Stranger at my Home

(This peice is an extract from my Diary dated 23rd December, 2005
when I returned back to my native place to the jungle tribal village of Manipur.)

People used to tell me home is where the heart is. But some times, like this very moment, one can feel like a total stranger at one’s home.

The feeling of homelessness is no stranger to me. I have traveled to most part of India which I called home but wherever I go, I remained a stranger. I reluctantly accepted the tag, forgiving them for their ignorance or at other time consoling myself as being a lesser Indian. But among my own people, I am not ready to be treated as a lesser one, at least not in my own village where I grew up.

As a child, I was given the notion that anyone from the mainland, especially the army, should not be trusted. I remember my mother going berserk when I, once, went to the army camp with my friends. Their fear is understandable as I myself had often seen and heard incidents to justify it. But this time round, my only crime is that I dared to say that I am an Indian and that India is my home.

It is true that I am an Indian (I want it or not) and India is my home (at least my home lies in India). But the sad irony is that my Indianess ends the moment I passed my region into the mainland. Wherever I go, people would ask me which country I came from. I would tell them that I was from Manipur. When people don’t know that I would substitute Manipur for Mizoram or Nagaland, it doesn’t help either. Most of the states in the North-east, according to their guesses, are in Nepal or China. At the end, I was so feed up of the question; I simply nodded to whatever country they guessed for me.

Then I would went to visit monuments and there they would charge me 500-600 percent more unless I am ready to spent some amount of time explaining the geography and demography of India. And in the sphere of education, every subject that includes Indian subject matter exclude me, and in the few occasions when the media picked up news from the north-east, they would be half-baked with most of the name being misspelled as if they were aliens’ names.

I traveled aboard to see people raising their eyebrows when they know my nationality. They thought I must be a Red-Indian. They wanted to ask me about Indian food, Indian music and Indian culture. But the Indian food, music and culture they wanted to know were alien to me.

During my stay in Delhi, I tried hard to learn and appreciate the ‘Indian’ language, food and culture. I forced myself to sit through an hour of ‘Indian’ dance recital, endured many three-hour long ‘Indian’ films and spent sleepless nights after stuffing myself with the spice infested foods which my ancestral would probably say ‘killed the taste buds’.

No matter how hard I try, the freaky question keeps popping out, and would irritate me as ever. I tried to take them as an innocent question but still, it fuels one’s feeling of alienation. People often tell me to take them easy but the prejudice, abuses and discrimination one’s faced cannot be easily taken by the stride. And it doesn’t help very much even thought they sincerely apologized after abusing you especially if your abuser happened to be someone as educated as your very own teacher.

Such situation, though infrequent, aggravate one sense of alienation. It is under many such situation that I started to believe myself as an alien in this country, and take that little jungle village in the tribal areas of Manipur to be my only home.

But now standing here in the middle of the road, surrounded by the chief and elders of the tribe, I certainly feel like a stranger. I was absolutely enthusiastic to return home after more than two years of absence, but the moment I landed up, the first reaction was of general disappointment. Everybody takes a look at me and the first comment was that I was a lost child. My language was adultered and my pronunciation stained. ‘Lost, absolutely lost’, the elders lamented whilst the youngster called me pretentious. And with that big crimes I was standing here with the elders who sermons me on our value, how we were free and independent, with our own land and laws.

I don’t know if it would be wise to remind them that the government doesn’t even want to recognize our existence. To me that is as good as being lost. The elders may think that we are free with our own lands and laws, many anthropologists may come to study our primitive ways and our wild photos may found home in galleries and museums around the world, but that may not be enough if a seven degree minority community living under the mercy of others wanted to survive. But I choose to remain silent.

I don’t know, as of now all I need is some one to talk to me and make me feel at home without pretension. Then I started to wonder, if I can call this place as home even after what I have been through, why cannot I do the same anywhere else? After all, the whole world is my home.

Lyan Samte