Incredible India: Entrances Compared

My husband John and I approached the immigration official at the airport in Bangalore side by side. “Are you traveling together?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, then added. “We’re married.” His response in clipped British-style English: “I never make any assumptions about that.”



With that, we entered the world of Bangalore, the high tech capital of India, where John would be on assignment for Cisco Systems for the next 2-1/2 months. It was my second time entering India in the past 3 months.


In February and March I traveled with fellow photographer and friend Terri Gold photographing the tribes in Northeast India. It used to be called the Northeast Frontier or the Seven Sister States. Our entrance to the restricted region of Nagaland (http://www.mapsofindia.com/maps/nagaland/nagalandlocation.htm), former home to fierce headhunters, was not that sophisticated.

Besides an Indian visa, a special permit is required to enter Nagaland. These are only issued for couples (meaning a man and a woman) or groups numbering four or more. The tour company in New Delhi had put two extra women on our permit, one from France and another from Japan. They were mysteriously “not able to travel when it came time to get on their planes,” explained the Bhutanese Nepali managers of the company that had been founded by a Buddhist Rinpoche. Even though deceased, the holy man still had a dedicated office in their small complex, complete with a dusty outdated computer.

After we had landed in Jorhat, Assam, we crossed the border into Nagaland. Here a soldier stopped us to confiscate our Tata jeep-like vehicle for government work. The state election was only a few days away and they were short on wheels, he explained. Jimmy, our able Naga guide, was able to persuade them that it was not a good idea to leave paying guests without transport. (We later found out that if the only occupants were locals, the vehicle would have been taken for sure.) This lone soldier didn’t check our document for missing tourists so we thought we were out of the woods.

A few kilometers down the road we encountered the officer in charge who said we were not going anywhere in a group of two women. Jimmy got on his cell phone and called all of his contacts in the nearby regional capital, Kohima. He talked a friend of a friend into leaving his home late on a Sunday evening to try to get us into the mysterious region. The kind man was also a police captain who ranked the guy on duty, but unfortunately it wasn’t his watch.

After long negotiations they struck a deal. If we would back track to the police headquarters and redo the documents, it would be Open Sesame. By breakfast the next day our problem had been solved using some ingenuity and a little oldfashioned document manipulation with white out. The multiple photocopies of our documents listed only Mary Altier and Terry Gold. The French and Japanese women had become MIA.