Within each village, there are the khels or colonies. “During the olden days, there used to be fights between the khels,” a villager who worked in Kohima told me over a plate of crunchy sakhothu (rice cooked, dried and fried) and tea. There was a slab erected in 1946 which meant ‘peace was bought between the two warring khels by a gift of cows’. Each khel had its own ghena or religious ceremonies during which members of other khels were not allowed entry. He showed me the stairway made from stones which allowed the villagers to pass by a particular khel without passing through it during the ghena. Bearing testimony to the action this little village has seen, starkly painted with white on a red coloured community hall are the words: Japanese troops arrived at Kigwema on 4-4-44 at 3:00 p.m. during World War II. I tried to find somebody who might be able to remember or reconstruct the events of that day. But according to one account, thanks to the height on which Kigwema is situated, most of the villagers could flee to Kohima before the Japanese troops reached. And from there to Zubza, 15 km further down towards Dimapur, which was the last frontier from where the Japanese were finally pushed back into retreat. So, besides the toll on the military there weren’t many civilian casualties. But my friend from the DIPR shared with me her belief in a conspiratorial tone that the many unnamed tombstones in the War Memorial were those of the brave villagers who had fought back the aggressors standing side by side with the armed forces with their daos, spears and bare hands.