By Ellerine Diengdoh
Disclaimer: I can confirm that absolutely no trains were involved in the transport of these sentences. I was petrified that if I put these words on a train, they would arrive too quickly and much too cheaply, bringing with them a terrifying ‘Influx’ of low-quality, migrant adjectives that might dilute the cultural purity of the paragraph. Instead, to ensure maximum inefficiency, this article was delivered exclusively by truck. As a result, this article cost 2000 rupees per paragraph. It is the most expensive opinion you will read today.
Since the dawn of time, humans have always been terrified of “The Outsider”. In the olden days, the outsider was usually a sabre-toothed tiger or a man from the next cave who had a slightly better rock. Today, in the dust-covered hills of Shillong, we have evolved. We no longer fear the tiger. We fear the fella who cooks curry differently from our mum.Science informs us that this terror is encoded in our DNA, and our DNA for those who don’t know, is a sort of microscopic spiral staircase in our blood that screams “Stranger, Danger!” whenever we encounter an “Outsider.” We are told over and over, that the “Outsider” is coming to take over our land, our jobs and to dilute our culture. This is a terrifying thought. It is so terrifying that we have decided to wear our traditional costumes as a shield. But the Dhara, the very fabric of our identity, woven with pride and history, is also woven by a couple of blokes in Assam. We are literally fighting a culture war while wearing the enemy’s merchandise, like a vegan protesting a slaughterhouse while wearing a coat made of sausages. So, we strut around in our indigenous pride, ignoring the “Made In” label and pray that our hypocrisy doesn’t shrink in the wash.
Let us first examine the prickly issue called “employment.” Now, if you want a wall built, or a pipe fixed, or a hole dug, or carpentry work done in these hills you have two choices: do it yourself, or hire the Outsider. You simply cannot ask ‘one of your own’. We are told the ‘good ones’ exist (like fully- functional government schools), but no one has actually seen them. They have all been ‘taken’, presumably hoarded by the super-rich in underground bunkers where things actually get fixed.
This leaves you with the terrible ones. If you hire them, you realise that their family tree isn’t a tree, it is a dense, tangled fungal growth that spans the entire globe. They have more relations than the population of China, who wait until you need a shelf put up, or a floor laid, and then they drop dead out of spite! Statistically, a local worker has more dead relatives than there were casualties in World War One.
If nobody has died, their other excuses would be ‘tired’, or it is raining, or, crucially, it is not raining, but the clouds look a bit moody and they seriously don’t want to risk it. So, we are forced to hire the Outsider. Our entire construction industry is built on the backs of people we are theoretically supposed to be chasing out of town with pitchforks, which is awkward, because if we did chase them out, who would build the shed to store the pitchforks in?
We will now look at the domestic front. The domestic ecosystem in Shillong is brutal. Finding “help” that genuinely wants to “work” is harder than finding an honest politician. If you find one, be warned: you are not an employer; you are a sponsor. You are sponsoring their transition into adulthood. Firstly, you feed them until you are destitute. Next, they wear your wardrobe to take selfies, posing in your designer sweatpants like they own the place, which, given how much better they look in them, they basically do. After which comes the monthly review, where they demand a raise for the gruelling task of ‘existing in your house’. As soon as you comply, they exchange their dumb phones for a smart one. The Smartphone is the Holy Grail. Once acquired, they access the internet, which is basically a catalogue of potential husbands. They swipe right, they match, and vanish into the mist to start the cycle all over again.
But this misery is nothing however, compared to the amount we are paying for essential commodities. Everyone complains, no one does a thing. Everything in Shillong costs a fortune. Buying a kg of onions requires a mortgage. If we had a train, a large metal snake that carries things cheaply, prices would go down. But we are scared of the train. We think the train will bring “Influx”. So we decide instead to bring goods by trucks. This allows us to support our thriving local industry: The Check Gate. So the truck pays the bribe, the truck driver pays the bribe, the truck owner pays the bribe, the onion however doesn’t care who pays…it just decides to cost a hundred rupees.
The irony is that the influx happens anyway, largely because people have legs, and cars exist. And when they get here, they meet the gatekeepers. The gatekeepers don’t stop them. That would be rude. Instead, they charge them. It is a perfect system: we get to keep our racial purity theoretical, inside our heads, while the gatekeepers keep the cash actual, inside their pockets.
Through all this, we maintain a dignified silence. We are terrified of the truth, so we attend church religiously. We believe that if we sing hymns loudly enough on Sunday, God won’t notice that we are being held hostage by our own hypocrisy on Monday. We pay our dues to the church and our bribes to the gatekeepers, a double taxation to keep our souls clean and our vegetables expensive. In the end, we have preserved our DNA. We are pure. Purely terrified, purely paranoid, purely delusional, purely fake, purely contradictory, and purely fleeced by our own. But at least we aren’t ‘Them’. Even though ‘Them’ is currently the only reason ‘Us’ has a roof to sleep under…..
P.S.
But on a completely unrelated note, I have an emergency. I need to rehome 4 sets of my mother’s kittens and I am pretty desperate at this point. They are small, furry and unlike our workforce, they actually move around quite a bit. They are available immediately, absolutely free, no toll gate fees apply. You can mail me at [email protected]. I am dead serious about this! Please take a cat. Or four.
