The Environment

Waiting for the Plague

Every 48 years or so, in the remote Indian state of Mizoram, hundreds of thousands of acres of bamboo bloom, touching off a plague of rats and devastating famine. As the Mizos face the next outbreak, can anything help them?

Mautak in flower—the last stage before they bear fruit and touch off a rat feeding frenzy. Photographs by Steve McCurry.

Some time ago, my attention was caught by a bizarre item buried in the back pages of the Montreal Gazette. It was about a small, remote state in the northeastern corner of India, wedged between Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Bangladesh, called Mizoram. Hundreds of thousands of acres of Mizoram are forested with a single species of bamboo, which flowers only once every 48 years or so. When this happens, the flowers produce fruits whose protein-rich, avocado-like seeds are devoured by jungle rats, and the rat population explodes. The rats go on to eat everything. They wipe out the villagers’ crops and grain bins, and Mizoram is gripped by famine. The last time this happened, in 1959, thousands of Mizos (as the region’s inhabitants are called) starved to death, and the Indian government’s failure to respond with adequate food aid sparked a guerrilla war that lasted 20 years.

Now, I read with mounting interest, the bamboo was starting to flower again, and everyone was cringing. Masses of rat traps and tons of rodenticide were being trucked in and distributed to the rural population. Mizoram’s chief minister, Zoramthanga (many Mizos go by only one name, but the names are distinctive), had been the dreaded leader of the guerrillas. A Castro figure in India, he had risen to power on the flowering of the bamboo, and now he had to deal with it.

A place where people’s lives are held hostage by the reproductive cycle of a plant—the story seemed like a ghastly Orwellian fable, the ficción of a magic realist, fodder for Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Was Mother India, still reeling from the 2004 tsunami, sending us a message—nature runs the show, not us?

Researching the matter further, I discovered that the Mizos, who number fewer than a million, are Tibeto-Burman—a different race with a different culture from the other billion-plus people of India. They are believed to have migrated from southern China down into the humid, bamboo-infested armpit of the Bay of Bengal a few centuries ago. Through most of the 19th century, they lived in scattered villages and made war on one another and their neighbors, taking the heads of their enemies. Transvestism was widespread among the men and was accepted by the society. The women had an unusual amount of say, and still do.

The Mizos lived in isolation until the 1890s, when two Baptist missionaries from Wales arrived. Their effort to convert this population of “hitherto ignorant tribals” was facilitated by the fact that the Mizos already worshipped a supreme being, whose name was Pathian, and believed in a place much like heaven. It was simply a matter of getting them to give up their more savage practices, like head-hunting and animal sacrifice.

Today, 90 percent of Mizos are God-fearing Christians, and Pentecostalism, the born-again evangelical movement, is spreading like wildfire there, as it is in traditional societies worldwide. A few thousand Mizos believe that they are Jews—descendants of the Manasseh, one of the lost tribes of Israel.

Mizoram is famous for its hospitality and its fiber-less ginger, the government’s Web site proclaimed. “Hotels of star and non star category” were waiting to receive you. The state animal, it said, is something called a “serow.” “Music is a passion for the Mizos,” and the “hills pulsate with the twang of guitars everywhere.”

Was this not a place that had to be checked out?

“A Gregarious Flowering”

Even today, Mizoram remains one of the most cut-off places on earth. As I register with the police in its capital, Aizawl, the clerk tells me that in the last five years the state has had only 2,319 foreign visitors, most of them missionaries and evangelists. It’s March 2005, and I’m just the 75th sap—or “foreigner,” in Mizo (from the colonial Hindi term sahib)—so far this year, and one of the few sap journalists to have shown an interest in the bamboo flowering, or in anything at all in Mizoram.

A few days earlier, I’d been stymied by the Ministry of Home Affairs in New Delhi, where I was told it would take months to get a Restricted Area Permit to this sensitive border area. Then, serendipitously, I met Dr. R. Lalthangliana, who is Mizoram’s minister of forest and environment, as well as its minister of education and its minister of information and communication. He cut through the red tape with one cell-phone call, and we flew together to Aizawl. Heading northeast from Calcutta, the plane crossed the plains of Bangladesh, where a population half the size of the U.S.’s is crammed into an area the size of Iowa, and three-quarters of the dwellings are made of bamboo. Then a rugged hill country, pleated with jagged, north-south-running ridges, appeared below us. “This is Mizoram,” said Dr. Lalthangliana.

Between the ridges are deep valleys choked with bamboo, 95 percent of it the species that will soon be nurturing millions of jungle rats. Its scientific name is Melocanna baccifera, but the Mizos call it mau or mautak. Its impenetrable brakes cover about 30 percent of Mizoram’s 8,142 square miles. After the bamboo flowers, the whole plant dies—a traumatic event for the animals in the jungle, and for the rural people, who depend on the bamboo for almost their entire material culture. This “dying of the bamboo” and the ensuing outbreak of rats and famine—the whole horrific cascade of events—is known as the mautam.

In New Delhi, I had paid a call on Dr. I. V. Ramanuja Rao, a botanist with the International Network of Bamboo and Rattan (inbar). As we sat in the group’s conference room, lined with shelves displaying some of the 1,500 products that are made from bamboo (there are even bamboo golf shirts), Dr. Rao, a soft-spoken, encyclopedically knowledgeable 52-year-old, explained that mautak is a “running” bamboo, as opposed to a “clumping” one. Its rhizomes spread rapidly underground, like tentacles, sprouting shoots that mature into 30-foot jointed poles in just two to three months. A single grove can cover 700 square miles and yield 10 miles of usable pole.

But then the mautak waits 48 years to flower. Why is this?, I asked. “This is not at all unusual in bamboos,” Dr. Rao said. “Some species take a hundred years. What triggers the ‘gregarious flowering,’ as it is called, after so long is a botanical enigma. Maybe some sort of genetic memory in the rhizomes, or alarm clock ticking in their cells. Even bamboos from Burma that were taken to Kew Gardens, in London, have somehow remembered decades later when they were born and have blossomed on schedule. The last time Sinarundinaria nitida [a bamboo native to China] flowered gregariously in Szechuan and died, there was heavy mortality among the pandas, which eat its shoots. But then, after a year or two, new shoots appear and the cycle begins anew. It’s as if, periodically, the entire eco-system has to be purged with these species. But other species flower every year, or nearly so.”

By the time of my arrival, the mautak in Mizoram is flowering only “sporadically.” Scattered reports of the bamboo’s blossoming or even bearing fruit have been coming in since 2002. The forests around at least 30 villages are in flower. Six districts are overrun by hemipterous stinkbugs—thangnang in Mizo—which are the size of a large kernel of corn. As they suck on the nectar from the bamboo flowers, the bugs grow fat and oily and are considered a great delicacy. Historically, an outbreak of these insects means that the mautam is imminent.

The big wave of gregarious flowering will begin in the coming months, moving up from the south, from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, in Bangladesh, into Tripura and Mizoram, and then up to Manipur, Meghalaya, and Nagaland—the other tribal, semi-assimilated states in the northeastern corner of India. Mizoram, because it has more mautak than all the other states combined, will be the epicenter of the catastrophe.

“A Fear Psychosis”

The nearest place that’s flat enough for planes to land is 12 miles from Aizawl, but the drive from there to the city takes an hour. The road weaves tortuously and precipitously up, past houses with latticed mautak walls, perched upon pilings on 60-degree slopes. Women carry produce in mautak baskets, and a waterfall flows into a split-mautak pipeline. Everything around here—fences, flutes, furniture, fish traps (to list just some of the artifacts starting with f)—seems to be made of the bamboo, and its shoots are a major part of the Mizos’ diet. “They’re softer and taste better than the shoots you get in restaurants,” says Dr. Lalthangliana, who is giving me a ride in his jeep, “and the tabasheer [the fine-grained silica found in the hollow stems] is used to make love potions, poison antidotes, and medicine for diabetes, ulcers, asthma, chronic cough, and old-age weakness.”

Aizawl is a spectacular hill town. It began as a British fort 112 years ago and spreads for several miles along a 4,000-foot-high ridge, spilling down its slopes, with a maze of narrow roads and alleys and staircases connecting the various levels. The Mizos have the uncomplicated innocence of people whose exposure to the West has been limited. “Mizoram is very homely. We have a happy outlook,” says Dr. Lalthangliana’s wife, Ngurmawii, who, like most of the educated urban elite, speaks fluent English.

No one in Aizawl is fat, and hardly anyone drinks. The entire state is dry, and the only thing to do in the evening is go to church. Every major sect has a congregation, and one or another of them holds a revival meeting just about every evening.

Much of Aizawl’s commerce is conducted by the few thousand Mizos who believe that they are Jews—an idea that seems to have come from the early missionaries, who found remarkable similarities between their animal sacrifices and other rites and those of the ancient Israelites. They have little shops with names like Israel Electrics, Zopa Goldsmith, and Ebenezar Foto, and are the only segment of the population that has an explanation for the mautam: the famine comes because they have not been observing the “jubilee” rite, prescribed in Leviticus, which enjoins Jews every 50 years to “neither reap nor sow,” free their slaves, and forgive all debts.

Outside the headquarters of the ruling party, the Mizo National Front, our jeep pushes through a crowd gathered around a loudspeaker that is issuing instructions about the coming mautam: Grow extra rice and store it in rat-proof bins. Don’t eat any more than you have to. Plant vegetables close to the house and crops that rats don’t eat, like ginger and turmeric. People will be coming to your village and telling you what to do.

The Mizos are starting to freak out, Dr. Lalthangliana tells me. “They have a fear psychosis since the last mautam.

He drops me off at the Hotel Ritz, a cozy little hostelry in the heart of town. In the dining room, with its breathtaking view of the city, I have breakfast the next morning with the Reverend Ray Hannah, an Australian Baptist missionary who has been ministering to the tribal Christians of northeastern India for 25 years. “I’m not out to change anything,” he assures me. “I just want to give them the added dimension of the power of the Lord.” Reverend Ray, as he calls himself, says he has just come from three villages where he laid on hands, got people to speak in tongues, and helped perform 200 miracles. “One woman had been bedridden for three years and was up and cooking breakfast the next morning,” he claims.

In his room, he has a laptop with a digital edition of the King James Bible. We search “plague,” “famine,” “locusts,” and “mice,” finding all kinds of references. Jehovah was a wrathful God, and he was always raining down some natural disaster or other on the backsliding people of Israel. In Leviticus he warns, “If ye walk contrary to me, and will not hearken to me, I will bring seven times more plagues upon you according to your sins.” But the Christian Mizos, unlike their Jewish compatriots, don’t regard the mautam as a biblical punishment for their sins. “No one can ascertain the reason why it is happening,” Dr. Lalthangliana says. “Only God knows.”

“I saw it myself, in November 1958,” Khawvelthanga, Mizoram’s joint director of information and public relations, tells me. “We went out to harvest the rice and nothing was left. I was 15. The rats came out of the jungle into the farmland below Aizawl. They came at night, so we didn’t see them. Then they all died in the jungle. Not many dead rats were seen in the villages or towns. Many people died of hunger in remote villages with no supply roads. They lived on roots and leaves as long as they could.”

When word comes that a small patch of mautak is blooming and bearing fruit right in town, I am taken to see it by a forest ranger whose name is Rongura. The patch is behind the house of an 80-year-old man named Biakthuama. The poles (or “culms,” in botanical nomenclature) are 30 feet tall and about two inches in diameter, with walls a quarter of an inch thick. Several of them have sprouted long, wispy spikes of flowers, known as panicles, and others are bearing green, pear-shaped fruits, or drupes, that come to a long point. I cut into one. It has a hard yellow pulp and a harder, globular white seed, about the size of an avocado pit. The seed is supposed to be an aphrodisiac for the rats. I bite into one, and it’s not bad. Kind of like a palm heart, but tougher.

Children in Mizoram cross a suspension bridge leading to a village where most of the houses are made of bamboo.

Biakthuama, squatting in his hut, says, with Rongura translating, that he brought up some seeds of mautak from the jungle and planted them here after the last mautam. He had been cultivating rice on a jhum, a temporary slash-and-burn farm, on the river Tut, toward the Bangladesh border. “So many rats were coming,” he recalls. “They started attacking the paddies before the mautak flowered, and stayed for two or three months. They ate up not only the kernels of the rice but the whole stalks. I was raising some mice to eat, and they ate them too. I fed them poison. Some died, but there were still so many rats, I couldn’t do a thing. So I left the farm and came to Aizawl. And everyone had the same experience. The rats came even to Aizawl.”

Did you know that the mautam was coming, or was it a surprise?, I ask the old man. “Our grandfathers, who lived through the 1911 mautam, told us that the paddies and crops will be eaten,” he says. “The rats can finish the whole farm even in one night. Our grandfathers said it is the routine correction of the mautak. It is natural. God has arranged these things. We do not know why it happens.

“We also knew it was coming because C. Rokhuma announced it to the whole of Mizoram,” Biakthuama continues. “You should talk to him. He is knowing everything.”

Rodent Control

Rokhuma (who is so revered that he is known to most Mizos as Pu C. Rokhuma, pu meaning “Mr.” or “Sir”) was in charge of rodent control during the last mautam and is the local expert on the phenomenon. He is 90 now and lives in a large, welcoming house in a quiet part of town. Still spry and alert, he takes me into his garden to show me his Rodent Control Demonstration Centre, which he set up in 1951. “I was a schoolteacher, and in 1951 I started an organization called the Anti-Famine Campaign with the victims of the 1911 mautam,” he says. “We knew that the mautam was coming in 1959, and wanted to take precautionary steps. We taught the women to grow more food, and to cook only sufficient food to eat, and save the rest. But our main objective was to kill rats. We used traps and poison—zinc phosphide—and the government paid a bounty of 20 paise [one-fifth of a rupee, or about half a cent today] for each rat’s tail the villagers brought in.” He shows me five different kinds of traps that he invented. One trips a log that crushes a rat as it comes for the bait. Another garrotes the rat. There is a tube for blowing tobacco smoke into the rats’ resting holes, which suffocates them, and a facility for testing deadly “cyno gas powder.” Rokhuma has six small rats in cages and a number of other rats pickled in jars, including a large female with 13 teats. He shows me a scrapbook with snapshots of enormous heaps of rat’s tails. His campaign netted 2.1 million tails, but it wasn’t enough to stop the rats or the famine. He claims that no one starved to death, but most accounts place the number of victims at 10,000 to 15,000. Maybe he is in denial about the uselessness of killing rats, which doesn’t seem to be the answer.

Rokhuma pops open a bamboo cylinder to show me his collection of record-length rat’s tails. One is 14 inches long. He also gives me a copy of his memoir, The Secret of the Famines Found. According to a section entitled “Some of the More Dreadful Rats in Times of Famine!,” one variety of jungle rat, called the chawmnu, has a white spot on its forehead and a white tail and is “about the size of young and grown up pig (a young female pig just attaining the age of bearing first born young ones).” Another section, titled “Some Remarkable Incidence,” includes an anecdote under the heading “Killing of Surprisingly Big Rat”: Mr. K. Laltawna, of the Diltlang village, was standing guard in his barn, which contained the rice he had harvested from his paddy, when the rats came swarming in. He clubbed easily 120 of them to death. Returning to the barn several hours later, Laltawna relates:

I suddenly spot what look like a wild cat sitting in one corner on a gunny bag but surprisingly other rats do not afraid of him. Without having a second thought I hit him hard with my club but such a blow is far from a deadly hit and he merely shows me [his] teeth as if he is trying to attack me by producing sneering sound. I immediately take out my dow and kill him at last.

Other entries include “Caterpillar changed into rats,” “Grub changed into rats,” “White-spotted rats in the body,” and “Rats with tail conjoined with leaf.” Distancing himself from these fantastic reports, Rokhuma observes wryly, “As the saying goes, ‘Seeing is believing.’ ”

“The cause of the rats’ great number is eating the fruits,” he explains. “When the bamboo fruits, the males stop eating their young ones. The mother rat can bear 10 to 13 rats in one litter and can become pregnant again in 25 days, and the babies from a new brood can become pregnant in 70 to 80 days. If the babies are safe from male eating, the rats will increase in great number, and Mizoram is the bamboo center, the main growing place of mautak. When it flowers, the rats come from Tripura and Bangladesh and Assam.”

The Secret of the Famines Found reads like Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year written in self-taught English. It gives the full, grisly history of what Mizos have suffered at the hands of Mother Nature, not only from the mautam but from two other famines. The worst was known as the thingpui tam. It happened at very long intervals in the distant past, and there hasn’t been one since the British began keeping written records. During one, Rokhuma writes, “men could barely sustain their lives by consuming ant-hills; and swines, deprived of proper food, could not produce any audible sound but just stood trembling against the hedge waiting for their dying date.… [Men] could hardly muster their strength to catch hold of such half-dead animals.”

Then there is a smaller but locally devastating famine called the thingtam, which is precipitated by the flowering of another species of bamboo known as rawthing (Bambusa tulda). It, too, blooms every 48 years, but the outbreaks come 18 years after one mautam and 30 years before the next. The last thingtam, in 1977, “proved to be quite disastrous to the people on the western side,” Rokhuma writes, while “many villagers in the eastern part of Mizoram did not feel the effect.” During the 1881 thingtam, 15,000 people died. This was one-sixth of the population. Colonel E. B. Elly, the local colonial administrator, wrote that “the famine arose from the depredation of rats, who multiplied exceedingly the previous year owing to the ample food they obtained from the seeding of the bamboos.” The next thingtam is due in 2025.

In other parts of the world, famines are caused by excessive rainfall, floods, droughts, and earthquakes—natural disasters that strike without warning and can’t be prepared for. Or they can happen for political reasons. From 1958 to 1961, between 20 and 30 million people starved in China because of Mao Zedong’s disastrous industrial and agricultural policies. It was the worst famine in history, and it happened to coincide with the last mautam.

But Rokhuma is convinced that the cyclical visitations on the Mizos are a deliberate act of God. “God has destined such regular and periodic famines so that we may not just sit idle but strive for our own betterment and all around development.”

Most of the time, Rokhuma writes, Mizoram is like an earthly paradise, where tigers, elephants, deer, wild boars, and all sorts of other animals roam, never failing to find their daily sustenance. Monkeys swing in the branches, and beautiful and exotic birds “find life full with the unfathomable riches of the forests.” But there are these periodic cataclysms, which have been going on “since times immemorial” and “could not be done away so far with the present knowledge and technology of mankind.”

The sounds of the thangnang bugs moving through the forest the year before the 1911 mautam, a survivor tells Rokhuma, are “nothing less than the onset of a monsoon hail and thunderstorm.” Big branches snap under the insects’ collective weight. In 1958, a swarm emerges and follows exactly the same route. How they knew where to go is a scientific mystery.

Heavy rain in the months before the 1929 thingtam causes landslides. The roads are blocked and bullock-pulled carts cannot reach the afflicted villages with food. A teenage Rokhuma helps with the relief effort. He doesn’t record how many people starve, but he does give a figure for rat’s tails that are turned in for bounty: 2,660,630.

In 1948, three square miles of green grasshoppers swarm in from nearby Manipur. They are followed by an even more destructive invasion of brown grasshoppers with white stripes. But the 1950s really put the Mizos to the test. In 1954, the flowering of yet another species of bamboo, rawte (B. khasiana), causes a noticeable increase in the jungle-rat population. Two years later there is a bloom of phulrua (Dendrocalamus hamiltonii)—another event heralding the mautam. But the honorable supply minister of Assam dismisses the rumors of an impending rat increase and famine as superstition, and no rice is sent to see the Mizos through.

By 1958, mautak is flowering and bearing fruit in every corner of the land. Locusts and grasshoppers attack paddy seedlings in certain areas, but even this will be remembered as the “year of preparation.” The full brunt of the famine is not felt until 1959. Great multitudes of rats are seen scurrying across jungle paths at dusk and swimming across rivers. Everyone suffers.

The following year, 1960, is supposed to be a year of abundance, with all the mautak dying and the rotting poles providing excellent mulch for crops, but the monsoon doesn’t come and there is a long dry spell. The poor harvest doesn’t yield enough food for the Mizos to recover from the famine. As the quantity of bamboo seeds dwindles, the rats become leaner and leaner until, for want of nutritious food, they die by the millions.

The 1961 harvest is not much better, due to the “fire havoc” and insect mayhem the year before. The Mizo National Famine Front, a statewide mobilization effort to provide relief to the starving people, becomes the Mizo National Front (M.N.F.), a political party spawned by the Indian government’s inaction. Its platform is separation from the central government in New Delhi. The 1963 harvest is also bad. Only in 1964 and 1965 do things start to look up, but then 1966 is the most politically turbulent year in Mizo history. The M.N.F. goes underground, and the guerrilla war starts. It is unsafe for farmers even to follow the paths to their jhums. The Indian government herds the rural people into “protected and progressive villages,” or P.P.V.’s, where they can’t help the guerrillas, and this disrupts paddy growing and causes even more suffering—a man-induced famine this time. In 1976, just as the Mizos are getting back on their feet, with the political turmoil subsiding and the insurgency quiescent, the thingtam engulfs the west, and a swarm of rats pours in from Tripura to eat the rawthing seeds. In 1977, the thingtam hits its peak. At the same time, enormous numbers of locusts swarm over Aizawl. But 1978, thankfully, is a year of abundance.

It has been one thing after another for Mizoram. This is not an easy place to live. Indeed, it is Rokhuma’s theory that no one has ever lived in these hills for very long. They were always driven out by the next mautam or thingtam, and went off to settle in more hospitable habitats—outside the range of these diabolical plants.

I go to see H. V. Lalringa, the chief secretary of Mizoram, who is also the chief officer and chairman of the working committee of its Bamboo Flowering and Famine Combat Scheme (baffacos), a multi-pronged, multi-million-dollar reincarnation of Rokhuma’s Anti-Famine Campaign. The government seems to have the matter much more in hand than it did in 1959. “This time we’re ready,” Lalringa (who has since moved on to another government post) assures me.

Rodent control, not surprisingly, is a central part of the action plan. Trapping has been going on, producing 221,636 tails in 2006. The fewer rats there are once the mautak seeds become available, the better, Lalringa says, but that is open to debate. Rokhuma thinks there were more rats in 1911 than there were in 1959, when the suffering was far worse. Dr. Rao, in New Delhi, said that “traps won’t do much.”

“The death rate during the last mautam was high in rural areas because there were no roads,” Lalringa says. “So one sector of baffacos is connecting every village with a jeepable road. Now almost 95 percent are connected. There are still some villages that are 12 kilometers from the nearest road, but food can be dropped to them by helicopter.

“The Health Department will be working full-time to combat the bubonic plague, typhus, and typhoid that the rats carry,” he says. “Another sector is in charge of building rat-proof [grain-storage] bins in every village. There are weekly broadcasts on the radio, and teams are going out to the villages to make sure everyone knows what to do.”

But the main thrust of baffacos, Lalringa says, is “to turn adversity into opportunity. There are 25 million tons of mautak in Mizoram—14 percent of all the bamboo in India, which has more bamboo than any other country on earth. A vast untapped resource is about to die and go to waste, so this ‘green gold’ has to be harvested. Bamboo is excellent building material—like vegetable steel. It is particularly good in areas prone to earthquake, because it is so flexible. You normally will not die in a house made of bamboo during an earthquake, even if it is plastered over. It is also well suited for areas battered by cyclones, hurricanes, gale-force winds, and torrential rain.

“The seed is rich in protein and enhances the fertility of the female rats,” he continues, “and maybe it is applicable to humans. Maybe it is a natural Viagra or something. We are looking for scientists to study it.”

The Mautam Insurgency

At the Chief Minister’s Secretariat, I am led up a broad flight of stairs to the spacious but unluxurious office of Zoramthanga. The windows are open, and the excited cries of a girls’ field-hockey match waft in from the playground next door. Zoramthanga is a small, unassuming man, completely lacking in the macho swagger and unctuousness of most of his ilk. But he is built like a pint-size Schwarzenegger, and can probably still dispatch an adversary with a blur of his hands.

“I was born in a small village on the Burma border in 1944,” he tells me. “The British were liquidating the last pockets of Japanese resistance, and some of the bloodiest battles of the war came very close to our village.” India’s independence, in 1947, opened up new avenues of possibility for young Indians, and, like many in his generation, Zoramthanga chose an education over a traditional life of toiling in the fields. “I was a month away from getting my B.A. in English literature at the Manipur University, in May 1966, when there was an uprising in Mizoram because of the Indian government’s failure to respond to the famine. The victims of the 1911 mautam had forewarned the Indian government that big famine was coming, but the government said these are just tribal superstitions and didn’t prepare, and the mautam came in 1959 to ‘60, and the rats increased like the Pied Piper story.

“We realized that, as long as we were under India, they would not care, so we started to fight for independence,” Zoramthanga continues. “After the famine, the Mizo National Famine Front became the Mizo National Front, and in the spring of 1966 its leader, Laldenga, made a unilateral declaration of independence, and the M.N.F. went into the bush. I joined at the age of 22 after taking the B.A. exam, before I even learned the result.”

So the last flowering of the bamboo played an important role in Mizoram’s history. It brought about a flowering of nationalism, I offer. Zoramthanga quietly nods.

At first, the M.N.F. staged guerrilla attacks from neighboring Myanmar, where a large population of Mizos has been living for centuries. Gradually, the M.N.F. infiltrated and gained control of certain districts in Mizoram and, in classic Maoist mode, struck out from them against the Indian Army. The army committed My Lai–like atrocities, and the M.N.F. used pit traps with razor-sharp bamboo poles to impale Indian soldiers, much as the Vietcong were doing to American G.I.’s not very far to the east. Every family in Mizoram was obliged to contribute to the cause. The villagers helped with food and shelter, until the army herded them into P.P.V.’s. But the suffering of the Mizo people only increased their determination. “We fought for 20 years,” Zoramthanga says. “Sometimes we were thousands, sometimes only 700. Sometimes we went for a week with nothing to eat but bamboo shoots. Life was difficult, but we never lost heart. The hope of independence kept us going.”

The insurgency dragged on for two decades, drawing support first from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and later from China. In 1986, the Indians realized that the insurgents were never going to give up until they got what they wanted, and a peace accord was finally reached. By then Zoramthanga had become the M.N.F.’s vice president.

“We came aboveground and handed in our arms, and they gave us a special constitutional protection,” Zoramthanga says. “Any law passed by the Indian Parliament regarding religious or customary practice or landholding must be approved by the Mizoram state legislature. The land and its resources belong to the Mizos.”

So in a way you owe your career to the mautam?, I ask. “In a way,” Zoramthanga replies. “The political party was a by-product of the bamboo flowering, but there were other issues: we had never been part of Indian political life—during the British period or after independence. The bamboo flowering was the percussion cap of an old cartridge, and the gunpowder was the constitution issue.”

Having fought and won a revolution sparked by the federal government’s inability to handle the mautam, Zoramthanga, of all people, should understand what’s at stake as he prepares for the rats’ resurgence. His plan, however—to harvest as much of the mautak as possible before it flowers and dies—seems unlikely to stop anything. New shoots will come up and flower and fruit on an accelerated schedule; even poles only two feet tall can bear fruit. “The idea is to not let the 25 million tons of bamboo go to waste,” he explains. “Did you know that one billion people live in bamboo houses, and that 2.5 billion use bamboo materials, and that most of India’s paper is made from bamboo?”

Zoramthanga envisions Mizoram as a major player in the world bamboo market. It will export to Indonesia and Japan, where sacks of bamboo charcoal are placed under floors to absorb moisture. Bamboo heated to 800 to 900 degrees Fahrenheit is used as a clarifying agent for sugar, he tells me, adding that Audi, BMW, and Volvo are replacing their fiberglass dashboards with bamboo ones. As the world’s wood runs out, bamboo will become only more important. “Mautak is a great wood substitute,” he says.

And if the seeds of the mautak turn out to have sexually stimulating compounds for humans, the Mizos could be sitting on a gold mine—if they can get them before the rats do. “Yes!” Zoramthanga says. “And this is a distinct possibility. It definitely needs to be investigated.”

One might expect Zoramthanga to have formed a nostalgic attachment to mautak, having spent so many years living in and off of it. But he is in fact planning to replace much of it with thicker, more commercial species such as B. gigantea, which grows 150 feet tall. He shows me a three-foot cylinder of gigantea. Its hollow center is big enough to stick your foot in, and its walls are half an inch thick.

The authorities’ eagerness to capitalize on this untapped resource has its critics, among them Dr. Rao, who characterizes it as “completely idiotic. The government wants to harvest the 25 million tons before it dies. It is worried about how to get this wood, not about how to take care of the people. It is not a good idea to replace mautak with thicker species from the alluvial plains. There is a reason why the mautak is there, and why it is so abundant. It evolved on steep slopes. The rhizomes package the soil into their interlocking walls and hold it in place, like honey in a honeycomb. There would be massive erosion if it is all cleared.”

In any case, it doesn’t seem possible to remove the mautak. Agricultural conversion and suburban sprawl in Japan and Brazil have wiped out local species of bamboo that caused mautam-like rat swarms in the 19th century, but Mizoram’s mautak is mostly inaccessible, growing in deep gullies and river gorges. Harvesting it would require a herculean effort. Access roads would have to be bulldozed, rope trolleys installed to drag the poles up slopes, and rivers cleared of rocks and fallen trees so the poles could be floated out. A critic in Aizawl describes the harvest plan as “another way to waste the government’s money.” Zoramthanga himself admits that he expects to get only 5 percent of it, at most.

Dr. Rao’s strategy for mitigating the mautam, which he presented at the World Bamboo Congress in 2004, in New Delhi, so far has fallen on deaf ears in Mizoram, although a district in neighboring Manipur is trying it out. He recommends clear-cutting the bamboo and even digging up the rhizomes at the edge of the villages to create “buffer zones”—open areas that the rats will not venture into for fear of being attacked by hawks, snakes, and cats. He also recommends leaving an unbroken swath of the bamboo, through which the rats can be “channelized.” “The Mizos have a better chance of not being eaten out of house and home if they leave a food corridor of intact mautak so the rats can migrate northward with the flowering wave,” he argues.

Critics of the plan say that buffer zones will not stop the rats once they get hungry enough, which they will be after they have polished off the paddies. They know there is food in the villages, and predators will be able to pick off only a fraction of them.

The Laughing Rats

The day after these meetings, Rongura, the forest ranger, takes me into the bush for two days to see more flowering bamboo. The further we get from the capital, the fewer jhums have been hacked out of the forest, and the more bamboo there is—thick jungle, with poles no more than a foot apart, smothering hillsides and frothing up valleys. After five hours of serpentine single-lane roads, our jeep reaches Mamit, where many people died during the last mautam. We drive past a uniformed forester and stop, noticing that he is holding a spike of flowering mautak. Flowering poles can be seen right beside the road.

On the morning of our second day, we go for a walk in the Dampa Tiger Reserve’s magnificent tropical hardwood forest with its field director, Lianmawia. Through the trees, we glimpse valleys that are 20 miles long and covered with nothing but mautak. Some of it has turned yellow—a sign that it is about to flower. Rokhuma’s evocation of an earthly paradise is no exaggeration. Down in a gully, peacock pheasants in a mating frenzy are kicking up a racket, and we spot a large, black, long-armed, tail-less primate—a hoolock gibbon—flinging itself 30 feet into the next treetop.

Laborers carry freshly cut bamboo through the Dampa Tiger Reserve, in Mizoram.

The flora and fauna of the reserve are almost completely unstudied. At least seven Bengal tigers roam its expanse, and it is crawling with cobras, kraits, vipers, and many nonvenomous serpents that hunt rats. I wonder if there is going to be a spike in the snake population when the rats get going. Lianmawia says that a few years ago the reserve’s barking deer got out of hand, and the wild dogs that prey on them rose to the occasion with a noticeable surge in their numbers. Eventually, both the deer and the dogs returned to normal levels.

One thing still puzzles me about all this, I tell Rongura. Why the explosion of rats? There must be some biological reason for it. The rats must be serving some purpose. Or are they just a population that periodically gets out of hand, like the lemmings in Scandinavia or the locusts that swarmed over North Africa in 2004, setting the stage for the famine that wasted Niger the following year? (One swarm in Morocco, 140 miles long and 90 miles wide, was estimated to contain 69 billion locusts.)

Rongura explains that, after 50 years of unfettered vegetative self-propagation, the mautak is everywhere. The groves become extremely congested, and there is intense competition for the nutrients in the soil. “So the mautak has to die, before it gets diseased and its quality deteriorates. The old must make way for a new, young, strong generation.”

Each stalk produces 6 to 10 fruits, he says, and if all of them were to survive and germinate, the next generation of mautak would be crowded and undernourished from the very start. The rats are a mechanism for thinning out the fruits. Every hundred feet or so they miss a fruit. When that missed fruit sprouts, it has plenty of room for its rhizomes to spread over the next 50 years. “So in the true sense,” Rongura reflects, “mautam is a blessing for Mizoram. But it also brings suffering. There is a reverse side.”

We return to the government guesthouse where we are staying. Before turning in last night, we’d set traps in the nearby jungle, along one of the rats’ known trails, but they are empty. Rongura says that means the rats are not abundant yet. “If they were, we would have caught one.”

The only rats I have seen on this trip, in fact, are the ones in Rokhuma’s lab. A few months ago, an Australian field biologist came and collected 11 species of rats in the jungle. It’s not clear how many of them eat mautak seeds. Maybe they all do, given the rare opportunity. In any case, “rat” is a loaded term that plays to Western phobias. Unlike their garbage-eating urban cousins, the rats in the jungle eat natural food and are usually healthy. The big one with the spots sounds a lot like the paca of the Amazon rain forest, whose flesh is delectable.

The Indian attitude toward rats is very different from the Western one. Hindus and Buddhists, which make up small minorities of Mizos, accept rats as fellow sentient beings, deserving of respect and compassion. Hindus even revere rats. There is a rat temple in Rajasthan, and Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of wisdom and prosperity, has a nameless rodent sidekick. To Buddhists, both rats and bamboos are, like humans, caught on the wheel of suffering. We have been rats in previous lifetimes. Western science may be coming around to this view: a recent study found that rats can laugh—or at least emit ultrasonic chirps when they are tickled.

I try to imagine what the mautam must be like for the rats—to be seduced by this fruit and driven to a frenzy of mad procreation and then to have it all turn on you, to be done in by your own appetite. It’s not an enviable way to go.

The Human Swarm

The Mizos have a term for the climax of the mautam. They call it sazu puang, or “when the rats start coming,” and as of this writing it appears to be drawing near. Most of the rats, it turns out, are not exotic jungle species but the common black rat, Rattus rattus, which is native to Southwest Asia. This hardy rodent moved west with the returning Crusaders and Mongol armies and traders, bringing with it the bubonic plague, which killed 20 million people in Europe and 75 million worldwide by the mid-14th century. Rattus rattus thrived in Western cities but was later pushed out by the larger Norway, or brown, rat. This is the species you see on subway tracks—the one that can chew through copper and aluminum and is responsible for 18 percent of New York City’s phone and cable disruptions.

By the end of 2006, the mountain ridges and valleys of Mizoram had turned brown, as the mautak flowered and fruited. More than 60 villages in the east had lost most of their crops, and by this summer the entire state was engulfed. The rats strike at night, so silently you don’t know they’re there, and the next morning everything is gone. The bounty has been restored: one rupee per tail, five for every trap that is made and set. But neither the traps nor the poison have been able to stop the onslaught. Even clubbing them to death—the rats are so intent in their chewing that you can pick them up by the tail—has not made an appreciable dent in their numbers. One pair of rats can produce 14,000 offspring in a year if the males have something better to eat than their young.

Because of better connectivity and communication, there have been few food shortages; the full brunt of famine will not be felt until next year. Zoramthanga sounded upbeat when I last talked to him. He had just made a deal to supply paper mills in Assam and Bangladesh with 420,000 tons of mautak, harvested before it died, and he told me he had personally invented three machines for flattening and peeling the bamboo so it can be made into pressed bamboo board, which is revolutionizing the flooring in Mizoram. “This is an example of how we are using the catastrophe as a stepping-stone, and I think we will end up coming out of it economically better than we were before.”

There is no confirmation of the mautak fruit’s alleged aphrodisiac properties, but some have reported that the juice is an effective agent against dandruff.

As the sazu puang was building to its climax, there was an unrelated outbreak of some two billion rats, unleashed by heavy rain and flooding, in central China. As of July, 6,000 square miles of cropland had been wiped out.

Back in New Delhi, I roam the incredibly congested quarter of Paharganj. The streets are packed with pedestrians, bicycle and auto rickshaws, and the occasional car or cow or emaciated pariah dog. The air, thick with diesel exhaust and other fumes, is scarcely breathable. When the pedestrian flow—about a thousand people per block—hits a major artery, clogged with motor traffic, it swells into a critical mass and then swarms across the road, overwhelming the traffic and forcing the nervous, hyperactive drivers to stop. As hundreds of people scurry among the cars and trucks and motorcycles, I hop into an auto rickshaw driven by an old bearded Sikh in a blue turban who pulls fearlessly into the frantic, helter-skelter traffic, which has now resumed. With his eyes darting quickly in every direction and his masterful steers and last-minute veers, he reminds me of a wily old rat. Indeed, the behavior of this whole human throng is not so different from that of a tide of rats.

I can’t help seeing a parallel with the disaster looming in Mizoram. The parable is obvious: the human race is swarming over the planet and devouring everything in its path. One day, in the not-too-distant future, it will have exhausted the natural resources available to it. Will we then, like Mizoram’s rats, experience a massive Malthusian die-off, or will human ingenuity save the day?

The latest news, from the United Nations’ four-year, $24 million Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, conducted by 1,360 experts worldwide, is that two-thirds of the world’s resources are used up. Everything across the board—wood, water, fish, land—is running out. The continued existence of up to 30 percent of the species on earth is in question. Frogs, honeybees, polar bears, freshwater mussels, and some of our beloved songbirds are experiencing mysterious die-offs or drastic reductions in their numbers. And our population is scheduled to hit nine billion by midcentury. Mathematically, we seem headed for catastrophe.

But whatever happens to us, my hunch is that the bamboos will survive. One of the world’s most ancient and adaptable life-forms, they have been around for more than 60 million years. There are about 1,200 known species in this enormous family of giant woody tropical grasses, and undoubtedly hundreds more to be identified, so its prospects seem promising, although some 600 species are now endangered. And the rats will not be disappearing anytime soon. Like the bamboo, they evolved millions of years before we came on the scene and are likely to remain long after we’ve vanished. They are always waiting in the wings, waiting for their moment, ever vigilant.

Nature will recover from what we are doing to it. The show will go on, and the mautam, I suspect, will continue to come every half-century, regardless of whether people are still around to suffer its consequences. It seems to be in no immediate danger of extinction—unlike so many things in the world.

Alex Shoumatoff is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair and the author of the 1988 book African Madness. His writings can be found online at Dispatches from the Vanishing World.
