Let's go a'Flyin

It’s 5 in the morning. I am woken up rather rudely to discover that the bus is now empty; we’re the last two people on the bus, me and the conductor type person who is talking to me in a language i do not wholly understand. It does not matter, I have arrived! I lug down my backpack excitedly to open still groggy eyes to my first glorious sunrise in the ‘Land of the Rising Sun’. The sunrise is glorious, no doubt, but as still woozy mind slowly realizes, I am not in Arunachal Pradesh, not yet.

After all the months of planning, “How in the world did I land up here?” Wait, did I say months, I meant days, err…well, it doesn’t really matter now, does it? This is not Itanagar, this is the middle of nowhere, but my skin, parched from Delhi’s heat and pollution, welcomes the clean early morning chill. Had I known then that Banderdewa was actually a spot in between the states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh that sees its fair share of violence, I might not have been so welcoming.

Coming from Delhi’s infamous claim as home to the world’s most badly behaved men, I was a little unnerved to find no women around. The few men around were still sleeping or staring at me, or so my prejudiced brain informed me. I walked around in circles for a bit until the first chaiwallah opened shop; in India, the provincial chaiwallah is among the best places to garner local information. Chaiwallah uncle informed me that I was in Banderdewa, a name that, let alone having never heard of before, I was having a hard time pronouncing.

As the tea leaves turned the boiling water in the pot a deep red, the few men around started making conversation with me. The automatic reaction was to panic and assume the worst, and till that moment I thought I was fairly open minded. It was so hard to simply accept them as warm hearted people, who happened to be shabby looking men. And as I sipped on the hot strong lal chai, theytold me I was about 2 kilometers from the Itanagar checkpost and therefore, 2 kilometers closer to Ziro where I was headed. One of them even accompanied me down the road from where I could get a ride into Ziro!
We live in a beautiful world, if only the mind didn’t love building walls!