It was the second time we were meeting with Choro – this time in his home, a two-bedroom apartment, where he lived with his wife and a three-year-old daughter. A few weeks earlier, we had visited his workplace, one of the top five-star hotels in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala. Choro had heard about our research and, as soon as we sat down, he started narrating a story about a magical stone he had found in the village where he grew up, which was situated in the hills of Manipur, a state adjacent to the border of Myanmar. It was a rare blue stone, traditionally used for ritual purposes, which he had brought along to Thiruvananthapuram. During the last year, Choro's family had faced exceptional misfortune and Choro had been forced to travel back and forth to his village, exhausting most of his savings on airfares and medical treatments for sick family members. In a dream, he learned that it was the stone that was causing all this ill fate. After consulting his mother, he threw the stone into a lake. After this, things started to improve, he conveyed cautiously.

Despite a successful career in the service sector that has made him a senior manager of one of the hotel's restaurants, Choro claimed he could think of nothing else than to return home, to the hills of Manipur. His family was there and he had several younger siblings in need of monetary support and encouragement to finish school. The plan was to settle in Ukhrul, the nearest town and the district headquarters, mainly populated by Tangkhul Nagas, the ethnic group to which his wife and he belong. The question they struggled with was how to make a living there. They wanted to start some kind of business but were still trying to figure out what. Choro was from a family of musicians and he was considering taking up music again, perhaps to start a music school.