It was past four-thirty in the morning. The car headlamp beams were softly caressing the asphalt of the lonely National Highway 40 at 100 km/hr. Slowly, a magnificent sunrise lit up the horizon. It was a hazy canvas painted orange-reddish by an artist par excellence.
The hues fell softly on the few trees, spared by the loggers, in an otherwise barren hill top. The dark-orangish glistening canopies of these trees zipped past with a whoosh of (probably) thankfulness.
The journey took on a whole new meaning after the car took a left detour from the National Highway towards Nartiang. This is the shortest route to Mukroh (Meghalaya, East Jaintia Hills district) that cuts through Nartiang, but is an insane joyride of 50km on non-existent roads. The other road to reach Mukroh, which is only a bit better, is through Laskein block, cutting across the small town of Shangpung.
The car was now doing 20/km. All this while the occupants were half asleep, but the non-existent road hit the nerves more than the strongest coffee. Suddenly, everyone was alert and looked around wiping the frosty car windows with pulled down jacket sleeves - there was nothing artistic about the environment to write home back and this was and is the reality of Mukroh and its surroundings.
For those who saved the ordeal of travelling 127 km on a chilly winter morning, half of it on a seemingly bombed road, a Google search gives predictable answers. “Six dead in Mukroh in police firing” and many more such headlines. Assam police say they opened fire in self defense after villagers attacked them following the interception of a timber-laden truck of smugglers. Mukroh villagers claim otherwise.
Be that as it may, what Google won’t tell you is that Mukroh and its people have been left to its own devices, both by Meghalaya and Assam governments. Consider some scenes about Mukroh and its people.
Scene 1: An unattended toddler wrapped in an old shawl sleeping on a bamboo mat in the courtyard of a thatched hut, with nobody around.
Scene 2: At a distance, few men arguing and struggling with a bicycle pumpto fill in air in their Maruti Suzuki 800 car tyres !
Scene 3: A ramshackle LP school, doubled up as an Angandwadi centre, with a huge crowd of womenfolk gathered with their babies outside it. They were taking home their weekly ration of one kilo Atta-Suji. Mothers, who should have ideally been in high schools and dreaming about their careers are now parenting full-time - breastfeeding infants wrapped in shawl and waiting for their luck.
Scene 4: Girls and boys, carrying head loads of water. Some of these kids are as young as six to seven years or even younger. Other kids carried their siblings on their backs tied with shawls. Many of these children don’t go to schools. Other children were seen playing on the road with playthings such as wooden carts and car wheels.
Scene 5: The "village doctor" wearing a sandal comes riding on a motorbike from Assam to administer medical care to a patient.Scene 6: A boy wearing shorts and a gumboot on a parched land, which looked as a marriage between abject poverty and a will to survive.
Scene 7: Teenage girls and women in charcoal fields. Toxic fumes filled the air as the workers burned timber and dumped them under the earth. Nature turns this charred timber into charcoal. (Caution) It's not safe to take pictures as some of these charcoal fields are illegally run by "powerful people."
As we emerge from these scenes, the village signboard "Mukroh" sits neatly beside a smooth road that was recently built by the North Eastern Council.
"We have nothing except this road...," a young mother said, as her eyes darted away towards a non-privileged world. A world with no clean drinking water, electricity, roads, health care, poor literacy rate and many other privileges that we sometimes take for granted.
Elsewhere, an auxiliary nurse and midwife whispered that people in the area don't believe in institutional deliveries, despite the health care workers' warning about the risk of home deliveries and emphasis on family planning. That explained the large number of children loitering around on the village roads.
A child in Mukroh is deported into an adult’s world, where uncertainty and hopelessness is the state of affairs. It’s an adult immediately after it can shoulder the strength to take care of its siblings. The child, sibling and childhood are tied to the umbilical cord of destiny in checkered maroon-black shawls.
In this world, Amaradeo Chauhan the village doctor may not hold an MBBS degree, but definitely is a life saver. He lives in Mokoilum, about 5 km from Mukroh and makes no qualms in saying: “I am not a doctor. I come here and administer injection, saline and also minor medical procedures. I charge Rs. 100 for my visit apart from the medicine cost.”
Nearby, Sem Rongpi, the forester from Assam and his men were basking under the sun and had spread out boiled gooseberries mixed with turmeric and salt. The forester also helped in getting us a few fresh gooseberries from the trees nearby.
The gooseberries left a sour taste in the mouth. Quickly spat it out, but the tartness remained, so washed it down with water and immediately the body and soul was diving deep into a world of sweet elixir only to be interrupted by the wails of sirens.
The Jaintia Hills Autonomous District Council chief, Thombor Shiwat was leading a delegate in the area. The convoy was endless. “This is our land,” he asserted standing beside a pineapple farm on the roadside. A man quickly stole an unripe pineapple from the farm and smiled sheepishly.
If this area and the people really belong to Meghalaya, why the neglect? Shiwat had no answer, neither did the Assam side. “This is Assam territory,” Faiz Ahmed Bhabhuyan, in-charge of Mokoilum police station said, sitting inside a tent set up outside the station.
He looked distressed after being recently transferred from a comfortable town posting. He somehow managed to pull up a smile and offered us the best of Assam chai.
After some time, he opened up: “We don’t have electricity here. We have solar panels to power the lights and charge our mobiles. We don’t even have a TV… Deforestation is a huge issue and illegal felling is a big concern in this area.”
We moved on for lunch at the house of a JHADC member. There was a sumptuous lunch spread out. The lunch consisted of pork, boiled silkworms, chicken and an assortment of local delicacies. “There are issues which need to be resolved sitting across the table,” one of the villagers said, munching the local delicacies.
As we moved on, the temporary Meghalaya police outpost, made with a plastic roof, looked like a bewildered foreigner who lost his passport. The haystacks on the ground made a lunch table for a Meghalaya police jawan. “Jai Hind,” a jawan greeted.
It was getting late and darkness was seizing the horizon like a nightmare gripping a child’s sleep. There was nobody around to soothe the child back to sleep. As the car tumbled away from the forested area, the trees behind seemed to huddle frighteningly in one big dark void.
Life at present in Mukroh is like one huge dark void. People feel lost, unidentified and there are all the evils that lurk in the darkness and frighten these poor people.
Life in this area is also like that gooseberry, sour and tart, with nobody to act as a catalyst and activate the sweet elixir to provide hope, direction and certainty to life.
Nevertheless, people will continue to wait patiently outside anganwadi centre's, try to fill vehicle tyres with bicycle pumps, carry headloads of water over distant hills and ravines with the hope that the toddler will wake up to a better future. So let’s not stop dreaming.
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