How I ended up here with Baba, I’m still not too sure. Between the malnutrition, the exhaustive travel and the sensory overload, it’s hard to be sure of anything. But I suppose it was impulsive wanderlust more than anything else, though there was also that 22-hour roach-infested train ride north from Kolkata and a jalopy-boat crossing on the Brahmaputra River. When Ryan Salm, a photographer friend of mine, began waxing poetic about a harebrained journey to a mystical Indian state called Nagaland, I jumped on board. He and his girlfriend, Lauren Bobowski, came upon some Naga photos and handicrafts while backpacking through Myanmar a few years back. It’s certainly an odd place to be, especially for four seasoned, albeit naive, American travelers with notions of Indiana Jones-like discoveries.

“It seemed so far out there and so far from anything we had seen before,” Bobowski told me. “It’s going to be wild; they’re going to be living in the bush.”

Awesome. I’ve always wanted to live with a tribe in the bush.

The fourth member of our group, Rich Duncan, came along because the housing market took a dive and, as an architect, he finally had the time to vagabond through a place he had never heard of. So now, here we are, on an island in the Brahmaputra. It will take us weeks to reach Nagaland by foot and dilapidated jeep, and what we encounter en route will be far more than what we bargained for...