In the 80s the Iran-Iraq war made us anxious. The rumours were that essential goods would run out. We were told that petrol would become unavailable to transport the commodities that we used daily and for which we were so dependent on truck movement between the states. Food items would then inevitably disappear from the shop shelves.
‘Stock food, stock tinned items and non-perishable items,’ older people who had actually gone through wars like the Japanese invasion, warned those who had not been so fortunate. ‘Buy salt,’ said many older women. ‘Buy a bag of salt,’ said my mother. She had already bought her bag of salt, and dal and rice she had in plenty as she had carefully stored her paddy harvest in the grain room. Buy salt, have you still not bought salt? I bought salt, my sister bought salt, my neighbour bought salt. There it stood next to the fireplace, our bulwark against the Iran-Iraq war. If the war reached us, we would fling salt at the invaders.
The war was never far from us. One night there was a continuous rumbling sound in the skies. It went on for hours. It resembled thunder but if it was thunder, some explanation was required for the duration of the ‘thunder.’ More than an hour went by with the rumbling sounds unabated in the skies. I woke up terribly frightened of God and all things celestial. Nobody had an explanation for that phenomenon. We in Nagaland, Northeast India, how could we be hearing the noise of a war happening in the Middle East? Well, stranger things have been known to happen. The next day the sound of rain came in the early afternoon. Our water drums were collecting dust because it had not rained in weeks. The rumbling was a teasing sound in the distance, promising rain, but taking its own sweet time to arrive. Finally, the first rain drops fell on the tin roof. The rain drops were so few and far between that we could count them. But the eagerly awaited rain was nothing like we anticipated. The drops were bigger, and they looked like drops of oil. They were also black in colour. My brother said it was probably acid rain because of the war. It was easy to blame the war for all the unnatural happenings at home. The Iran-Iraq war.
What happened to all that salt after the war? My sister says a large part of her salt melted away. Mine grew rock-hard and to get at it, I had to chop it with a dao, Naga style. I ended up voluntarily giving away big blocks of salt. It would have taken us years to go through that bag of salt. Was it 20 kilos or 50 kilos? I forget, but it was the big jute bag that only a Deswali labourer could carry. And now, with the landslide that has taken away our roads and our people’s lives, one wonders if it is too late to buy salt. Our hearts are with the families of those who lost their loved ones to the fury of nature. May they know peace. May no more lives be taken. Even in the late 30s, road digging along the Ledo road by the colonial forces always ran into trouble during the monsoon months. There are accounts and photographs of army vehicles sliding in mud and being lost when the struggle against the mud ended in the vehicles slipping down the hillside, beyond retrieval. The road, known as the Stilwell Road, was dug from Ledo in Assam to China via Burma to act as a military supply road. A traveller from the UK visited Tinsukia in 2018 but could not locate the Ledo road and was told it had fallen into disrepair. The British road engineers described the soil in our Hills as shale, ‘a fine-grained, sedimentary rock’ formed over time by ‘clay, silt, mud and organic matter’ compacted together, a fact affirmed by our own geologists. Shale explains why our soil is highly susceptible to landslides and mudslides. It probably occurs in a very large geographical area since the Ledo engineers had problems with it. As a layman, one can only hope that the worst has passed. Will prices rise? Will artificial shortages be created? If they are, may the poor not suffer. May the greed of man slumber through this.
