Roing feels like a dream.

A dreamy sunset in Roing.

Roing feels like a dream.

And no, I don't mean it in the sense that it has been something out of a fantasy. Although, I admit, being in Dibang Valley - and working there even - has been a constant first on my wishlist of life for more than two years, as many close enough to me to bear my constant examples and anecdotes about Idu Mishmi culture would know, when this thought first crossed my mind I never expected it to be followed by the line of thought that did.

Dreams are random, imaginative, and chaotically fantastical; but they are also defined by familiarity. You wouldn't see a face you wouldn't have seen before. You would find your "best friend" from school you thought you had forgotten, or your latest crush, or your pet cat, or the tour guide of your latest trip. You would find yourself toppled into faded, distant memories, with imagination standing in for missing pieces. Dreams make perfect sense - but only when they're not dreams, but when they're being experienced, lived, walked through. Not in hindsight, nor in your expectations as you lie awake in bed.

Everything about being in Roing has felt as if I were falling in and out of a dream. I remembered each turn of the road from Dibrugarh to Roing, remembered the fields and the trees even, felt my hands subconsciously reach for the door before I was consciously aware that we had reached the Santipur border gate to Arunachal Pradesh. And yet, the snow clad peaks whose sight announced the proximity of the Eastern Himalayan state took me aback - evidence of which was my excited expression of it to Iho, my companion for the ride, who didn't know what to make of my perhaps unusually heightened excitement for the mountains that cradled him since his birth, now in his eyes sharing the normalcy of the sky. "That's Siwundi," Iho had said, pointing to the tallest of the peaks, "Roing is just under that mountain, and Mayudia falls right under the peak."

The days following my arrival were filled with ups and downs. Unexpected revelations, content acceptance. Feeling alien in a room scattered with belongings of the previous dweller (my host's daughter), feeling a private, growing closeness with my host when I call her Nani (Mom in Idu) or when she slips an extra spoon of rice on my plate despite protests. Walking the familiar streets of Roing, remembering its shops and their names, but watching it change shape and colour as the rosy tourist glasses slowly abandon my eyes. Hopping along on long rides to forests and rivers prompted by a last-minute invitation, feeling stuck in my room during evenings, wishing for company. Catching glimpses of home in my nostalgia, learning new Idu words every day.

Evenings with Nani mean sipping chai while watching her filter rice in the golden light or chatting about her nights and days as a nurse and the aspirations of her children.

Roing chuckles at my proud proposition that I'd know a place I have visited before and read so much about. It takes me on an awkward, unfamiliar ride - like the water I toss from one bucket to another (and back) every night to save enough to get through the water cut in the day. One moment the town screams "Outsider!", and embraces me with warm hands the next. Roing is indifferent to my love for the valley, deaf to my supposed "knowledge" of its culture, and yet fully capable of swallowing me into itself, for I would happily walk into its dreamy, random, indifferent, warm, simple, familiar, strange world, never to look back.