Myoko is friendship said out loud.

Myoko is the long friendship rite of the Apatani, who call themselves Tanii. It is kept in the villages of the Ziro valley, in Lower Subansiri. M.N Homestay is in one of those villages, Mudang Tage. The house does not run Myoko. The clan and the village do.

People translate it as a festival of friendship, and that is not wrong, but it is thinner than the thing itself. Friendship here is an obligation you can be late for. Households host the people they are bound to, and then they walk to those houses and are fed in return. The visiting is the rite. A guest who arrives hoping for a stage and a timetable will be in the way.

The valley does not celebrate Myoko together. The villages take it in three turns, so a household carries the full weight about once in three years, and spends the other two years walking to someone else’s door. Accounts differ on a name or two at the edge of a group. The shape that the valley itself repeats is this:

In 2018 the public days were with Hija, Mudang Tage, and Bamin-Michi. That is the group a guest at this house should ask about. A March when Hong is keeping Myoko is not a quiet month in the valley, but it is not Mudang Tage’s own hosting year. Ask the house which turn the year belongs to before you plan the trip around it.

The visible days sit in late March and run on into April. One Apatani account, written from Hari, puts the start on the evening of 20 March and carries the obligations through to the middle of April. The district’s own note says the friendship runs for nearly a month, from the end of March toward the end of April. A newspaper account from the valley speaks of about ten public days, often between 20 and 30 March. Those are not contradictions to tidy away. The preparation is longer than the days a visitor can see.

Timber for the lapang, the community platform, and for the babo, the tall ceremonial pole, is cut well before March. Clans repair the platform and raise a new pole. In the Hari account the platform is spoken of as male and the pole as female, and the trees that may be used are named and limited. There the eldest clan goes first, and the others follow. By the time a visitor sees a pole on the ceremonial ground, the village has already been at Myoko for months.

This is also the season when the new rice goes into the terraces. The prayers that sit inside Myoko are for the crop as well as for the bond between villages. The two are not separate errands.

During the hosting days, houses stay open. A person can come in without the small negotiation that a closed door implies. That openness is the custom, not an invitation to treat a family room as a viewing gallery. The people being received are often biini ajing, the ritual friends from other villages, whose visit is owed and whose meal is part of the bond. Rice beer, meat, and the time it takes to sit down are the substance. A priest, the nyibu, chants. Pigs are offered. There is clan order in who moves, who cooks, and who is visited on which day.

The line of women in the photograph, in white and red, with beads and cane baskets, is ceremonial dress for a public moment of Myoko. It is not a costume put on for a camera. Tiipé, the facial tattoos, and yaping hullo, the nose plugs, belong to older women. That marking stopped in the 1970s. The cloth and the beads did not stop.

Myoko is not shortened for an audience. There is no ticket, no enclosure, and no announcer. If you are staying in Mudang Tage in a hosting year, you are in a village that is busy with its own people. Walk where you are clearly welcome. Do not plant yourself on the lapang. Do not photograph a chant, a priest, or the inside of a house as if the rite were a show. Ask first, and accept no.

M.N is a family house on the lane, with the sign on the lower balcony. In a Myoko year for this group of villages, the family is inside the obligation, not standing beside it as hosts of a festival hotel. Meals, visitors, and the hours of the day belong to the rite. A room may still be free. It may not. The rate and the answer come from the house, not from this page.

Book the room before you travel, and say that you are coming in Myoko. If the year is not Mudang Tage’s turn, say that too, so the house can tell you what the valley is actually doing.

Myoko is not Dree, which is the July rite for the standing rice. It is not Murung, which a single household undertakes. And it is not the Ziro Festival of Music, which is a guest in the valley and leaves when the bands leave.