Every reporter pays his dues doing one beat, or story, in his lifetime. I paid mine covering the Northeast between 1981-83. Just as you can’t get that out-of-sight, out-of-mind region on our front pages these days, then you couldn’t keep it off. The ’80s were the most perilous of what the American South Asianist, Selig Harrison, described as India’s Dangerous Decades and the “Seven Sisters” of the Northeast had danger signs painted all over them. The Assam movement was at its peak with supplies of crude oil to the mainland blockaded, Naga, Mizo and Manipuri insurgencies were active, there were killings of “outsiders” in Tripura and even serene Meghalaya had had its first brush with riots in what was called the anti-dkhar (outsider) outbreak.

That eruption in Meghalaya was sharp, but short. By the time I pitched tent in Shillong, still the unofficial capital of the Northeast, peace had returned. You could walk on the street safely at night, even drive to the only “authentic” Chinese restaurant near Polo Ground where they served raw onions and green chillies with your greasy chopsuey. In nearly three years of living in Shillong in what’s been the most wonderful period of my life, personally and professionally, I wrote almost no story on Meghalaya. There was no trouble here, no massacres, no ambushes, insurgency, human rights abuses and secessionism. It was impossible to sell a Meghalaya story even to an Indian Express news desk run at night by a most benevolent and uncomplaining chief sub-editor, namely Radhika Roy (yes, now of NDTV). The usual question from the desk was, but what is the story in Meghalaya? It was echoed in the question a Khasi civil servant once asked me: “So Shekhar, how many plains people do we have to kill so you can get a Meghalaya story on your page one?” So the only Meghalaya stories I wrote then were Sunday features, gleefully accepted by Dina Vakil, who then worked at The Indian Express like all great journalists do at some point. One on Dollymoore Wankhar who made mementos from real butterflies, on the local pastime of “tir” or mass archery where you got prizes for guessing a intriguingly calculated number of hits, rather than for backing the winner, on the quaint old winery of Mawphlang that made syrupy cherry brandy, and one even on tribal monoliths — in fact these were the only ones I had seen outside of Asterix comics.

... contd.