This City Called Imphal

                It’s been such a long time since I last typed. It is as if the comfort of the room is not enough to write here – it requires the winter to invade my skin, the midnight gibbous moon to show me the words – for me to hit the keyboard with eyes closed, like a pianist’s fingers dancing. Anyway, there cannot be a better time to reflect than the New Year’s Day.

Life has been such that every post on the blog has a feel of “everything has changed so much”. This post comes at a time of another big shift – I have moved to Imphal for my district training. This is the first touch with the field and the first instance of application of theory. It has been almost three weeks and the name “Imphal” has slowly started to sound familiar. This post is only about the first few meters in this miles-long journey.

A Change of Home

Moving to a new place can never be a good experience. Here is something that I wrote during one of the boring lectures recently:

When you move to a new land,

You try to draw a line

Through the things living and dead

To keep the old away and alive,

To guarantee the sanctity of its shape.

These lines show on the eyes

And the sand crusted on faces.

They are entangled with the lines

Of everlasting bits of lost memory.

I cannot however deny that I love new places. I love their strange shapes and the way that strangeness gently vanishes as your eyes get used to the way of things. The first few weeks are the most interesting. This shock period requires a heightened level of activity – you cannot persist with the passiveness of your older surroundings – you’ve been woken up from a slumber and you need to rub the sleep out of your eyes and it will be some time before you can fall back. You are to change from one psychological state to another, you are to become almost a different person.

When I shifted to Imphal, I moved into this small room which I share with a cadremate. (Unlike the glamour of the Services that sparkles on social media, not all cadres have the same levels of comfort.) There are two beds, two almirahs and a table. All the memory I brought caged in boxes has to shift into these new accomodations. Some articles lie packaged in boxes and literally everything is awaiting a proper place in a proper home. The books stand in two towering pillars one almirah, the lower books buried under heaps of unkempt clothing. Reminders of friendship and affection sit on the table – a deodar cone, a set of photos, a bell, a pen stand, a pink table light, a big cursive “Relax” and an Alexa. There is no clock in the room.

The Feel

These first few weeks have actually been easy. Acceptance has come at its own pace (rafta rafta, haule haule). When talking to locals, I have tried to shift from “your state is beautiful” to “this state…”, but saying “our state…” is still a bit odd. The hellos and good mornings are often punctuated with conscious “khurum jari” and “chak charaba”.

There is a football ground outside the building. If you climb up to the second floor you can see the mountains that garrison the Imphal valley on all the four sides. Almost all the surrounding buildings have a green tin roof, closely reminiscent of those good days in Mussoorie. The winter sky is almost always a refreshing shade of blue and it is always difficult to take my eyes off it. On the better days, patches of clouds as white as steam invade the sky and a desire to set out on a bike takes hold of me. The police flag adorning the pinnacle of the building is almost always fluttering in that relaxed breeze which freezes everything at night.

The night falls early here and more so in the winters. Three is in the evening, not in the afternoon. The gloominess of winter makes it difficult to guess if it is December or rain clouds casting their shadow at four. On a clear day, it is dark by five and it becomes difficult to run on the broken pavestones along the Kangla. For a person from northern India, seven in Manipur seems to be well past nine because it has already been two hours of dark. By eight, you have lost all track of time and if for some reason you are still outside, a fog of anxiety starts gathering around you. The long absence of sunlight starts dropping the temperature by this time though no street-side pit fires come up. The recent conflict also ensures that almost all shops are shut by eight-thirty. The silence of the streets adds to the darkness. The lack of people produces a trembling of the heart. There is hardly any differing between nine and twelve and two at night.

The Life

My exposure to Manipur is extremely limited. This is an important factor because of the great proportions of the state. Its small size by no means belittles the diversity of its culture. There are multiple tribes and ethnic groups and there are multiple sub-cultures among these. What I have seen in these days is just a small part of the Imphal valley which is populated primarily by the Meitei people.

 There are many unique things about Imphal and the Manipuri culture. Our first lunch was fortunately a complete Manipuri thali at everyone’s favourite Laxmi Kitchen. Along with the multiple similarities the Manipuri thali has with the rest of the Indian cuisine, there is also a kheer with a tender hint of camphor in it, a dish with a pakora dipped in what tastes deliciously like the South-Indian payasam, and a dish which is probably eggplant with a curious mix of fermented fish. There are great pakoras made of Chinese chives (locally called ngakopi, the pakoras are called bora), exotic East-Asian dishes (it is difficult to find bad restaurants here), delicious bakery goods, warm paan (if you know the right shops). There is a culture of serving green tea in the government offices, inspired perhaps as much by the craze for fitness as by a dislike for or the non-availability of milk.

In the morning, marketplaces and footpaths are lined by middle-aged women (let’s call them “ema”s – mothers in Meitei), and at times couples, serving freshly cooked poori-sabzi for breakfast. You may also find a very North-Indian-like dal without much difficulty. Sadly for me, poori and paratha always have a very handsome addition of maida. This is probably because the Manipuri diet is primarily rice-based and the people find it difficult to form a circular shape without the maida.

I still have difficulties dealing with the names of the dishes. The sounds of the Manipuri language are almost entirely at odds with the North-Indian languages. Meiteilon belongs to a different family of languages called the Tibeto-Burman language family. Speakers of Meitei are located as far as Thailand but it has been classified as a vulnerable language because there are only about 1.8 million persons globally who speak it as their first language. It is the sole official language of Manipur and is written in Bengali and Meitei script (Meitei mayak). Most of the people write the Meitei in the Bengali script and the knowledge of Meitei mayak is also limited. However, there has apparently been an official push towards the latter’s usage recently.

I found multiple books in the Central Library in the Meiteilon and many of them in the “rare books” section. The library has quite an impressive section on Manipur and the rare books actually included collections of royal literature and records. Manipur also seems to have a rich literary culture. In my three weeks of arrival, I have been to two book fairs (which had quite an interesting assortment of titles, focusing on Manipur, the North-East as well as Eastern Asia) and multiple bookstores. Many bookstores serve great coffee and hot chocolates too! Despite the current cold atmosphere, I have almost always found students loitering in these bookshops and the owners receptive of title demands and discounts.

Conundrums

The people of a place are built by their history more than their present. Everything that has happened in the past leaves an impression and the old dreary times have left their imprints on Manipur. Much like the rest of North-Eastern India, Manipur has also had a history of militancy and violence. The same is reflected in relatively lower levels of development (Imphal, the second-largest city in North-Eastern India is a Tier-III city as compared to Jabalpur, my home and the third largest city of MP, which is a Tier-II city). The 2010s saw a gradual decline in militancy and it was during this time that a lot of top-level brands moved to Imphal. Though big malls are still absent, there are multiple shopping complexes, big departmental stores and glamorous restaurants. That much of this remains empty or has started to shut down is a reflection of the fear that persists after the latest (and continuing) wave of violence that began May 3^rd 2023.

Everyone seems to recollect that bygone good time and it is as if everyone wants to find a reason to talk of the ongoing conflict. There are all types of arguments – who is to blame, what the fault of the administration was, and what is to be done – but everyone agrees in one tone that the violence has taken the state back by twenty years and that some kind of solution to the problem needs to be arrived at.

This also brings the spotlight on the resilience of the Manipuri people whom you will ever rarely see not smiling. They are a hard-working lot and many of them (even some government employees) maintain secondary occupations. Almost half of the shops I have gone to are manned by women. I have always found them to be helping – my driver who can barely understand my Hindi would go on to speak long sentences, however irrelevant they might be to my instructions, just so that he can keep me entertained. A friend whom I was introduced to by a batchmate was so dedicated to showing me around that he almost seemed heartbroken when one day I had to deny his sightseeing proposal. Another friend actually went to a momos-vender’s home to get some vegetable momos specially prepared for me (veg momos do not exist in Manipur, or they are at least a critically endangered species). I have so long not come across a vender who will not smile at me. During a visit to Ema Keithel (“Mother’s Market”, the largest women-run market in Asia) recently, EVERY ema I enquired with asked where I was from and if I was liking Manipur.

Resilience also reflects in the way the Meiteis stand together in the face of difficulty. The number of internally-displaced persons (IDPs) in Manipur right now is over sixty thousand. Though I am yet to visit any of the relief camps but the newspapers have daily headings regarding the difficult conditions of their survival. Many of the shops have therefore come up with donation boxes and stands for products crafted by the IDPs. A friend of mine who happens to be a local dentist was sad that he was unable to provide free services due to the personal impact of the crisis. There was no loud music or club dance during the New Year’s Eve (or “Bye-Bye” as it is popularly called here) but people did collect in rooms to spend time together. (The picture underneath is the main road passing through the city at around 7 PM on the eve of Bye-Bye.) The family is functionally intact in Manipur as a social unit and perhaps it is through the family that people wade through such crises. I found multiple families travelling to temples on the New Year’s Day and my friend next to me prayed for the peace of his land.

As I type this, Imphal takes deep, guarded breaths in its bed. The road outside is being patrolled by sleepy jawans most probably trembling in the winter’s inky dark. There is a tiny stationery shop on that road which has an array of shockingly quality books, reflecting the reading culture of the town. The multiple newspapers (both Meiteilon and English) published here and the kind of local opinion they publish also depict the level of public education. The beauty of Imphal is contained not just in its hills and skies, but also in its house ponds, its flowers, its universities as well as the eerily empty streets at night.

On the whole, Imphal right now presents the picture of a society in grief and shock. It is a people who are trying to come in terms with a social as well as an economic breakdown. It is a world desperately trying to find the pieces of normal in the slow-moving quagmire of crisis. It is a valley of culture and history, and complications. As for me, it presents a challenge and opportunity to do right what I used to think while preparing for the UPSC examination – to be able to do something worthwhile.