop to have tea with Chief Tsithrongse in his village. He puts on his traditional Naga gear and shows off some fearsome blades, now thankfully only for show.
What a character, this guy, animated, and always laughing, and interested in where we come from. He sheds a tear when we tell him about apartheid. After tea with him and his wife we say goodbye and promise to come back to Nagaland in future, with every intention of doing so.
We stop at a store on our way back to the hotel to get some wrapping paper for the gifts we bought that morning. We check out early the next morning, leaving a bag of gifts at the desk and taking with us whole lot of memories. Even though our stay here has been so rushed, it’s been so worth it. It’s going to take a lot more than snooty officials, stone-age bureaucracy and discriminatory train policies to stop me from coming again, one day. Hell, I’ll walk if I have to.
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