Of chicken and chicken pox

Kids fall sick sometimes. While we were at VKV Sunpura , two girls started showing signs of chicken-pox. There was no choice but to send them back home since the infection is contagious. Sending them back is not as easy as it sounds. Some of the girls came from places simply referred to as ‘the interior’or ‘hills’. It took days just for a message to reach the parents.

After much co-ordination , a day was fixed . The girls were to be sent by the school jeep to a place called Roing. Relatives would collect them from there.

Since the jeep was going out to Roing, it was decided that we too could go along to see the place. Roing is a large town and we had not seen an Arunachali town till then. We would be visiting one more school and see a handicraft center there .

Since we would be passing through Chappakhowa, a market place, it was also decided that we might as well come back with some fifty hens for the ‘meat day’ at school.

Since Roing is a town, VKV Roing did not have such a sprawling campus. But they did have a computer lab! 

At Roing , only one person had come to collect the girls. We were told that the other girls family are busy with rituals at home. The girl’s mother had died few days back.

We had a sudden realization how isolated this place is. There was no way for the news of the mothers death to reach the school . There were small pockets of technology and communication , but the vast majority of the land was remote , isolated and raw nature.

We visited the handicraft center and we drove to the bank of the Debang river. We went upto a big steel bridge there . Across the bridge is a rough road that goes all the way to China border. The river was bone dry when we went there , but every few years , this bridge gets uprooted from it’s foundations and it gets thrashed about when the river gets angry. The old bridges lie down stream in a tangled heap. Repairs are impossible. The army builds a new bridge in a few days.

The views were breathtaking . We were soaking in new things . Our experience at the government handicraft center was almost hilarious . But the whole day was shrouded in the grief , shock of the news of  the mothers death.

By late afternoon we were back at Chappakhowa. Our hens were ready at the market. All fifty of them were packed in a big bamboo basket shaped like a boat a good six feet long. We could not tie the basket to the top of the jeep since it was raining.

Sharing passenger space with four humans and fifty hens under hot humid canvas is not a nice experience . They were making the whole place dirty and the stink was unbearable.

We finally Sunpura reached back in the evening craving for a bath and some hot tea.

This could have easily qualified as a really bad day for us . True, we heard some bad news and had a really uncomfortable ride, but we were also soaking up new things and new concepts every time we turned our heads.

A silver lining to the dark cloud was a chance meeting at VKV Roing with a person who is almost a legend in Arunachal .

Satyanarayanji is an old man in kurta pajama with twinkling eyes and a smile. When we met him , he had arrived from Anini . That’s across the Debang River near China. He had hopped rides in Army trucks to get here. It had taken him a couple of days. All he had with him was a shabnam bag with a shawl and a set of extra clothes. Luggage tied him down. Lots of things get done, he said, if our needs are less. Decades ago he had come to Arunachal leaving a government job at Kerala. His job was to look after administration of the far flung schools . But he is doing definitely more than that.

To all the children , he is uncle Moosa. Wherever he goes kids flock to meet him and listen to his stories. Kids eagerly wait for his arrival at their school as he also brings messages from far away homes. He is relentless in his mission of making sure education reaches the children in Arunachal.

Sometimes it took him months to convince parents to send the kids to school. Two such girls he knew were at  Sunpura . He wanted to come with us to meet them and talk to them. We could not take him along as the very last inch of space in our vehicle was going to be taken up by the chicken on our way back.

The few moments we spent with him are treasured. We could have spent a few days together had it not been for the chicken . When we met him, we talked about medicinal plants. A google search tells me he is still in Arunachal and that last year he set up a string of free libraries for the kids.