Dzüko is a valley in the far northeast of India where a knee-high bamboo covers the rounded hills so evenly that the whole floor reads as lawn. The line running through it is one Nagaland and Manipur have never agreed on. No road comes near it. You climb three or four steep hours through forest from Viswema or Jakhama, and at the treeline the valley arrives all at once. Wave after wave of smooth green folds, with a cold stream winding down the middle that gave the place its name. There is no viewpoint to collect and nothing to aim for, so a day here is counted in hours of open ground, down to the water and across the floor with the hills changing shape as you go. Rhododendron and temperate forest hold to the ridges above, but the floor never lets a tree stand.
From June into July the pink Dzüko lily is scattered through the grass, a brief bloom that a boot flattens without noticing. It was described as a species of its own until botanists compared it closely and found it all but identical to the Shirui lily, the state flower of Manipur over the range. The valley's flower, like the valley, answers to a different name on each side. Most walkers stay a night at the base camp, a cluster of plain bamboo shelters where you brew tea against the cold while the hills go orange at dusk and the stars come out thick. The morning is the reason to be up there. Fog slides off the floor as the light comes, uncovering the hills one wave after another, and the whole ridgeline turns orange. Both states police the ground you are standing on, both claim it, and the tribes here hold their own title to it. When fire ran through the bamboo in the winter of 2020, putting it out meant assembling a response across a line nobody agrees on, air force helicopters included.