The sweet and the lowdown

If I were ever to write a novel, this is how it would begin...

It was a Kohima of fond memories that I was born in. Before insurgency, before the gurgling brook that ran through it caught fire. We were four. Ma, Baba (was that what I called him), Mithu and me. We lived, fought and fell out in a rambling 3-bedroom cottage, with two cavernous, perpetually wet toilets. Our house was quaintly perched on a hillock, and there was no concrete road leading to it. Only a neat pile of stone steps that connected it to other hillocks and civilisation …