While traversing through the mountainus tribal landscape of Nagaland, nestling quietly in the far east of India, i met a woman who was as old as a stone and as wise as a monk. She was Pupi, aged 122, apparently the oldest surviving woman of India, slowly crawling through her last days, resides in a small village called Kigwema in Nagaland. Having been blessed with a rare gift of seeing one's succeeding four generations, her only regret is having lost her eyesight due to age.
She feels them. She hears them. She narrates stories. The children gather around her tiny wrinkled feet, they play with her beautiful shaky hands and when the villagers come to pay their homages, she just smiles and shoos them away. Meeting her felt like going to a temple, touched by a strange sense of bliss of having theld a rare precious stone, a repository of history and a testimony to time.
While touching my hands, she said that i had long fingers and asked whether i painted. This caught me completely off guard and was stunned by her cool sharp assessment. When i said yes, she just passed a light flaky smile and asked me to never stop expressing through my paint.
After sitting with her for quite some, soaking in stories of Japanese troops entering her village during the world war II, her subsequent flight, her trials and tribulations, her dead children and her long lost husband, for a moment it made me feel i was listening to an old record in a gramaphone, screeching and squeaking in the middle, yet reeling its grand legacy.
I left with a heavy heart and a rare feeling of time, longitude and the amazing corpus of a human's life
