One evening while going back to hostel from office I could not help but realize the ironic presence of the damp wind wrapped in the sunshine at dusk. It was trembling but making its existence felt. I too was walking on the brink of some sort of bewilderment, touching the rather yellow grass of uncertainties with my bare feet when I stumbled into the tunnel of memories. The moment your heart starts journeying in reverse, you long for familiarity, you yearn to see those known faces, and you remember those annoying smiles which you realize are more precious than you thought. In such intricate situations your heart pushes you towards yourself, triggering you to do what you love as that’s the only step closer to you. I grabbed the shown way and ventured into a night journey to a town called ‘Champhai’. Booking a mere ticket could be task in a land where the majority does not speak the languages you understand. I asked something, they responded something else, they nodded at my questions and I tried answering all their answers. And then we come down to just words and fall further to gestures, then awkward smiles, and it’s somehow done in the end.
As we embarked the journey I was perplexed to be entering into the pitch dark road with a vast void on one side and a green, steep hill on the other. Squeezed in my seat in a Tata Sumo I was constantly trying to decipher everybody’s expressions. Now the beam of the vehicle’s headlight started unfolding the narrow road. One can feel the voidness beside the road when headlights would pierce into dark nothingness. I was finally finding solace in the familiar feeling of unknown. The journey through the night gave me some moments which were not experienced before. The constant humming of the man sitting behind the seat, the intermittent murmuring of the lady sitting beside me, she was talking to herself, probably trying to convince herself of something, the driver’s gestures to let me know when we halt for food or tea. The settling and unsettling of our bodies in the vehicle and the shuffling through the rocky trail would let us know we are fortunately still on the road. The road penetrating into the darkness amid the hills and jungles seemed like a nomad snake which does look back, which knows the route into this stark, unknown darkness. The little villages with countable homes would come up from nowhere only to be left behind as the headlight shows the road ahead.
After half an hour driving through the spiral road I looked back and found a hill studded with diamonds, embellished with richness and shimmering in the dark like an upside-down crescent moon, it was Aizawl. We must have traveled for 20 minutes more when the driver stopped the car on one side of the road. I paused the music to know what was happening; there was pin drop silence, suddenly the lady beside me started murmuring something, I was startlingly looking at them unable to understand until they unanimously said “Amen!” The road introduced me to some peculiar but equally incredible customs like ‘Nghah Loh Dawr’, a shop without any keepers. I had heard about the practice of it in Mizoram but did not know that the very road I was travelling on has host of these ‘Nghah Loh Dawr’. Due to inaccessibility and remoteness of the place people have set up little stalls of fruits, vegetables, corns and other important things which could be of help to a traveler passing through the road. The keepers of the shops leave a price list before going home. So anyone who wishes to buy something can look up to the price list and put the money into the box lying there. This beautiful practice of trust made my belief entrenched more firmly that kindness must be an integral constituent of our natural being. When we are challenged by certain factors we are tend to snuggle back to our actual being which is uniformly there in all of us. It was an immense delight to acknowledge these acts of kindness and trust.
The journey was long and roads seemed as tired as us, sleep is never an option for me when I am on a journey like this. At 1 in the night we halted at an eatery in a small village to have some thingpui (local tea) and snacks. Two beautiful girls must be in their early twenties were managing the shop at midnight in this godforsaken place, my heart was rejoiced to experience the sheer equality in gender roles. I think the more ignorant you feel in some situations the more observant you become. The night could not get any darker and started losing its edges to the morning. As one after the other all passengers hopped off, the taxi drops till your home. As I had no idea where I should get off I was just observing everyone’s end of this journey, how they would knock the doors at 3:30 in the morning and a loved one would come out with a smile, leading them inside and they would now marinate in the warmth of home. As far as I was concerned I had no place to go, after a broken conversation with the driver I succeeded in making him understand that I am looking for a lodge. He dropped me at a small hotel which was unfortunately closed. It was very reassuring that the driver waited for me around half an hour to make a decision as I was constantly knocking on the lodge’s door which refused to listen. At last I asked him to go as he had one last passenger left to drop.
As soon as he left I started roving on the roads of Champhai, it was energizing to see this little, sleepy town drizzled with the golden rays of approaching sun. Champhai means plain land, and the town has the largest plain and cultivatable land in Mizoram. Rambling around aimlessly I fortunately came down a hill where the government lodge was situated. The place called ‘Zion Veng’ was like those towns which you see in fairy tales, greenery was rustling with the sun rays and painting the whole town with red and gold. On a plain land I saw mist and clouds weave a perfect Saturn ring around a small hill, I was overwhelmed with this playfulness of the nature, it was the closest I had been to heaven, I thought. Champhai had more to offer than that…….
