Tokalo : Day Eleven

Day Eleven is all about bamboo, more bamboo and bananas.

Early at around 1 am I see one of the colleagues – a young boy - slice bamboo to get the fire going better. He is shivering and I recall this happening the previous night also when I had grudgingly got out  to pee. I ask Jo in the morning and he lets me know the fellow doesn’t have a sweater and further prodding brought forth the fact of his being not cared for by his father and step mother. Sometime during the day he breaks into a frenzy of sneezes and I offer him my sweater. He is taken back, declines as the first reaction and then thanks me. This is the loudest I have heard him since we got on walking. The sweater I have been clinging to since my days in schools will find a new home.  

All around us!

The food today is rice and dal. We are short of food – we only have enough for 1 more meal. 2 colleagues move in search of food to nearest village. 

As the rest of us pack bags and get ready I see another colleague, helping with luggage, look at me. He has helped me with the luggage the previous day too. Our eyes meet and without speaking or nodding he opens my half empty bag and puts his bag inside. He then closes my bag and gives me a smile. The warmth in that smile tells me I have been accepted. The feel brings a lump in my throat. Somewhere deep down these are the certificates one cares for, the acceptances which matter.  

My body now is feeling the strain of changed physical patterns, diet and environs. I take cheese and medicine but also notice that the trouser getting loose.

A forest beauty!

Few colleagues pick up the thread on hunting again. They ask me if they can shoot these animals once they are beyond the Wildlife Sanctuary boundary and in Burma? As I look at them and after a brief interaction feel that - for some time to come - I have succeeded! It is these conversations I need to encourage with students and teachers; the crux in conservation education also lies in responding aptly to a question or a situation which emerges.

I have been walking for 5 days now and have neither come across a person or even plastic lying around. As this realization dawns on me I slowly understand how uncommon this is and wonder how many other places in our country can provide such a sublime experience. As I walk on - my mind roams. The adventure too has been 'eco-friendly'. Our glasses have been of bamboo, mats of banana and other leaves, ropes from trees, wild bananas and fishes for food, earth for washing cooking utensils and the list goes on. 

Bamboo, coming up and going down

Today we see 2 orange bellied Himalayan squirrels nibbling at flowers and fruits from our camp early morning. They are on the uppermost storey of a tree that has very far less leaves on it compared to others nearby. This is a fairy tale forest – I wonder later.

In what little I have walked in my life - today was one of the more strange experiences. Bamboo - all around – so dense it is difficult to describe. We bent and kneeled for more than a few hundred metres. Crawling hurt and even the pain was new to me. Sunlight peeped in from the meager gaps it was allowed and the leaves below glowed in innumerable shades of yellow, orange and red. Bamboo got stuck between legs, in straps of bags and other avenues they found. We had to be careful as the person immediately in front got rid of the bamboo bothering him. The bamboo would hit the person next in line. The flowers, dust and all that bamboo offers gets into our clothes. We remove our shirts, try to shake the unwanted particles away and take a break. Mautam; read bamboo flowering.

There is no enough in nature. It is one vast prodigality. It is a feast. There is no economy: it is all one immense extravagance. I perhaps understood what Richard Jefferies had meant in his Absence of Design in Nature. 

Bamboo, after tiring us, goes away. We reach a peak from which I see the Maraland landscape. It is as if the hills of Mizoram have been split into 3 compartments; new jhum, old jhum and good forest. The good forest reminds me of a conversation with a friend at Aizawl. He used to refer to such images and say ‘just like a cauli-flower’.  

How does one move?

The slope down is bananas and the number of times I fall and slip makes me go bananas! Others too give me company on the slippery slope. We eat bananas, we have ourselves bumping into banana stumps and we walk and slide in more than a feet high mattress of banana leaves – old, yellow and slippery.  That afternoon I realized how high the level of water content in banana stumps is.

Colleagues wonder if this bamboo and cane can take care of the furniture needs of entire Mizoram and thus save the standing trees. I wonder if those pursuing higher academics on bamboo and cane move beyond their office and meeting spaces and walk spaces such as these and if they do how they react. Also, if I will get another such opportunity and my body will be in a position to allow me to take it up.

None of us has seen the Rala river at this end; we have to catch it for it is now the border we would follow. We need both water and food for the evening. We walk on not sure when we will get either. In all this the birds and time frame of the adventure take a back seat. We are far from the nearest habitation and excepting of one of us walking for a day (and little more) to the nearest village there is no way to communicate with others.

The contours of our tired faces change as we drink the sweet Rala water. Sun is just about to go to sleep. We have sugarless tea and cook up together what we have of dal – rice. We do fine. Basics get such respect in absence of luxuries!

I surprisingly have gusto to write in the candle light. After a couple of pages I suddenly realize it is a dead jungle night and all around me colleagues are in deep slumber. The watch shows 8.25 pm. My body aches and reminds me of all the bamboo and banana collisions and the sleeping bag gains gets priority over the pencil and pages.

Day Twelve here.