I came to Chendang village in Nagaland as an SBI Youth for India Fellow, a fellowship run by SBI Foundation, where I was placed with Eleutheros Christian Society (ECS).
I came to Chendang as an SBI Youth for India Fellow. The fellowship, run by SBI Foundation, is a 13-month programme that places young people with grassroots organizations to work on rural livelihoods, education, health and more. I was placed with Eleutheros Christian Society (ECS), and I lived in the Chendang village for the full length of the fellowship. A village cannot be understood through day visits. You learn it by working, eating and waiting alongside the people who live there.
In Chendang, jhum cultivation is the main source of income, and there are very few other ways for young people to earn locally. For many of them, earning a living has meant leaving the village in search of work. Our project tries to offer another option. Mushroom cultivation needs little land and a small investment, and it can be done close to home. It also has a shorter harvest cycle than most other crops and gives good returns, which makes it a steady source of cash flow. With it, young people can build a regular income without having to migrate.
Mushroom cultivation starts with chopping paddy straw, and I made it a point to be there for every step with my youth group, not just overseeing but actually doing the work alongside them. That day we were chopping straw together, talking, cracking jokes, the kind of easy back and forth that made the work feel lighter. We were using a dao (a local machete). A slight shift in focus was all it took. In a single moment, I cut my thumb and index finger, and my scream turned the whole wholesome, joking mood into panic.
The group got seriously worried. I tried to calm things down by playing down the wound, even as I was doing rough first aid on myself. Somehow, we finished the day's work anyway. That evening, at the local medical sub center, a nurse told me the cut was deep enough that it needed stitches, but without the right tools available, she had to manage with a proper bandage instead, a process that took over half an hour while I nearly fainted from the blood loss. By the end of it, both fingers were bandaged.
Later that evening, hungry, it hit me. I couldn't cook. And right behind that thought came a string of others. How would I manage. What was I supposed to do now. What would happen over the coming days.
What happened next is something I never saw coming, a kind of solution that left me in a debt I don't think I'll ever be able to repay.
At first, I felt strange accepting so much from people who had so little to spare themselves. It didn't sit easily with me, being fed twice a day by households I hadn't done anything to deserve that from, and I kept wondering when it would feel appropriate to say I could manage on my own.
But it wasn't just one household, or one person going out of their way. It was the whole community quietly deciding, without ever discussing it out loud, that I wasn't going to go hungry while I healed. Someone would notice my bandages were still on and simply assume I'd be eating at their place that day. Word seemed to travel on its own about whose turn it was.
One person in particular, Anou Khumla (anou means big sister in Chang language), ended up taking care of me the most. When I once mentioned that my fingers felt fine enough to cook again, she looked at the bandages still on my hand and told me plainly that I wouldn't be cooking until they were fully healed. For the rest of that week, she called me over twice a day, once for lunch, once for dinner, without missing a single one.
And here's what made it bigger than it might sound. I'm vegetarian, and I don't eat meat, fish, or eggs. In Chendang, meat, especially pork, is part of daily life, and even rajma, something everyone eats regularly, isn't something I eat either. So, household after household prepared separate meals for me anyway, usually dal, papad, and chutney, making sure I never ended up with just rice and dal.
It meant someone was rethinking their own meal, every single time, just to make room for mine.
This whole experience made me feel like home, far away from my home, which I never thought would be possible. But an entire community made me feel exactly that, without ever making it feel like charity. Chendang made me believe it really is only ever about people, not place. We feel home in people, with people. Home isn't a place, and they showed me that in the most ordinary way possible, one meal at a time.
[Abhayjeet Gupta is an SBI Youth for India Fellow (2025-26) working with Eleutheros Christian Society (ECS) in Chendang, Tuensang, Nagaland]