Waiting for the Plague
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APRs IN 10/10/07 Text Revise ___________ NOTES: Art Director ___________ Color Revise __________ DISPATCHES THE CALM BEFORE THE SWARM Children in Mizoram cross a suspension bridge leading to a village where most of the houses are made of bamboo. WAITING FOR THE PLAGUE Every 48 years or so, in the remote Indian state of Mizoram, hundreds of thousands of acres of bamboo bloom, touching off a plague of rats and devastating famine. As the Mizos face the next outbreak, can anything help them? BY ALEX SHOUMATOFF ome time ago, my attention government’s failure to respond with ade- Researching the matter further, I dis- was caught by a bizarre item quate food aid sparked a guerrilla war that covered that the Mizos, who number few- buried in the back pages of lasted 20 years. er than a million, are Tibeto-Burman—a the Montreal Gazette. It was Now, I read with mounting interest, the different race with a different culture about a small, remote state in bamboo was starting to flower again, and from the other billion-plus people of In- the northeastern corner of everyone was cringing. Masses of rat traps dia. They are believed to have migrated India, wedged between Myan- and tons of rodenticide were being trucked from southern China down into the hu- mar (formerly Burma) and Bangladesh, in and distributed to the rural population. mid, bamboo-infested armpit of the Bay S called Mizoram. Hundreds of thousands of Mizoram’s chief minister, Zoramthanga of Bengal a few centuries ago. Through acres of Mizoram are forested with a single (many Mizos go by only one name, but the most of the 19th century, they lived in species of bamboo, which fl owers only once names are distinctive), had been the dreaded scattered villages and made war on one every 48 years or so. When this happens, leader of the guerrillas. A Castro fi gure in In- another and their neighbors, taking the the fl owers produce fruits whose protein- dia, he had risen to power on the fl owering of heads of their enemies. Transvestism was rich, avocado-like seeds are devoured by the bamboo, and now he had to deal with it. widespread among the men and was ac- jungle rats, and the rat population explodes. A place where people’s lives are held hos- cepted by the society. The women had an The rats go on to eat everything. They wipe tage by the reproductive cycle of a plant—the unusual amount of say, and still do. out the villagers’ crops and grain bins, and story seemed like a ghastly Orwellian fable, The Mizos lived in isolation until the Mizoram is gripped by famine. The last the fi cción of a magic realist, fodder for Rip- 1890s, when two Baptist missionaries from time this happened, in 1959, thousands ley’s Believe It or Not. Was Mother India, still Wales arrived. Their eff ort to convert this of Mizos (as the region’s inhabitants are reeling from the 2004 tsunami, sending us a population of “hitherto ignorant tribals” called) starved to death, and the Indian message—nature runs the show, not us? was facilitated by the fact that the Mizos al- 204 VANITY FAIR www.vanityfair.com PHOTOGRAPHS BY STEVE MC CURRY DECEMBER 2007 2204.indd04.indd 1 110/29/070/29/07 22:35:26:35:26 PPMM 1207VF CL-36 Text Revise ___________ NOTES: Art Director ___________ Color Revise __________ DISPATCHES ready worshipped a supreme being, whose Between the ridges are deep valleys in since 2002. The forests around at least name was Pathian, and believed in a place choked with bamboo, 95 percent of it the 30 villages are in fl ower. Six districts are much like heaven. It was simply a matter species that will soon be nurturing mil- overrun by hemipterous stinkbugs—thang- of getting them to give up their more sav- lions of jungle rats. Its scientific name is nang in Mizo—which are the size of a large age practices, like head-hunting and animal Melocanna baccifera, but the Mizos call it kernel of corn. As they suck on the nectar sacrifi ce. mau or mautak. Its impenetrable brakes from the bamboo fl owers, the bugs grow fat Today, 90 percent of Mizos are God- cover about 30 percent of Mizoram’s 8,142 and oily and are considered a great delica- fearing Christians, and Pentecostalism, the square miles. After the bamboo fl owers, the cy. Historically, an outbreak of these insects born-again evangelical movement, is spread- whole plant dies—a traumatic event for the means that the mautam is imminent. ing like wildfi re there, as it is in traditional animals in the jungle, and for the rural peo- The big wave of gregarious flowering socie ties worldwide. A few thousand Mizos ple, who depend on the bamboo for almost will begin in the coming months, moving believe that they are Jews—descendants of their entire material culture. This “dying of up from the south, from the Chittagong the Manasseh, one of the lost tribes of Israel. the bamboo” and the ensuing outbreak of Hill Tracts, in Bangladesh, into Tripura and Mizoram is famous for its hospitality rats and famine—the whole horrifi c cascade Mizoram, and then up to Manipur, Megha- and its fi ber-less ginger, the government’s of events—is known as the mautam. laya, and Nagaland—the other tribal, semi- Web site proclaimed. “Hotels of star and In New Delhi, I had paid a call on Dr. assimilated states in the northeastern cor- ner of India. Mizoram, because it has more mautak than all the other states combined, will be the epicenter of the catastrophe. EVEN TODAY, MIZORAM “A Fear Psychosis” REMAINS ONE OF THE he nearest place that’s flat enough MOST CUT-OFF PLACES ON EARTH. for planes to land is 12 miles from Ai- T zawl, but the drive from there to the city takes an hour. The road weaves tortu- non star category” were waiting to receive I. V. Ramanuja Rao, a botanist with the In- ously and precipitously up, past houses with you. The state animal, it said, is something ternational Network of Bamboo and Rat- latticed mautak walls, perched upon pilings called a “serow.” “Music is a passion for tan (INBAR). As we sat in the group’s con- on 60-degree slopes. Women carry produce the Mizos,” and the “hills pulsate with the ference room, lined with shelves displaying in mautak baskets, and a waterfall flows twang of guitars everywhere.” some of the 1,500 products that are made into a split-mautak pipeline. Everything Was this not a place that had to be from bamboo (there are even bamboo golf around here—fences, fl utes, furniture, fi sh checked out? shirts), Dr. Rao, a soft-spoken, encyclopedi- traps (to list just some of the artifacts start- cally knowledgeable 52-year-old, explained ing with f )—seems to be made of the bam- “A Gregarious Flowering” that mautak is a “running” bamboo, as op- boo, and its shoots are a major part of the ven today, Mizoram remains one of posed to a “clumping” one. Its rhizomes Mizos’ diet. “They’re softer and taste bet- the most cut-off places on earth. As I spread rapidly underground, like tentacles, ter than the shoots you get in restaurants,” E register with the police in its capital, sprouting shoots that mature into 30-foot says Dr. Lalthangliana, who is giving me a Aizawl, the clerk tells me that in the last jointed poles in just two to three months. A ride in his jeep, “and the tabasheer [the fi ne- fi ve years the state has had only 2,319 for- single grove can cover 700 square miles and grained silica found in the hollow stems] is eign visitors, most of them missionaries and yield 10 miles of usable pole. used to make love potions, poison antidotes, evangelists. It’s March 2005, and I’m just But then the mautak waits 48 years to and medicine for diabetes, ulcers, asthma, the 75th sap—or “foreigner,” in Mizo (from fl ower. Why is this?, I asked. “This is not chronic cough, and old-age weakness.” the colonial Hindi term sahib)—so far this at all unusual in bamboos,” Dr. Rao said. Aizawl is a spectacular hill town. It began year, and one of the few sap journalists to “Some species take a hundred years. What as a British fort 112 years ago and spreads have shown an interest in the bamboo fl ow- triggers the ‘gregarious fl owering,’ as it is for several miles along a 4,000-foot-high ering, or in anything at all in Mizoram. called, after so long is a botanical enigma. ridge, spilling down its slopes, with a maze A few days earlier, I’d been stymied Maybe some sort of genetic memory in the of narrow roads and alleys and staircases by the Ministry of Home Aff airs in New rhizomes, or alarm clock ticking in their connecting the various levels. The Mizos Delhi, where I was told it would take cells. Even bamboos from Burma that have the uncomplicated innocence of peo- months to get a Restricted Area Permit to were taken to Kew Gardens, in London, ple whose exposure to the West has been this sensitive border area. Then, serendipi- have somehow remembered decades later limited. “Mizoram is very homely. We have tously, I met Dr. R. Lalthangliana, who is when they were born and have blossomed a happy outlook,” says Dr.