An unexplored land in the eastern Himalayas of India – unadministered until India won her independence. Everything being built from scratch here – schools, hospitals, roads and bridges to connect it with the mainland, even relations between the endemic tribes of the region. Members from different tribes were made to gather as laborers to build a road through treacherous forests and mountains. Even in such thorny environs, love blooms like a rose.

SYNOPSIS

The Administration made it compulsory for every village to send a volunteer each from every household to construct a stretch of road that would connect Tawang and Bomdila in North East Frontier Agency with Tezpur in Assam. Rinchin, a youth from the Sherdukpen tribe arrives with his kin at a place called Eagle’s Nest to volunteer for the construction. One day, he along with a few girls enter a thick jungle to collect firewood, and encounters an extremely beautiful girl. The two instantly fall in love with each other. The girls accompanying Rinchin assume this beautiful stranger to be a shrimpu, a mythical creature living in the high mountains with the power to assume human forms to lure men away. Tsering Wangmu, a girl from the group, attacks the girl with a machete and had it not been for Rinchin’s intervention, the result could have been fatal. But the girl turned out to be Yama, from the Nyishi tribe, who had come with her village folk to volunteer for the construction. The Administration had made all volunteers stay together so that they could familiarise themselves with each other. Each tribe, although now under one administrative umbrella, had different customs, different languages and ways of life. Each thought of themselves as superior to the other. Whereas Sherdukpens were a peace-loving Buddhist tribe, Nyishis were animist, fierce and always at war. The Sherdukpen, fearful of the Nyishi who they considered as most cruel, first refused to work alongside them – both were assigned to work in a difficult rocky site with a hanging cliff.

The initial reluctance ultimately gave way to a feeling of bonhomie when they realised that despite their differences, they possessed the same human nature. Rinchin made friends with Tadak, the Nyishi group leader who also happened to be Yama’s brother. They communicated in pidgin Assamese, their lingua franca, because their own tongues had nothing in common. But for Rinchin and Yama, language proved to be the tallest barrier.

Neither one knew that the other was already betrothed. Rinchin was betrothed to Tsering Wangmu, the girl who attacked Yama in the forest and was jealously guarding her fiancé from the time of that encounter. Relatives of Yama’s would be husband, camping a little distance away, came to know about the affair and insisted that she stayed with them till they returned home. The hurdles started mounting – even Tadak, who had become Rinchin’s good mate, went against the two.

Silent Lips, Whispering Heart is the story of two lovers. Taking the road as metaphor, the author has woven a story of a remote region in its journey of connecting to the mainland – how mountains connected to the plains; how people, unknown to each other, got connected and how a backward world plugged itself with the so-called civilised country.