By Obadiah Lamshwa Lamare.
People who travel to our state will always be greeted by moving checkpoints. If you have suits on, or maybe if you have big cameras and sun glasses, you may be let off, otherwise, if you come in a shirt and a pair of trousers, with your worn out slippers, ready to jump in the mud and the clay, to earn your bread, to make sure that your child will not die of that illness that could have been prevented, then you’re in for a treat. If you’re not greeted by fists you are definitely going to be enrolled in an exercise programme which might be humiliating for you but it does not matter, for this has become the manner of greeting people here. They would have hung the body of someone just like you, someone who was murdered just last fall, to deter the likes of you from ever setting sights on these hills but that might just have been too rude.
There are jobs here, jobs that will not be so enticing to your counterpart, positions that only a destitute, hungry, desperate parent like you will qualify for occupying, but they are not for you! They are jobs that locals will not take up but at the same time they are jobs you are not permitted to do. The reasons for which are as absurd as a hen lecturing physics. Even if you have fewer tea breaks and smoking breaks but more sweat, more labour, you are a bad worker because of the colour of your skin and the way you look. You have to understand that here logic is defied, reason is brushed aside, and humanity too often slips away. If you were not too busy trying to hush your hungry belly, and if you had the comforts that most of us have, then you would have already stumbled on the peculiar fact that most of us seem to be of the notion that we were able to choose the race, the family, community we were born to, the situations we were born into. Even our mythical demon serpent is a racist, having an appetite only for Khasi unfortunates. It is so easy to tell that most of us are locked in that chauvinistic swastika sort of a thinking that sets us as special, unique and supremely consecrated. In short, we live in bubbles. The fact that you are so familiar with the harsh realities of life threatens the sanctity and the integrity of the bubbles that we have come to call our homes; this is why you are seen as someone fit to be shooed away!
Do not look to your counterparts here, they are not your comrades, their thinking has already been done for them. There are not many differences between your plight and theirs’, but that does not matter for they have been given instructions in spotting and conjuring spots of dissimilarity but are disastrously incapable when it comes to lifting the veil and seeing in you a mirror image of themselves, a partner not a rival. Do not look towards the direction of the ringing bells; there is nothing for you there. It’ll really be a miracle if you happen to find gentle hearts and caring eyes in those lofty, high rising buildings. Speaking of miracles, in your case hearing the universal, humanitarian, fraternal message of Christianity will be a rare thing, for even churches have been enthralled to lend their pulpits to those who preach a new sermon, a sermon they accept to be an urgency for their special nation, a sermon that ends up picturing you as a monster, a carcinogenic train. You see, we have a well knit, influential, powerful, educated but not necessarily enlightened elite, which comes in just every shade and colour imaginable, it interprets things and mobilises the people, at times with promises literally too good and too insane to be true.
There are a few who sympathise, but remember to highlight the word few. There are also a few who are rational enough to see that you are not a threat, but an actor in the economy of the state, but they still shriek at the thought of you settling here. You cannot dwell here nor can you seek your shelter here. This part is true and we do agree that people should stop settling here. People, not non tribals or foreigners or tribal, but people should stop pouring into the city. Its urban and suburban areas are too crowded. But this is not generally welcomed by most, so we’re afraid it applies only to you. A shack you build to shelter yourself from the elements is seen to be a greater discomfort than the big bungalows that stretch out even to public spaces. The sneers of the affluent are more welcomed than the gentlest of your smiles. Migration of the wealthy from other districts of our bountiful state to the capital city and its suburbs after they have raped the land back home, making it infertile and barren is not an issue. It is not an issue even if they have reduced the land to a dying light, inhabitable for so many others who cannot afford to migrate and set themselves in the bosom of Shillong and who are stuck to face the coming dryness and misfortune, so many others who are just like you.
If you manage to evade the moving checkpoints and reach the Jaintia Hills Districts, you will find that there are plenty of job opportunities that come with the strangest conditions and offers. For crawling inside a dark hole and breathing in more black dust than air, you may also avail the opportunity of being buried under a tunnel, probably with black diamond consuming you. If you manage to survive the day and leave the life of a mole for a few hours, there is every opportunity that you will be spoiled. Immorality may be the only friendly face you encounter here but then you may also be too busy dreaming about the last engulfed miner’s scream. There is the high possibility that as you lay in your makeshift, disease ridden tent, you will find your very humanity slipping away and the sky beginning to become nothing more than an empty space. If you do not lose the shreds of humanity you have left on the surface, there is an enormous chance that you will lose it when you crawl back into that hole. Maybe when this happens, living the life of a human mole will become much easier. To help you sleep, the best fairy tales that can be recommended are the tales of a caring, benevolent, potent and capable human race, and the tales of the mighty and shining India.
We think it is clear by now that you’re not expected to be human, so stop dreaming, stop scraping, just turn back, curl up and die if you have to, and do not forget to take your family with you…but also do not forget to give us credit for making Devolution looking more than a hypothesis, it is to our credit that dehumanisation has wielded its head to become a habit here. You may leave us with a bruised face, coloured black and blue from the fistful brush strokes, but that is a far better face than the inhuman face that has grown on us!
(Obadiah Lamshwa Lamare is a Research Scholar in the Department of Political Science, NEHU)