The City That Keeps
Its Own Counsel

I have been trying to describe Aizawl to people who haven't been there, and I keep failing. Not because there's nothing to say — there's everything to say — but because what makes Aizawl extraordinary is not the kind of thing that survives in description. It is experiential. You have to be in it.

Try anyway: a city balanced on a ridge, so steep that the houses stack vertically instead of spreading horizontally, each one apparently held in place by habit rather than physics. A place with the energy of a hill town and the self-possession of a capital. A city that is genuinely itself in a way that very few Indian cities are anymore.

Reiek Tlang. The ridgeline above Aizawl. The world drops away on both sides.

The Mizo Difference

The first thing visitors notice about Mizoram is the cleanliness. Not the performative cleanliness of a tourist town preparing to be seen, but the matter-of-fact cleanliness of a place whose people have decided that this is simply how things are. Streets swept before dawn. Waste sorted. A civic consciousness that feels less like policy and more like character.

The second thing you notice is the music. Mizo churches — there are many, this being one of India's most Christian states — produce choral singing that you can hear from the streets. Not amplified, not produced. Just voices, assembled, doing something together that sounds like it matters. I stood outside a church one evening and listened for twenty minutes without going in.

The road to Reiek. The mist arrives at eye level. You ride through it.

Reiek Tlang — The Summit Above the City

Reiek Tlang is thirty kilometres from Aizawl and a different world. The road climbs through forest, through mist, past the "I ♥ REIEK" sign in the village that is the most earnest piece of place-branding I have ever encountered — and means it — and eventually delivers you to a ridgeline that looks out over valleys disappearing into cloud in every direction.

The grassland at the top is golden in April, the specific gold of dry grass that hasn't decided yet whether it's dying or resting. Stone steps follow the ridge down one side and up the other. The mist comes in from the valleys and wraps around you and for stretches of the walk you can see only the six metres of trail immediately ahead. It is the most beautiful kind of blindness.

The "I ♥ REIEK" sign in Reiek village. The most sincere piece of signage in India.

Bougainvillea in Reiek village. The colour that Mizoram keeps finding excuses to use.

The ridgeline at Reiek Tlang. Arms out is the only appropriate response to this.

The trail to Reiek Tlang summit. The climb is steep. The view earns every step.

The Night Ride Back

I rode back from Reiek after dark. This was not planned — I had stayed too long on the ridge, watching the light change, and the light changed all the way to dark before I noticed. The road through the forest at night is not frightening, exactly. The trees are too tall to be frightening. They are simply the world, doing what the world does when it thinks no one is watching.

The headlight of the scooter lit a tunnel of road ahead. The mist caught the beam and scattered it. On the left, the forest. On the right, a drop into valley darkness. The city was somewhere below, its lights visible through gaps in the trees like a fallen constellation.

I arrived back in Aizawl at 8pm. Ate rice and meat at a small restaurant where the owner refilled my glass without being asked. Slept the sleep of someone who has been outside all day. This, too, is the point of Mizoram.

Coming back after dark. The headlight, the mist, the road. One of the best moments of the year.