The Queen of Love

Heavy Indian rock music, spiced with a tinge of contemporary Bangla, repeatedly punctures the darkness of the night. A bunch of teenagers, visibly rattled by these oriental rhythms, scream their hearts out as they plunge into some kind of wild dance. Within a couple of minutes, the village kids also make their presence felt, by blending in with the rest on the dance floor. In a short while, this fever of wild dancing grips us all, and we join the dancing crowd. This was the scene of an ordinary wedding in Jaflong, a remote village in Bangladesh.

Somewhere, in the midst of this excitement, was Nerola Tynsong, the Queen of a Khasi tribe in Jaflong, Bangladesh. I was stunned to see her dance along with everyone else, as if she wasn’t their superior in any way. In fact, with the exception of her expensive garbs and jewels, there was nothing else about her to show that she was of royal stock.

But as the dancing mood reached its climax, two elderly men, with thick curly hair, bow legs, ragged teeth, and rare dancing strokes that raised a thick cloud of dust off the solid ground, took a dive and began to kiss her feet. That was the first signal of the presence of royalty in our midst, and it was met with a prompt response from Nerola, who kept shouting at these men, “Hey! What’s wrong with you? Stop that! Don’t do that! Get away from here!”

At the end of the wedding party, we retreated into the cozy confines of her mansion. But even there, I was amazed to observe that ordinary people just walked in and out of her residence as they pleased. She ate from the same plate, and drunk from the cup, as the most ordinary of her subjects.

“We were brought up to love every human being, and every creature, equally” she said, when I inquired about her unusual behavior. “In my tribe, we worship nature, because we believe that there is God in nature. Therefore, we also hold nature in reverence. I have been brought up to believe that in this world, regardless of what we do, or who we are, we are all equal and deserve to be treated with love.” (continued next post)