ABSTRACT
In 2012 I stood on the fourth floor of the Shija Private Hospital in Langol Lamkahi. On the other side of the road running past the hospital and all the way along the foothills to the National Games Village – completed to house athletes for the 1999 event and then sold off, in controversial fashion, in the years following – is a church built on a hillock, a cluster of houses on various flattened patches of hill, and at street level a row of restaurants and small hotels. A small sign marking the start of the ‘reserved forest’ is lost among the advertisements for Palmei Fooding and Lodging, Triune Medicos, and scores of small signs advertising various training courses and tutors to help students pass medical examinations. As I stared out the window a bus full of young women in yellow and purple nursing uniforms passed on its way to the hospital’s own nursing college. At night, while much of Imphal is in darkness and the hills of Langol are speckled with small house lights, Shija glows from the lights generated by its own power supply. The site has been dubbed ‘Health City'; a phrase that even the Chief Minister has begun to use.
