THE Garo morning dawns as softly as the night falls. I opened my eyes to the sound of birds -- hundreds of them in scores of species. The whole place is coming alive. I stretched, let out a yawn and jumped out.

A cool breeze washed my face. Everything looked doubly clean and beautiful in the bluish morning light. Diffused lighting has always had its own beauty which you get only in the morning.

Mashi Ma was already up and Mukti too. Moloya was in the bamboo-walled kitchen, sipping tea.

The Garos are a matriarchal society. The women take the lead in everything; they own the land and the men. When a Garo man gets married, he has to migrate to the bride's house -- just the opposite of us; when a baby is born, they take the title of the mother, not the father.

And women are the most respected of humans in the Garo society.

Close by, there is a bamboo lean-to and we could hear female voices. We peeked through the big windows. It's a weaving factory and colourful Garo clothes are being made by a few Garo women. The whole process is almost as ancient as civilisation itself and yet impeccably nice clothes roll off the production line. In fact, we saw similar weaving projects in many other Garo houses that day.

After breakfast, we scouted the villages stippled with thatch-roofed mud houses. Children running naked, skewed hill dogs, oinks of the black boars tied in the backyard. And the unmistakable Garo smell.

The sky slowly turned black with cumulous, the wind chilly. An unearthly light descended on the paddy fields, they looked soft -- the green not quite green, the yellow not yellow but something else. Well, you'd better see it for yourself.

We arrived at Khamal Dighi, a pond where the Garos used to settle their village disputes. The system was so simplistic the Garo way. Both the parties the complainant and the accused had to take a dip in the water and stay there as long as they could. However the one that surfaced first was the guilty. The system is obsolete now. But Garos still honour the pond in a special way.

We moved on. The land became more and more removed from civilisation. We felt like we are in a place out of the ordinary. The cloud rumbled and looked like the bath water of a coal miner. The sun was already obliterated. A few drops came down, cooling us off. The hills on the Indian side were now nearer and more visible, the border pillars hardly 50 yards away. We could see a few houses on the side of the hills. And a BSF watchtower was about 100 yards away. We retreated and took a few snaps and came back to our Garo host's home.

A special chicken was being prepared. Mukti wrapped the marinated chicken in banana leaves and put it on a pot of boiling water. About an hour later, the chicken was cooked in vapour, a delicious treat.

After dinner, we headed back home as the rain eased up. At Koilatoli, we took the left turn for the coal dump. Huge Indian trucks, some rundown, rumbled down from India and dump coals. Importers in small tin-sheds look busy receiving their orders. The last tin-shed is home to two BDR men with Chinese AK-57s. They looked friendly and one even offered to walk us down to the Indian border, some 100 yards away.

The dense forests on the Indian hills beaconed us with their breathtaking beauty. A few egrets flapped lazily along the hills. We were standing just on the borderline, with heaps of black coal in the background. An Indian Sikh soldier came and shook our hands. Suddenly, a bond of friendship hung in the air there. The border tension seemed something of the past. We sat there and chatted nonsense.

photo: Syed Zakir Hossain and Inam Ahmed