Chatterjee decided to skip practice and come along with me on my travels. One can see a kind of restlessness in him that makes it clear he is not much of a sightseer. Why trouble ourselves so much when we can sit in our room is his general demeanor. He told me he had not been to Kohima despite being in Dimapur for two years.
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| Sacred Forest to the left |
But now he is keen to come. I hired a taxi and off we went based on Pradeep Modak's advice to the Sacred Forest and then perhaps the canyon at Laitlum and then perhaps Elephant Falls. The driver Sanjib was a fellow from Tripura - family out there, younger brother driving a cab while he is here. now Sanjib is not too tech savvy and gets along life smiling away. So with no Google maps to aid him, he took us on the wrong route and where we should have been at 11 in the morning took us 45 minutes more. Anyway, we did reach the spectacular forest, a dense deep grove.
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| Inside the forest |
We took some village road and seemed to have bypassed the main entrance where another smiling young lady gave us tickets to the forest, a guide (without whom you cannot enter the forest), parking etc. We paid and walked in with our guide Ringko or something to that effect. Now these guides speak good English so it's easy. The guide who we met before was way more friendlier but he got another customer, a solo travelling lad from Assam. Chatterjee and I could see that the other guy was offering way more than our chap - but then maybe the presence of the lady could have been the difference.
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| Chattu |
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| A Fallen Tree |
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| A ritual area |
We saw three stones at the entrance, sat on them, and took pics. Our guy did not help us one bit. The rule in the sacred forest is that one cannot take anything into it nor can one take anything out of it (except memories, our guide told us, and pics). We followed him into the dense woods and he showed us a rudraksha tree where he said fruits are borne only once in 8 years (the real ones sink in water), showed more stones, and a place where the sacred rituals are performed - a bull is sacrificed and its head cut off in one stroke. But the rituals do not take place often, rarely, when there is something not right afflicting their tribe. It is of the Khasi tribe he said and there are many sacred forests.
To Rinko's credit he offered to take a pic of me and Chatterjee and he did some trick with his phone and Chattu's phone and took a really nice pic. Then he said it was over and it was just a short walk. The other guide with the lady from Assam struck up a conversation with us and told us more than our guide did. Chattu was disappointed and felt cheated. But he feels cheated most of the time.
On the return journey I could sense Chattu's growing desire to get back to the hotel. He shot down the idea of Laitlum canyon saying what's there to see in a canyon. He made a concession for the Elephant Water Falls which was three levels down and we did walk down and climbed up too despite bad knees. There was water falling here so we were quite happy to take some pics. A few touristy types came with their boom boxes and decided to entertain all of us by playing it loudly and dancing to it in an ungainly fashion.
Chattu and I had had enough and we decided to head back.
...
Now Chattu alias Abhijit Chatterjee and I go way back to 1984. I first remember seeing him as a fiery left arm fast bowler bowling his heart out in the Under 15 nets in our school. He was quick even then. Then we got to play together as members of the Hyderabad Under 19 team which we won at Vizianagaram, then the U22 team at Bangalore which we won again, then the Inter varsity at Vizag and Calicut, the abandoned U22 trip to Madras because of a cyclone. He was a doughty fighter, a tough competitor, could bowl fast and slow, bat anywhere in the order - a captain's delight. Then he played Ranji Trophy for Hyderabad, one game, was dropped and he moved on to the Railways for a job.
When I met him much later he had evolved into a passionate coach who loved his cricket and his coaching. And discuss he does - cricket - all the time. He has coached in Assam, Nagaland, Thailand, Hyderabad and is a Level 2 BCCI coach which is pretty good.
He looks a bit like Sunil Dutt, laughs like Utpal Dutt and is a bit of a control freak. But he is great fun, loves his drink, gets nostalgic at the drop of the hat, loves his music, is emotional and wears his heart on his sleeve. I knew he had lost his father early and had a tough childhood but I never knew he was the youngest of nine children!
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