[ Dani Sulu ]
My friend, Prof PG Tago, comes off as a perfect gentleman with a three-piece suit, designer shoes and a cap that befittingly adorns his otherwise deeply balding head. His neat image and dressing sense is admired by all, especially by the fairer sex. But then, he was not always like that.
Having come from the same village, Tago’s presence in my life goes back to the point where the memory of my life itself starts. He must have been a bit younger than me, maybe in months. My earliest memory of Tago is of his face smeared with dirt and dripping nose and the sight of his nasal mucous that would drip down and down till it reached his stomach and then suddenly he would sneak it up again into his nose. At other times, his nasal mucous would be smeared across his cheek with some dried remnants of mucus stuck in the back of his palm. His dirty face and equally carelessly tugged dirty clothes marks the memory of his childhood in the minds of all our contemporary friends. This period must have been sometime in the middle of the 1970s. Since memories of long gone periods are fogged up by so many things, the exact years are lost in the doldrums of life’s happenings.
I went to a boarding school, VKV Sher, in 1978 and we lost touch with each other for some time. The early childhood passed away in a zip.
Then, in 1984, I joined the Donyi Polo Vidya Bhawan, Itanagar and our teen years were destined to be spent together once again.
Tago had changed a lot for the better. His teen years were of struggle. His family’s economy depended much on his mother’s grit and determination to provide for her children. She ran a local wine shop, and it was the favourite of the locality in Naharlagun, just behind Lichi Legi’s big building where an SBI office was the prominent landmark. His father was a well-known local priest.
Tago helped his mother run the household. He would bring firewood in the morning, go to school during the day, help his mother in brewing local rice beer, and sell it in the evening. During the afternoon, we would rough it out on the Naharlagun football ground, playing our hearts out.
He was so hard-working during his early teenage years that he single-handed carried sand from the nearby river and constructed one Assam Type OBT house in G Extension. We used to while away our leisure times in this getaway, daydreaming and talking about girls.
Came the college and university days, and I dropped from the Class 12 exam in 1991, whereas he passed in the first attempt itself and went on to join Kirori Mal College, Delhi University, Delhi. Later, he joined JNU and completed his MA and joined MPhil.
During the school and college days, Tago was a simpleton and would keep away from wine and girls, unlike us, who had taken to wine, dine, girls and wild moments the way a duck takes naturally to water.
In 1996, he got selected as a political science lecturer after facing the interview conducted by the Arunachal Pradesh Public Service Commission and joined Jawaharlal Nehru College, Pasighat.
Tago was a late bloomer. After completing his MA from JNU, New Delhi and becoming a lecturer, he bloomed, and bloomed wildly in the fields of wine and romance. By this time, we were slowly withdrawing from the wild fields of wanton romance and adventure. He opened up to these fields and they took him with both hands. Many a young lady fell for him. He seemed to be naturally settled in the tipsy world of sweet wines and sweet companies of many a young lady.
For the good of all, he fell for a young lady who was as pretty as any words could describe. I am not sure where he met Miss Mudang Yalu, who was fair as snow and beautiful as any flower in full bloom. All said and done, they seemed to have had a torrid and intense romance before settling down for marriage. During the Mabbo Inchi, which is the binding marriage ceremony of the Tanw society, 16 of us friends attended and took Aalu (Yalu) with us to his home. It was a sort of record and blasphemous as not more than five people are permitted to attend this marriage ceremony from the groom’s side.
After marriage, Tago’s life was reined in to an extent. He became a family man and got deeply involved in Tanw society’s activities. He was everywhere in society works, irrespective of whether it was a celebration or passing through difficult times. At times he dared to venture where the proverbial overcautious Tanw elders feared to tread. We all would wait with bated breath. He conducted the golden jubilee celebration of Hija school in 2003; he was the secretary of the All Hija Welfare Society; he graduated to pan-Tanw organization, and remained as the general secretary of the Apatani Socio-Cultural Society, Itanagar for three consecutive terms on popular demand. He was one of the founding members of the Arunachal Indigenous Tribes Forum and continues to be one of its most active members. He was also the president of the Arunachal College Teacher’s Forum till a few months back, and he was elected as the general secretary of the Tanw Supuñ Dukuñ, the apex body of the Apatani society, in 2018. He doesn’t fall in the category of charismatic or crowd-pulling and rabblerousing personalities, but his amiable personality, hard work, patience and getting on well with everyone without any ego hassles has made him one of the most popular and dependable personality of the Tanw society.
Today, as we step into the autumn years of our lives, I look back on our life, at how we passed our early childhood playing around the dirty village streets, how we struggled in the teenage years between helping out our parents and the football fields, how hard we tried to keep up with our better placed friends during college days, and how we gave our last drops of sweat and tears to get a decent job, how promising our marriage looked with the most beautiful young women of our generation as our wives, and how we steered our marriage through unseen storms and unexpected bumps, how we are apprehensive about our young children, how we fought and quarrelled and fought with each other, sometimes over small and trifle issues and sometimes over our differing ideologies and opinions regarding the society.
All the above phases of life have passed through between the years of our friendship without realizing that we had hit the autumn roads of our lives.
Only the other day, when we met at a formal family event and saw each other in formal dresses with lines of age drawn around happy-to-see-you faces, we realized that the mellowing years of our lives had caught up with us. The careless jeans and baggy pants even during formal occasions have given way to suits and sober dresses even during casual occasions.
The years have rolled by and the dresses and manners of speech have changed, but deep inside our hearts, life still beckons us and we wish to walk the road ahead, maybe with more matured and firmer steps.
