August has always been a tense month. Nagas would wait to celebrate the 14th of August, Naga Independence Day, and the buildup to the Day was fraught with tension and secretive plans. In years past, an elderly man would don his Naga army uniform and march out from his home carrying the rainbow flag to town. He would continue marching until arrested by our policemen and incapacitated from completing his march. That old man left for his heavenly abode many years ago, but his dramatic patriotism will not be forgotten. A slightly built man with a determined look on his face, he would not let anything deter him from his march. He was a living picture of what the Nagas must have been like in the early days, invigorated by the simple motivation of freedom. Things have become so complicated now. The rainbow flag of the western world is a signal for quite another movement, and signifying quite another kind of freedom. You have to be a Naga for the rainbow flag to make sense to you.
In our schooldays, the approach of the month of August signified many other things. The Assam Rifles band would begin early to play the greatly familiar marching songs, as a preparation for the Independence day parade. Bagpipers led the green-clad band as they played the songs that most townies remembered from many Independence days past. School parades were always a part of the official parade. Four years of parading in sun and rain, especially the heavy rains of August that soak you to the skin (and bones) are not exactly memories to treasure. In those days, all the parades took place at what we locally call the local ground.
At one brutal parade, the sun beat down mercilessly. The schools that were participating had come to a standstill after smartly ‘taking the salute.’ Probably ‘giving the salute’ is the appropriate term, but you know what I mean. Line by line the students in their school uniforms were standing in formation, providing an audience for the governor’s speech followed by speeches of other dignitaries. One by one, the speakers droned on. In later years, I came to realise no one really listens to what those speeches are about. They listen hopefully hoping that the speeches would soon come to a merciful end. On that hot August afternoon, as the students were kept standing and waiting for at least three hours together, a sound was heard. A young boy had fainted. He had fallen face forward onto the soil and short grass. Teachers rushed forward to his side. First they tried giving him water, but seeing that he was in no condition to make the effort of drinking, a stretcher was quickly provided and the boy carted away. The speeches continued as though nothing had gone wrong. But for the students that was the story they took home when it was all over. What was it all for? Was it worth that? They were children, not soldiers. The same treatment for soldiers could not be meted out to school children. Those were the arguments and questions angry parents came with and they were agitated and complained to the respective schools. There was not much the schools could do except to promise that the teachers would make sure the students were safe. But they could not control the sun and rain, could they? To give some incentive to students selected for the parade, sweets were distributed after rehearsals. The sweets graduated to singara in the next year, all courtesy of the government. Not sure if that was an incentive for more participants.
August is also the month of excessive rain. Only poets can transform days of incessant rain into beautiful phrases and invented metaphors. Oral poetry praises the verdant vegetation of the month and compares it to a lover’s beauty. Another poetic voice considers it as the rain that is sweet, the rain that waters our crops so that their growth is ensured. It is the rain that brings life to our fields. This is why the farmer has so many names for rain and each flower that the rain in August brings to bloom, albeit briefly, is not nameless. A poem describes the sound of rain on the roof as a memory of pleasant former times. Thank goodness for the poets who can weave beauty out of the mundane. As for the rest of us, let us endeavour to rain harvest what August gives as there will be months in the future when we will wish we had not complained so much about the rain.
