In Nagaland for the Hornbill, I had decided to take my experience one step further by not making an advance hotel reservation; I wanted to stay with a native. But the tourist influx surpassed all previous years – filling up every hotel and listed homestays – it so turned out that I wouldn’t have got any place to stay. If I hadn’t lost my pen, that is. Amidst all the scurrying on the inaugural day (“Photographers, please leave the performing arena, now!”), the ducking (“Photographer with the long hair, you are blocking the VIP view.”) and the dodging (“Hoo-ha”), my pen fell out. It was an expensive Swiss Army Pen, bought just the previous day from the airlines which has the habit of making perfectly unwanted things seem eminently useful and sexy. This list also includes a ‘can cooler’ – a contraption which looks like the decapitated limb of Terminator, really. Handy if you happen to lose your way in the desert, still stagger on with a can of cola.
My profuse thanks to the kind soul who returned my pen started a conversation which ended in me checking into the one spare room in his sprawling house late that evening. It was his son’s room who had, at the last moment, announced that he wouldn’t be coming for this year’s instalment of Hornbill. I was their first ever guest. They were not in the homestay business and my expectations were to be kept to the barest minimum.
“Don’t worry uncle,” I assured him. “I just need a roof over my head.”
“And you will be like one of our own sons,” uncle said. Perfect.
“You will eat with us,” said the aunty, his wife. Couldn’t be better. “But come back not too late at night.” Well, ok.
Thus, as luck would have it, I experienced firsthand, the famed Naga hospitality and got to stay at not a hotel. There were 11 children in the family – from the youngest teenager to a mother-of-two in her late 30s – ensuring that I had no dearth of companions. Whether I wanted to go to the festival, check out the Night Bazaar, groove to the rock concerts, trek up the nearby hills, binge along the meat trail or quaff rice beer from every single morung (tribal dormitory) representative of the 16 tribes set up at the festival venue, I had an accomplished ally.