The land is bountiful, bearing fruits and crops of different varieties—oranges and grapefruits, bananas and mangoes, rice and mustard, tea and coconut, areca nut and betel leaf. During the summer rains, the place is washed clean and covered by a rich, deep green carpet which, from the air, appears to be an incredible patchwork of geometrical patterns. In the winters, the farms are, for the most part, quiet and fallow. The fields are almost barren; dust lies where rice stalks flourished in the monsoon rains, when women with saris and skirts wrapped around their legs walked with military precision through knee-deep water and slush, holding porous, delicate-looking but strong cane baskets. These baskets are fish traps but they would not look out of place as an exotic artifact in the drawing room of a wealthy family in Delhi, Bombay or Calcutta. Mud-spattered and deeply tanned from the sun and humidity, these women wear japis or cane hats on their heads and cane trays on their backs during the thunderous monsoons for protection from the heavy rain.

These are vignettes of gentleness and social peace among communities used to a slower pace of life, whose worlds are gentler and kinder than ours. Such postcard-like lives conjure up visions of South-East Asia and one would not be far wrong in linking the two. For India’s North East is where South and South-East Asia meet and merge to form new identities, rooted in either tradition and possessing a uniqueness of their own.

But with astonishing abruptness and brutality the calm of these societies is being torn apart.