Leaving behind all plans

I left my house for three weeks. While I was away, I started hearing the first rumblings of the violence in Manipur and started worrying about friends and acquaintances there.

- NISHA SUSAN

Within days, many of the people I knew, or knew of, in Imphal had left. They are, variously, a doctor, a journalism student, a retired government employee, someone who works remotely for a Bengaluru IT company, a housewife who had just finished building a home in Imphal. They have left with their most precious portable possessions. They have left with babies and the elderly.

I came back home to Bengaluru. This is a house I have been renting since 2020, a house we were thrilled to move to in the first year of the pandemic. Before we moved, my younger child had not seen the world outside our apartment’s front door from March-August 2020. His first sighting of a black car speeding past him caused him to wonder if it was a bear. Since then, it has been thrilling to live in the poorly connected suburbs with the rich possibility of seeing birds and butterflies. I have always wanted a wall full of flame vine and three Sankrantis down, I have finally seen those familiar orange flowers.

I came back home and a close friend told me that her people, who have left Imphal, do not think they will ever be able to go back home. At least, that is how it feels now. Some of her family have jobs and portable wealth, along with portable possessions. Others have been impoverished overnight and are now suddenly highly dependent on the kindness of extended family in the way that they might remember some distant relative in their childhood was.