Like too many of us who live down south, my knowledge of the northeast of India is superficial, and I’ve always felt a pang of guilt about this. I recently made my first visit there; I went up to Imphal, the capital of Manipur. I was the lighting designer for a play that travelled as part of a theatre festival, so we were there a scant three days, but it was a wonderful trip. It was strange to be in a place that’s so like India, but not. Indeed, the Imphal residents we interacted with referred to things as either “Indian” or “Manipuri”, and this pride of identity among certain groups has fuelled a decades-long separatist movement, one often marred by violence.

On the day we landed, the whole city was closed for security measures because it was India’s Republic Day. Our cheerful hosts told us there’d already been four bomb blasts in the city, and rather merrily said that one of them had been near the theatre we were to perform at.

Imphal is a small but crowded city with a distinctly unfinished air about its architecture. The police and army presence around the city is forbidding — everywhere you look there are soldiers armed with automatic weapons. Traffic stops and impromptu checks are continual — though as visitors we were always accorded a friendly curiosity, with several soldiers asking us (for their own edification) where we were from. Our hosts were attentive without ever being intrusive, and though we felt looked after, we never felt hustled, something that can happen all too easily with Indian hospitality.

Manipuri cooking

With food being a passion, I looked forward to eating a cuisine I’d never sampled. We had only one Manipuri meal, but all the cooking we encountered featured fresh, wonderful tasting vegetables, and a light touch that preserved their crispness. Manipuris use many different greens in their food, most of which were unknown to us, and one or two of which have deeply strange flavours. But we especially loved the tangy chicken and meat dishes bright with greens and burning with chillies. After all, this region is home to some of the hottest chillies in the world, and though the food isn’t heavily spiced, it can be very hot indeed.

We had no time for sightseeing, but our last morning was spent at the “mother’s market” that’s run solely by women. There was so much that was new to us — the wraparound skirts, the beautiful shawls, and the strange fruit and vegetables. One cranky old woman puffed away on a beedi (local cigarette) as she sold us smoked, dried red chillies. At another stall we bought the aromatic black rice that Manipur is famous for, and that we’d eaten the night before in a sweet dish.

As for those smoked chillies, they were quite large, and in my experience larger chillies are seldom hot. So when back home, I put a couple into a beef dish I made. It was as if I’d tear-gassed our house as the meat cooked, and when we ate, our eyes streamed and tongues flamed, and yet we were drawn back again and again for more.

The unending diversity of India is not easy to forget, but sometimes one stops being surprised by it. Sitting out in Imphal, it struck me that even the markets of Mexico didn’t have as many vegetables and plants that were strange to me, and whose cooking methods I couldn’t even begin to guess at. It’s pretty amazing how far you can travel, culturally, without having to use a passport.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in Bengaluru, India.