Shai

In truth, there have been nobler reasons to make a journey.

Someone once stumbled out of Africa and populated the world. Pilgrims trudged for miles to pay obeisance to their gods. People fled war and hunger. They sought knowledge and new worlds, carving shipping routes for their queens and countries. People have traveled to visit the sick and the dying. For love, for adventure. To fulfil their dearest, most precious dreams. To see the Pyramids or the Galápagos. They’ve saved and scrimped and quit their jobs and headed out in triumph. While I—well, for me it’s a somewhat different matter. I’m traveling out of Delhi, this mad, magnificent city at the edge of a desert, to go back to where I came from—the wettest place on earth.

About all this, the lady at the counter is blissfully unconcerned. Her shiny gold name tag says Monika, and Monika cares only about whether the passenger before her has stowed a power bank in their checked-in luggage.

“No.”

“And a coconut, ma’am?” Monika’s face is inscrutable, masked by a variegated coastal shelf of makeup.

I decide I will answer her now and google this later. “No.”

Whatever next? But it looks like I’m done. My suitcase is tugged away on the conveyor belt in spasmodic bursts; I’m handed my boarding pass, a quick smile. Gate 42B.

“Have a good flight, ma’am.”

By the time I’m through security and spat out the other end, I know all about the coconut, its high oil content and how its meat is potentially combustible. Even though, so far, there hasn’t been a single incident of fire on an aircraft resulting from a flaming nut. At least not of the palm-tree kind.

 

In the bit of the airport that looks like a mall, I stroll past beige chinos and pots of body butter, bags as big as bears, women in jeweled saris selling ayurvedic cosmetics. Above, a board is lit up with inspirational quotes, something by Rumi, What you seek is seeking you. Good. I knew it was meant to be—coffee and me.

Upstairs, the queues are long at Starbucks, but I join one nonetheless. Everyone is peering into their phones; I peer into mine, too. Two texts. A TED Talk link from my father—“Tomatoes talk, birch trees learn—do plants have dignity?”—which I save for later, and a message from “Joseph Bangalore.”

In Delhi this weekend. Catch up?

By catch up he means sex. Quick, good, a couple of rounds at night, and once in the morning before he heads off to save the world. I jest. He’s a pharmaceutical sales rep, not someone I might have met through friends or colleagues, but that’s the magic of Tinder. Match. Chat. Date. Regret. Though I see Joseph Bangalore infrequently enough for this last to not have set in—yet. Pity I must tell him I’m not in town.

When you back, babes?

I hate it when he calls me that.

 

Gate 42B is tucked away in a godforsaken corner; down a long corridor, past potted palms, vending machines, and a bald bronze boy perpetually working his surya namaskar. Above me, the airport rises like the inside of a high-ceilinged shell; below, a carpet the distinct shade of diarrhea. When I get there, it’s crowded already, passengers, luggage, kids, spilling higgledy-piggledy off the seats on to the floor.

Since when is Tuesday morning a busy time to travel?

I stand some distance away, sipping my coffee. Pretty awful, but still half-decent compared with what’s available where I’m going: Hello, Nescafé.

Last time waiting to catch a flight like this, I met an old classmate from school; she seemed delighted to see me while I stood there desperately trying to fish for her name, Nandita, Namrata, Namita, and then—like a magician performing a favorite trick—she drew a child out from behind her. A child! Of three or four.

I still borrow earrings when I’m invited for a wedding, and she has a daughter.

No such intrusion now, thankfully, but it returns, my disquiet.

Not because I want children—I don’t, or at least I don’t think I do—but because of something else. Perhaps this is why I’m leaving. Not because of my schoolmate, still nameless, but something else, also unnameable. Not love. Not the weather. Not to prove myself right, or wrong. But because something—I don’t know what exactly—has been lost.

 

Across from me, on a silent news screen, a fire rages through the forests of, I think, South America. The president of somewhere insists it’s not. “The media is lying,” read the subtitles under his pink, belligerent face. He’s saying something about how it’s a fallacy that the Amazon is the heritage of humankind, when my phone rings.

“Hi, Mei.”

“You’re coming home?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

“You’ve been fired?”

“No.”

“Then?”

“What? I need a reason?”

“Of course not. I’m only asking because you usually come around Christmas.”

This is true. I shrug. “It’s the air, Mei. Four seventy-seven AQI and counting.” About this, I’m not lying. Delhi hovers a very close second to Bishkek in the World Air Quality Index list. Bishkek—this, too, I have googled—is the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

“Had something to eat?”

I’m thirty-two and my mother still asks me this.

“Yes,” I lie.

There’s a pause before she asks, “What about the award ceremony, Shai?”

“It’s not my award.”

“Yes, but you should be there, after everything Nah Nah Pat’s done for you. She’s—”

“Family,” I complete. “Yes, I know.” Nah Nah Pat is my mother’s cousin, and she heads a Christian evangelical development agency that I once worked for in the invigoratingly titled role of assistant social transformer.

Mei stays silent.

I sigh. “I’ll call and apologize . . .”

“Yes. And go see her as soon as you’re back.”

It’s time for a swift change of subject.

“Mei, do you think plants have dignity?”

She says she doesn’t know; she hasn’t watched the damn video yet.

“Also,” she adds, “your father’s gone off again . . .”

“He has?”

She snorts, lightly. “Yes. On another one of his crusades.”

I ask, because I must, “Where to, this time?”

“Not far. But he’s becoming impossible.”

Before she launches into the million reasons why, I cut her off, not so gently—“Mei, we’re boarding, I’ll see you soon.” We’re not. The stewards stand desultorily by the still-unopened gate. A daughter nobler than I would have said it’s a good thing, then, that I’ll be home, but for the moment, I want to selfishly, quietly, sip my foul brew in peace.

Why are you coming back, Shai? I wish I could have told Mei that sometimes you must make the journey to find out.

 

We land in a place that falls off the map.

So far east in this vast country that it feels not of this country anymore. I emerge from Guwahati airport into ferocious heat and dust, and a wake of clamoring cabdrivers. I’m looking for Mohun, a guy from home who’s meant to pick me up. We always hire him, though I’m not entirely sure why. He’s busy on the phone for most of the three-hour drive up winding mountain roads, and he chews alarming amounts of betel nut, intermittently opening his door, while we’re moving, to eject a stream of red liquid onto the asphalt. All along, we leave a trail of little crime scenes.

Thankfully, now, he finds me. Ale, he says in Khasi, even though he is Nepali, and whisks my suitcase out of my hand. I follow him dutifully across the parking lot, to a shiny white Santro. The good thing about Mohun is he doesn’t feel the need for conversation, apart from near-monosyllabic questions—AC? Tea? Toilet?—and so I watch as Assam passes by outside the window. After a traffic-clogged section at Beltola, we drive through long quiet stretches, fields edged by graceful palms, ponds choked prettily with hyacinth, and then we hit the truck-heavy highway—also the border between the plains and the hills. Booze shops line the Meghalaya side on the right, where alcohol taxes are lower; on the Assam side, busy markets spill with colorful produce backdropped by cement factories belching white smoke. All this is familiar. All this, I have known all my life. Etched into all the journeys I have made to and fro, from elsewhere to home and back to elsewhere again, an oddly reversed ordering, I know, but home, for me, has always been a place not to live in but to leave.

After we cross Jorabat, a grimy, sprung-out-of-nowhere town, we begin to climb, and I roll down the window because this is when the air turns fresher and the dust lightens. Soon we’re in the mountains, and the way down turns long and steep, the road curling like a ribbon. I find it peculiar, how vast, majestic landscapes like these feel unwaveringly timeless. As though they’ve always been this way, permanent and perennial. But fifty million years ago, all this was underwater; a shallow sea extended from these hills across to Rajasthan. Everything, in its own time, changes.

Though now, too, we could be submerged—I’ve arrived after the end of the monsoon, and the forested slopes shimmer in shades of green I find difficult to describe to people back in the city. Light and luminescent as the first leaves on our planet. Dark and deep, the color of ancient emerald pools. Perhaps because they are drummed from the earth by what we call ‘lap bah—rain so heavy and long-lasting that it’s the mightiest rain of all.

Soon we stop at a makeshift restaurant, with baskets of early oranges, pickle-bottle armies, and swaying banners of silvery Lay’s. I want nothing more than water, and wait while Mohun eats a quick lunch.

When we resume our journey, it’s late afternoon and the air has turned cool. It will cut to the bone when night falls, but I will be home before then, before the shadows grow long and the sun begins to slide behind the hills.

*  *  *

We live a little out of Shillong, at the top of a hill, up a steep slope.

Mohun puts the car into first gear; in second, we would stall and roll all the way back. I’m bracing myself. Always this strange feeling upon arrival—of not being sure why I’m here, or whether I should be here at all. Pine trees tower over us, their shadows falling slenderly across the windshield. Soon, Mohun rounds the last corner, and there, to the right, flanked by bamboo thickets, stands the green gate through which we must enter, and we come to a halt on a porch with a garage housing an ancient Fiat that’s driven only when I’m around. When Oiñ, my nanny, still lived with us, she’d be standing outside to greet me. Today, my mum steps out alone, and it takes me a moment to realize that this pepper-haired lady is her. It’s been less than a year since I’ve seen her—in which secret hours did she age?

When I hug her, though, she smells familiar, of wool and naphthalene and hand cream, and at this moment . . . cinnamon. “You,” she says, cupping my face like she would a candle flame. I look at her, smiling. Mohun is duly paid, my suitcase extracted from the car, and we stream inside.

We live in a big house, far bigger than required for two people who don’t speak to each other much. And emptier, now that Oiñ has moved back to her village and my mum’s parents have died. This does mean sections of the house feel unused—because they are—and my room stays undisturbed. Visit to visit, outgrown yet intimate, palimpsest of every room it has been over the years. Papered with posters of boy bands, Greenpeace, and tennis stars; an old collection of postcards, “Cities Around the World”—Rome, London, Stockholm, Paris, New York—which I thought bestowed on my walls a certain sophistication.

For now, we head to the kitchen. Mei has baked a cake, and the warmth of it lingers in the air. “Your favorite,” she says, placing a slice before me. I also accept her offer of tea. I watch as she busies herself with the electric kettle, the teapot, the cups, not attempting to help her because I know she will refuse and brush me aside. You’ve had a long journey. My mother looks thinner, as though her bones have lightened, but her cheeks are flushed with warmth. It’s strange how she can seem robust and frail all at once.

“How long are you staying?” she inquires. Pleased as she is to see me, Mei is never too keen for me to be here long. Here, where once there was always trouble—or the possibility of it. After Independence, when the people of these hills found themselves swallowed up by Assam, with nothing much in common with the plainspeople apart from newly drawn national borders, they fought for their own state. Meghalaya. A Sanskrit name given to a place that spoke no Sanskrit. The Home of the Clouds. After that, a drive to chase out dkhars, outsiders—the Nepalis, the Assamese, the Bangladeshis, the Bengalis—every decade bringing with it fresh waves of unrest. My mother wished none of this for me—the curfews and violent disturbances, the clashes between our local “militants” and the army and Central Reserve Police Force, of which there always seemed to be an endless reserve to bring here, she said. So, when I was old enough to be sent away, I was. To boarding school, to university, for employment. Always elsewhere. Mei considers our hometown a dead-end place, where nothing ever happens except militancy, and no one makes much of themselves. Except, well, I’m not sure I’m making much of myself elsewhere either.

“So?” she asks again. “How long?”

I give her a reply I haven’t before: “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?” She sits across from me. “And work?”

“I’ll have to find something else.”

“Again?”

“I’ve been there three years, Mei! And besides”—I take a deep breath—“they’re shutting down.” Little hope remains these days for a publishing house specializing in travel guides—we’ve been replaced by apps and Google Maps, our boss told us. And while the rest of my colleagues scrambled around looking for new jobs, I didn’t. I bought a plane ticket. I’m here. This, though, is not something I share with Mei.

“Well,” she says finally, “that’s a pity.”

I sip my tea, but I sip it too quick. It’s hot, and I scald my tongue.

“Careful,” she says, frowning.

“Grace sends her love.” I hope this will placate her. My flatmate is a bona fide parent charmer; Mei has only ever spoken to her on the phone, but even this is sufficient for Grace to work her magic.

“Oh, how is she?”

Grace is doing well, I tell her, working as a counselor at the reputed Bluebells School. My friend is the daughter my mum could be proud of; me, I think, not so much.

The cake, soft and warm and studded with walnuts, goes down heavy.

I sip the tea gingerly and ask about Papa. She cradles her cup in her hands, steam rising gently in front of her face. “Why don’t you go see for yourself?”

“Okay, then,” I say, “I will.”

“You can take him his tea.”

 

When I walk out later, flask in hand, the hills have begun to darken. No more than an hour of daylight remains. Delhi feels far away. Always this, when I arrive home. The sudden downsizing of the world. In some ways, I feel resized myself, smaller somehow, more compact.

I walk up the winding colony road; ours is one of the last few neighborhoods with old houses still standing intact, low-roofed, lime-washed, fronted by neatly trimmed hedges, with names like Hacienda and Little Cloud. Much of Shillong has been given over to manic construction, an inglorious clutter of unplanned cement structures—mostly illegal, of course, in an earthquake zone such as this. Every so often, the town is rattled by tremors, or a series of small rumbles. Warnings of what’s to come, my mother likes to say, sounding as though she might even be wishing it upon us.

My father has no such views. In fact, it’s difficult to discern whether he has views on anything at all apart from things that grow in the garden. And trees. Especially when they might be felled. And “plant bias”—our human tendency to underappreciate or ignore the flora around us—according to him, our species’s greatest, gravest crime.

He has always been this way, for as long as I can remember. Growing plants and saving them, from frost and aphids and too much rain. He’s not as tall as my mum, and built smaller, stouter, less lean, with the air of always being elsewhere. Though now he is very much present—and immobile.

“Hello, Papa.”

“Oh, hello.” He smiles benignly, as though I’ve never been away a day, and that my visiting him under these present circumstances is perfectly normal.

I’ve reached the edge of the colony, from where a pine forest extends over the hills. It’s protected, which means it’s meant to stay unthreatened by housing or commercial developments, but something has driven my father out here to strap himself to a tree. I have visions of gated colonies like the ones in Gurgaon, Western Heights, or Maple Crescent. Or worse, a swanky mall or humongous cathedral.

Instead, he tells me, someone has decided to build a wall.

“What exactly it would be keeping out or in, I’m not sure,” he adds, “but it means cutting down trees to make way for it.”

“How many?”

“At least a dozen.”

The way my father says it, one would think the Amazon’s burning.

“All they need to do is build the wall about a foot thinner,” he continues, gesturing, “and it will miss them completely.”

“Yes, it will,” I say placing the flask beside him. He’s sitting up against the widest of the potentially doomed pines. “How long have you been here, Papa?”

“Three days. We’re taking shifts,” he adds quickly, seeing the look on my face. According to Mei, he slinks in and out of the house like a thief, to eat, to change, to sleep.

“Who’s we?” I look around. There’s no one else here.

Kong Nuramon, apparently, the lady who lives opposite and runs her own nursery. Every day of the year, something or other blooms wildly in her makeshift greenhouse, in the rows and rows of pots along the wall, on her veranda, all along the steps up to her front door. She’s the colony flower lady.

“And?”

Bah Kyn comes over sometimes. My father’s closest friend, who lives across town; given the distance, though, I don’t see how he could be a reliable earth warrior.

“So, what’s happening now?”

“Well, we’re not sure yet,” he admits unhappily. “Kong Nuramon says the wood has already been sold, a lakh, a lakh and a half for each tree. Which is why officials are reluctant to do anything. But Bah Kyn’s been trying to get in touch with someone he knows in the Forest Department who might be able to help.”

“That’s good.” I pause before asking, “Must you be here all the time, then?”

“Just in case.”

He’s sipping his tea now. Mum also sent him some cake. I sit down with him. It looks like we’re having a picnic. The scent of pine rising around us, damp, mulchy, sour. My father looks older, too, gray at the hairline where all was once coal black. Why are you doing this, Papa, I want to ask, but I’m afraid he’ll give me an answer I won’t comprehend. I sit with him quietly. He’s never been one to ask many questions, so usually, I make the effort. “I watched the video you sent this morning,” I tell him.

His face brightens. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” I nod. This prompts him to chatter—about plant communication, their immense aromatic vocabulary, their capacity for memory.

“Birch trees can remember a past event for up to four years,” he says in delight.

Yes, I joke, it’s possible they have a better memory than I do.

He beams. “The lady in the video says that, too.”

It’s growing dark now, quite suddenly as it does in the hills, and here in the forest all light has seeped away.

“Papa,” I begin, “why don’t I request Kong Nuramon to keep watch for any . . . activity here during the night, and you can come home for now?”

I expect him to put up a fight, or just flat-out refuse, but to my surprise, he agrees.

Later, as we walk home together, a thought swoops into my head like a bat: All the trees in the world remember.

 

Tonight, I’m tired. I lie in bed listening to strange silence—in Delhi, always the sound of cars, of flights overhead, the night guard thumping his walking stick on the road every hour. My window here, next to my single bed, looks out into the pine forest, the edge of which my father is trying to protect. From here rises the chirrup of crickets, and from near the stream, a bright chorus of frogs. In the distance, a dog howls, joined by another and then more. I’m almost asleep, when suddenly there’s a sharp rap on my window.

Must be the wind, the branch of a tree, something, I think drowsily. But there it is again, a series of strikes, like pellets or hard rain. I sit up, draw back the curtain, and wrench the window open. Below my first-floor window, a face grins up at me, bright and shiny, full as the moon.

“What are you doing here?” I hiss.

The moon says something in a half whisper.

“Wait,” I add. I pull on a sweater, socks, and scamper downstairs.

My parents’ room, like mine, is on the upper floor but on the far side of the house. They won’t hear a thing. Still, I tiptoe into the pantry and gently unlock the back door.

Standing outside is my friend Kima. “Hello,” he says.

I give him a quick hug as he steps in. We know the routine. I carefully shut the door, and we head back upstairs, but to the TV room, through the attached bathroom, and out into a small balcony from where we climb up to the roof, to a platform where the water tanks sit like squat black monsters. We have been coming here almost a decade. It might be my favorite place in the world, although I would never confess that to this fool. We sit at the edge, the lights of Shillong before us, sprinkled like jewels along the slopes.

“Heard you were back,” he says.

“Yes, but for like three hours now. How did you find out?”

He shrugs. “Small town.”

“Or I’m just insanely famous.”

“I’ll let you take your pick.”

In truth, he’d seen me in Mohun’s cab, taking the turn off the main road heading for Lum Kynjai, where my parents live. Kima roars around on a silver-streaked Yamaha. I met him while dating his friend Dajied—they played basketball together—and while the romance didn’t last, the friendship did. Kima lights a cigarette, a short, stubby Gold Flake, and offers me one even though he knows I don’t smoke anymore. He also offers me kwai—bits of quartered betel nut and tobacco leaf flecked with lime. I decline; I’ve never told him this, but kwai makes me nauseated and dizzy. He will laugh, I know, and call me a bourgeois softie.

“How’s the teaching going?”

He exhales, his face plumed in smoke. “Going along.” This, I’ve realized, is Kima’s answer to mostly everything. “And how’re you?” he asks.

“Okay, I guess.” And this is usually mine.

“How’re your folks?”

I tell him about my father: how, at sixty-two, he’s strapped himself to a tree.

“He’s still there?”

“I managed to get him home tonight.”

He chuckles. “Your mum must be so mad.”

“So mad, her blood pressure has spiked,” I tell him. He commiserates. He has a sick mother beset with diabetes; he rarely talks about her, but I know she was a hawker in the streets of Shillong, providing for a child the father never stayed around long enough to see born. He’s told me he did his PhD in literature to make her proud. Compared with Kima, my mostly directionless existence seems abysmally meager.

“How long you here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh? And work and stuff?”

I tell him.

“That’s shitty. When you get back, you’ll have to look for another job?”

“I don’t know.”

Kima stubs his cigarette out and chuckles. “What do you know, Shai?”

He means it in jest, I’m certain, but something like a fish bone catches in my throat. I try to laugh it off, declaring that I’m going through a cosmic dark age.

“The fuck’s that?”

“Well, the night sky didn’t always used to look like this, you know.” We glance up, the stars bright and clear and glittery. “At one point, for a hundred million years after the Big Bang, there were no stars, no galaxies, only fog. The universe was devoid of light.”

He looks at me. “Still watching Discovery Science?”

I nod. “Especially since I lost my job.”

“And then what happened?”

“I now know a lot more about the cosmos?”

“No idiot, I mean after the cosmic dark ages.”

I shrug. “I guess we’re still finding out.”

*  *  *

Usually, I return to Shillong for brief spells, like quick spring showers.

I rush around, do some local shopping—turmeric, pepper, smoked meat—and visit people, mostly family, an elderly grand-uncle, a cousin who might be in town, a kindly aunt who’ll ask when I’m planning to settle down and have babies. I just about have time to notice how things are different, more cars, more houses, how things are the same, the hills, the light. My parents and I will go for a meal on my last evening here, somewhere nice, which always turns out to be a restaurant in a heritage building on the next hill from ours. Because it’s close and convenient.

And then I leave.

This time, though, it is different. I have no plans. To shop or to see anybody.

And it is strange. I’m oddly restless, like when you pose for a photograph and don’t quite know what to do with your hands and feet.

I am unhabituated here, I realize, in all senses of the word.

What should I do? Should I . . . leave? For Delhi? For elsewhere?

I tell myself I just need, for a while, to breathe.

So I stand in the sun, outside in the garden, where I’m left in the quietness with my own thoughts. I watch the chrysanthemums coming into bloom. The guavas ripening. A small jewel snake slithering into the bamboo grove. The sparrows rising and swooping. The grass growing. The poinsettia changing from green to gold.

I also find odd jobs to do around the house—cleaning out drawers, rearranging bookshelves. I look through a box of old letters, my old diaries. What strange archaeology am I indulging in? I ask Grace over the phone. “Shai, you’re looking for yourself.” And we both laugh—though I do wonder, am I not really? Am I not asking the same question the first creature who could did looking up at the sky: Who am I?

Some afternoons, I abandon my father and the pines to walk farther into the forest. I haven’t done this in many years, and I walk along, passing the occasional kid on a bicycle, or a runner, feeling like a stranger. I wish I could say I find peace here—or joyous communion—but apart from some sort of measured contentment, I don’t. Perhaps the city has dulled my heart, my senses. Perhaps because, unlike my father, I can’t name anything I see. Is that why the forest doesn’t speak to me? Because for me it’s all surface? The tall, ungainly pines, the ferns like swords and ostrich feathers. I am walking through a landscape, pleasing and peaceful, but what does any of it mean? I feel deeply unknowing of the world.

It doesn’t help that at home, a sliver of tension sharpens. My mother, I can tell, is a little disquieted—why are you not making plans to leave?—even though she hasn’t said anything to me yet.

So I begin to stay out of the house more.

Luckily, it’s that time of the year when the weather is briefly stilled between monsoon wet and biting cold. I venture into town. Along the main road, toward Wah Umkhrah—once a stream in which the British fished for trout, now the biggest drain this side of Shillong, clogged with colorful plastic. I pass newly built churches, old houses sitting small and incongruous, a line of little shops. A bakery, a Chinese restaurant. Above, signboards advertising homes in New Shillong, faster Internet, a hot-air balloon festival—“See the city from the sky.” On the streets, faces pass by, sometimes in a blur, peering into phones, sometimes I catch chatter and laughter.

In a town small enough to always bump into an acquaintance, I know no one, and no one knows me. I glide about like a ghost.

*  *  *

A fortnight after my flight from Delhi, I’m outside, behind the kitchen, chatting with Kong Rit, our daily help. She’s telling me about a man from her village who went missing and was found a few days later, “lying on a rock like a dried fish in the sun.”

“Where did he go?”

“Ngam tip,” she says. Nobody knows. “Some say he met a ‘suid tynjang . . . you know?”

I do—mischievous spirits who lead travelers astray, apparently.

“But some think he was with his mistress and some drama happened.” She giggles, and I’m expecting to hear more about this when we’re interrupted by the landline phone, ringing loud and prehistoric. Mei answers—“Hello, hello,” I hear her shout, as though she’s speaking to someone on the moon. She’s not on the call for long.

“News from Oiñ,” she says. “She’s coming to Shillong . . . for a checkup.”

Oh, it’ll be wonderful to see her, I say, it’s been so long—and here, I feel a little stab of guilt for not having taken the trouble to keep in touch more. “What kind of checkup?” Mei shrugs. The line dropped, and when she tried calling back, she couldn’t get through.

How old would Oiñ be now? I wonder. I find it difficult to calculate. Perhaps seventy? She was slight, wiry, strong, and only in her last year with us did she succumb to a little weight, on her face, her tummy. I’d tease her, and she’d say it was my fault, for growing up and not needing her to run around anymore.

When we first met, the story goes, I stopped crying instantly. Me, a swaddled, snotty, cranky four-month-old, and Oiñ, at our doorstep, recommended to Mei by a friend, holding out her arms, drawing me from my exhausted mother. In the twenty or more years she was with us, she drove Mei a little crazy, being similarly stubborn, but a few things saved her from dismissal—she had no “bad habits,” didn’t steal, smoke bidis, drink secretly, or chew foul-smelling khaini. What also made it impossible for Mei to let Oiñ go was her complete and absolute love for me. I was bathed, fed, held, and entertained—and I adored her, too. So much so that at night, if I had nightmares, or a storm thundered outside, it was Oiñ’s bed I would clamber into, not my parent’s. “Khun, thiah suk,” she’d say. Sleep peaceful, child.

It’ll be good, I tell myself, to see her again.

 

When I visit my father that afternoon, tea and cake in hand, I discover he’s turned into a minor celebrity. A reporter from the local paper has appeared on the scene—to write a story on the “Treeman of Shillong.” Papa’s friend Bah Kyn is also here, and he reminds me as always of an affable penguin. Small, round, with a bit of a wobble in his walk. He, too, has the same distracted air as my father, except his preoccupations are entirely nonbotanical. “Here,” he says, handing me a flyer.

“What’s this, Bah Kyn?”

“My dream come true,” he replies mysteriously.

After Papa’s interview, the journalist snaps a photo of him—looking slightly dazed—with his enormous DSLR and departs. As does Bah Kyn, though Kong Nuramon joins us for cake and tea. I’m beginning to enjoy this little ritual—there’s no cause I wouldn’t get behind if it involved protest picnics in the forest. Especially on evenings such as these, when the sky promises it will always stay blue, and the sun shines warm and benevolent.

“This could really help us,” says our flower lady, “if the reporter doesn’t mess it up.” She’s a little worried because in a recent story about a curfew in town, he wrote buses were still seen “flying” on the roads. Our laughter rises like birds through the trees.

“What was the curfew for?” I ask.

Kong Nuramon makes a face. “The usual. Demands for an Inner Line Permit. To keep out dkhars.”

Then, as though to swerve away from all this, she tells my father how much she enjoyed the video he’d shared on their colony gardeners’ group, the one about the wood wide web . . .

“The what?” I’m sure I’ve misheard.

“The wood wide web,” she repeats, and then gestures to the forest. “See this? These trees stand singularly, one by one, but underground they’re all connected by fine-fine threads . . . What are they called again?”

“Hyphae,” says my father. “Sent out by fungi through the soil, from root to root.”

Beneath our feet exists another world, I learn, a network of infinite biological pathways, through which trees share resources, information, nutrients. Some regard it as a competitive system, regulated through self-interest, sanction, and reward. Others believe trees care for one another, and act as guardians, sharing resources, with the healthy supporting the weak. A free market versus a socialist’s dream.

I say that’s quite something, but Papa is hesitant to agree. “I think,” he begins, slowly, “forests are more complicated than we can ever imagine. They’re beyond these two stories . . . We have no language yet with which to begin to speak of trees.”

We sit in silence, the pines and us, listening to the breeze.

 

That night, I’m in bed reading, when a text comes in, and—surprise—it’s from Dajied. Hey, how’s you? Heard you’re in town. (Thank you, Kima.) We’re in touch rarely, if at all. There was a time when we were, let’s say, quite in tune about my comings and goings—we waited breathlessly to meet—but not anymore. Still, I spend too long trying to decide on a suitable reply to this most succinct of questions, and finally send what I’d typed out initially: Good, thanks. Yes, I am.

Almost immediately: For how long?

A while, I respond vaguely, expecting him to suggest we catch up, but my phone stays silent.

He’s a strange one. Always has been. All right, no, that’s not true. He was awkward around Mei, but then, she never really liked him and didn’t try to hide it—local boy, unconverted to Christianity, and his family not from the same class, living in a crowded, noisy part of town, where everyone’s backyards intertwined, and no one had gardens.

She’d tell me I deserved someone better. And maybe I believed her then, I don’t know. Perhaps it was just easier to, especially at the end. Otherwise, being with him had felt . . . abundant.

But I don’t wish to think of Dajied now. I’ve done too much of that already—when we were together, when we were apart. I put my phone away and slip under the covers.

But sleep, as is often the case, will not come.

I’m thinking of him and our last parting. Maybe someday, we’ll collide again, as we’re fated to, two stray galaxies meeting in four and a half billion years.

I admit this is a bit dramatic. But it is difficult for me to make sense of it any other way. To love, to lose, and what then? Do paths not cross for a reason even if the trajectory of the story is so vast, we cannot fathom it in our lifetimes?

Else, all of it to what purpose?

Papa may have been right, that there’s no language to speak of trees—but I find there’s no language also to speak of so much else.

*  *  *

Sooner rather than later, I know, my mum will ask whether I’ve found a job. And I’ll tell her about the date seed in Israel that germinated after being preserved for two thousand years—“Mei, things take time.”

I suspect she won’t find this amusing.

Perhaps I should look for something. Here. That Teach First English school Mei retired from a few years ago is still running. Or maybe I could drop by the Ri Khasi Press, across town in Umsohsun—though it publishes mainly local literature, and my Khasi, once fluent, is now less so.

In honesty, something—an inner voice, Grace, the two are often the same thing—tells me not to take a leap.

Back in Delhi, every evening, I’d stop off at our neighborhood park on my way back from work, to walk along a path that wound all around its edges. Me and many other residents, some walking their dogs, others just themselves, around and around we went, until one evening, something—like a stepped-on twig—snapped. What am I doing? Is this, I thought, as I rounded another curve to take me back exactly to where I began, all of my life?

Finally, or at least for now, I have quit all this—the jostling commute, the “trying to make it in a big city.” What’s the point if all I do is rush into something else I’m unsure about?

“You have no inner compass, Shai,” Grace once told me. And I was struck by this image. Of my heart as a big whirring instrument whose needles spun wildly—unsure of where north was. How do I find my north? If you ask my father, he’ll say follow the bend of the thuja tree, that’s the direction in which they lean. Sadly, this is of little help to me. Migrating birds, it’s been discovered, find their way by sensing the earth’s magnetic field. They see directions as lighter or darker shades in their vision; for them north is a color. I am deeply amazed and envious.

Grace would also say I’ve lost my own sense of direction because I’ve always been told what to do—by Mei, mostly. “Steer your own ship, Shai.” Yes, all right, but where to, where to? I have no clue.

For the moment, I align myself only to follow the sun. I wait for Oiñ, and at the end of each day, wonder only what the next will hold. What will happen will happen, and sometimes just being open to that means a new path might unfurl before you.

*  *  *

Today, adventure.

I’m speeding along—well, as fast as our Fiat can go—across town. I’ve hit Mizo Colony, where Kima lives, the locality, I often tease him, with the greatest number of churches per household in the world.

What to do? he says dolefully, we really liked the missionaries.

Beyond here, a part of town I rarely visit, Assam Market, Assam Rifles, the neat, clean slopes of the cantonment grounds.

On the dashboard, Bah Kyn’s flyer flutters.

“Welcome to the Ever-Living Museum,” it says, “where the heartbeat of Culture and Heritage lingers on.” Below, a list of attractions, a motley mix of ethnographic objects. I’m not surprised. My father’s friend is an old-fashioned collector of everything. Scavenging the khrums—the basements—of people’s houses for objects, unused and forgotten, and persuading the family to “donate” them to him for safekeeping. From our house, too, he’s retrieved a khiew dek, a heavy pot for cooking meat, and an old mohkhiew, a garden hoe. Admittedly, I haven’t displayed much interest in his eccentric quirk before—and not much more in “learning about the rich Culture of Meghalaya”—but well . . . there’s a first time for everything.

I’m driving through a shaded forest, up a winding road that eventually leads to Sweet Falls, a popular canoodling spot for local couples, or so I hear. I turn off much before that, though, at a green signboard announcing my arrival at the museum. It looks like someone’s home, with a sloping garden, and an orchard at the back. I buy a ticket from a young lad at the reception—a table and chair placed in the garage near the gate—and head inside. I’m the only visitor in this large space built on two levels with wide windows all along one wall. In the middle, a fiberglass tree “grows” along a pillar, spreading its branches at impossible ninety-degree angles across the ceiling and down the opposite wall.

Is this what he means by Ever-Living?

Before me stands the first, and largest, exhibit—a life-size model of a “traditional Khasi hut.” Thatched roof, thatched walls. I peer in through the door. Inside, a rympei, a wood-fire hearth, around which lies a careful scattering of knives, mulas, betel nut baskets, rugs. In the corner, a tiny bed. It’s quaint, but I find the emptiness strangely unsettling—what sudden unnamed tragedy befell the inhabitants and forced them to leave?

Next, I wander past the shelves along the walls: preserved fungi from the Khasi Hills, an ancient Petromax kerosene lantern, a hat made of leaves. I’m not sure what to make of it all.

When I’m at the “Items Used for Rituals” section, someone else enters—a young woman, strikingly pretty. She’s tall and slender, with tight curls cropped fashionably close to her head—effortlessly stylish, too, in jeans, UGGs, an oversized sweater. I find myself wishing I’d taken the trouble to throw on more than just some track pants and a sweatshirt. And that I’d combed my hair.

I watch her in the glass. She, too, is looking wonderingly at the fantastical tree.

I pretend to be interested in a flat wooden object on which, the plaque informs me, “the egg ceremony is performed,” when Bah Kyn walks in. He’s pleased to see me, wobbling over with an arm outstretched.

“Welcome, welcome,” he says. “Oh, I see you’re looking at the pliang shat khan.”

“Yes,” I say, “I am.”

“Do you know how the egg ceremony is performed?”

I have little clue. “Not in detail, no.”

“I had it done for myself, you know, to find out if my illnesses were natural or”—he lowers his voice—“caused by the evil eye.”

I’m not sure where to look.

“The priest chants into the egg,” Bah Kyn continues, “invoking the gods to reveal the answers, and then he smashes it on this”—he gestures toward the wooden slab. “If the eggshells lie mostly upturned, the illness is natural . . . if not, it’s the evil eye.”

I’m almost afraid to ask, but I must. “What was it for you?”

“Thankfully, natural. What no one wants to see is bits of shell lying in a line.”

“Why?”

“That’s the road to a funeral pyre.”

We move along, with him pointing out the star attractions: a blanket made with bark from the Garo Hills, a pair of looped feathers from a racket-tailed drongo. Then we come to the kyrwoh, a plaited cane—like an outsized bangle or an elvish crown—once used in these hills, I’m told, to send messages between villages and their chiefs.

“How?” I ask, confused.

It’s very clever, Bah Kyn explains. Depending on the width of the weave, the kyrwoh conveyed the urgency of the call. One finger meant come immediately, three, more leisurely, or five, a hand, take your time.

“Like a medieval text message?” I say, quite delighted, but he appears unimpressed by my analogy.

Next we head to a tiny adjacent building at the end of the garden. The natural history section, with shells from the Bay of Bengal, plant fossils, bits of glittery quartz. We stop at a large circular stone—once an exercise weight for young Garo men. Bah Kyn says he found it abandoned in a forest, and only after he asked the stone for permission to move it, to “sumar,” or look after, did it turn light as a feather, and he was able to carry it away with him and bring it back here. I blink, not quite sure what to make of the story—who would believe it was true?

After we’re done, we step outside into the garden, filled with lady’s slipper orchids and flowers that look like small stars. The sun is high and strong today, the light sharp and clear and autumn gold. I look around, but it seems the stylish visitor has already left.

“Enjoyed?” asks Bah Kyn.

“Very much.”

I don’t tell him that wandering around his museum left me feeling a little like I do on my walks in the forest. Everything distant, lying behind glass.

*  *  *

I’ve been in Shillong almost a month, when finally, I feel my heart begin to lift to the sky. Something shifts, recovers. “Maybe it’s the water,” I tell Grace in jest; it comes from the forest spring, after all, and tastes fresh and sweet. She thinks I’m on the upswing in a cycle of lows and highs. Perhaps. Or maybe something’s really lifted. As they say here, how long can the fog hug the ground? Embrace it, I tell myself. Good things will happen.

Already we’ve had some happy news—the local TV station would like to interview Papa, and all is abuzz. Kong Nuramon has been quick to capitalize on the publicity—she’s started a petition for colony members to sign, and who wouldn’t want in at this point, including those initially indifferent to the plight of the pines. This will be moved to Bah Kyn’s contact at the Forest Department, which now, Papa says, cannot afford to “look bad.” The trees might be saved after all.

And then, this evening, a gig to look forward to with Kima.

I told him at first that I didn’t want to go, but he can be persuasive. You’re hardly around, Shai . . . come on, everyone will be there. So I relented, also in the small, secret hope that everyone would include Dajied—it would be nice to see him again, and didn’t he text me the other day perhaps for this very reason? So we could, you know, meet and catch up?

When I head out on an afternoon walk, the world seems eager, expectant—the pines reaching for the sky, the cherry trees in early blossom, the swifts in swooping flight. Who knows what the day will hold? In all honesty, this is the most amount of anticipation I’ve felt in months, and isn’t it true, that to anticipate is to feel alive?

Before I realize it, I’ve walked all the way to Ward’s Lake.

Even if the sky’s a bit overcast, and already a mild ‘lap ñiup-ñiup is falling, my spirits aren’t dampened. Around me lie the openness of water, the sweep of slopes edged with flower beds and weeping willows. I can see ducks, blooming lotuses nestled in green. I do what I often used to as a child with Oiñ—buy a packet of popcorn from a lady selling snacks at the gate, stand at the bridge across the middle, and feed the fish. They’re not massive but many; hundreds roiling around in the muddy water like one giant slippery thousand-finned monster.

Didn’t she once tell me a story about an ugly fish who turned out to be a beautiful river nymph? Possibly. Oiñ told me many stories. Usually, in the kitchen, while she fed me spoonfuls of rice. Likai, the woman who turned into a waterfall; Pahsyntiew, the goddess lured out of a cave by wildflowers; Manik Raitong, the lowly flute player beloved by a queen. Long and convoluted, they varied wildly from telling to telling—depending on her mood, characters would either fall in love or off a cliff.

My favorite was the legend of the Diengiei. About a giant tree atop a mountain that grew so large it hid the rays of the sun and covered the earth in shadow. And when the woodcutters tried to fell it, miraculously, every night, it was healed. How did it begin, then? There was a tiger, I know, and a small bird . . . When Oiñ gets here, I say to myself, chucking the last of the popcorn into the water, I shall pester her to tell me the story again.

 

A few hours later, I’m shivering on the back of Kima’s Yamaha.

We’re headed to the rooftop bar of a hotel in Laitumkhrah, a shiny new place, all fake wood, glass elevators, and a 1970s brown-orange color scheme. Not long ago, there wasn’t anything like this in Shillong, and people drove out in their cars and drank at scenic viewpoints. If you didn’t have a car, well, you found a spot on the road in a nice, quiet colony, or an empty parking lot. All this, I know from Kima and Dajied.

Guests have gathered on the rooftop—and the members of the band. “Nine,” I exclaim. “They’re all farmers,” says Kima. “Farmers by day, passionate musicians by night. Or at least,” he adds, “that’s what the posters say.”

He knows many more people here than I do, but I recognize a few: Jeff, the Ashkenazi Jew whose grandparents fled Germany, arrived in Calcutta, and eventually ended up in Shillong; Apdor, who disappeared to the UK for a degree, and returned with a girlfriend named Gemma; Valte with a mohawk who loves the Beatles. I head to the bar, order myself an overpriced beer, and by the time I’m back, the band is introducing themselves. Ngi, ngi dei Khlieh Asem. From villages in the East Khasi Hills.

The lead singer is a cheerful, balding man in a blue shirt, fluttering about like a sparrow. They begin with a hymn, a song of devotion that sounds like nothing you might hear in church. Jisu ba ieid, Jisu ba jem, nga ieid nga ieid ia me.

I move to the edge of the terrace. Kima is lost in the crowd, nowhere to be seen. Then I hear someone call out. It’s Dajied, walking toward me in a long black coat. He looks the same, though leaner, and still with that air of a lone wolf about him. His hair slicked back, his stubble light and fuzzy. Only briefly do our eyes meet, before he says, “Hey, how’s you?”

“Good, thanks.”

We first met at a wedding, a grand, dull affair, where I was bored enough to sneak off to the back, behind the canopy, and ask a couple of guys, strangers, for a cigarette. Sure, said Kima, holding out a Gold Flake, and Dajied lit it for me. I also discovered they’d carried Coke spiked with rum, so I stuck with them for the rest of the evening. I was finishing with university in Delhi, and Dajied had just started, though not because he was much younger. “First, my parents forced me to do engineering in Chennai,” he explained, “so I made sure I flunked so badly they had no choice but to take me out . . .” He was a film student at a college in Shillong then, allegedly the best in the region. By the end of the night we’d kissed; by the end of the week he was slipping in through the back door and into my bed. We called them our “expeditions,” and they continued all through my summer break, between finishing university and beginning an internship at my aunt’s organization, and off and on through the years after, each time I returned home.

Until, one winter, we stopped. For many reasons. It was complicated. But we’ve never talked about it since. Not once. And obviously, I’m not about to bring up anything now.

“Read about your dad in the papers.”

“He’s quite the celebrity.”

Dajied chuckles and leans over the parapet. This comes as a surprise, but I realize he’s nervous, too. Somehow, that makes me feel better. We don’t speak for a bit, listening to the music.

“Good, no?”

I nod. “They sound . . .”

“Like they come from the Deep South?”

I’m taken aback. “Of India?”

He laughs. “No. America. Bluegrass.”

Ah, right. “How’s work?” I ask.

He’s a documentary filmmaker, perched between aspiring and established, and even I can appreciate the precariousness of this. At the moment, he’s helping out on a nature program, he says, sponsored by the Arts and Culture Department. He’s been filming in the Sung Valley, between the Khasi and Jaintia Hills, for a documentary.

“About?”

“Jah Khei.”

“What’s that?”

“You haven’t heard of it? It’s a flower that blooms only once in twelve years, which means, goddammit, we couldn’t afford to miss it this time.”

“And did you?”

“What?”

“Find it?”

“We did, yes. We looked for it for days, and then suddenly there it was, all over the hillsides.” He gestures widely and smiles, and suddenly I would like to step up close and lean into him. I want to be held. He has always felt solid and strong and steady.

And right now, I am air.

“You?” he asks. “How are you, Shailin?”

I’d forgotten how it felt to hear him say my name.

“I’m good,” I say, blinking.

“You came with Kima?”

I nod. “And you?” My voice catches in my throat. “You’re here on your own?”

He shifts; I don’t quite catch the look on his face. “Yes . . . my girlfriend couldn’t make it this evening.”

I swallow my beer, the cold, damp air, everything unsaid, and the music, unheard, spirals up into the night.

 

I’m poking around the kitchen later, trying to scramble together a late dinner, when Mei comes in and tells me she’s had news about Oiñ. I’m feeling slow and sluggardly, but my heart lifts.

“She’s here?”

“Not coming.”

“To Shillong?”

“Where else?”

“I mean . . . but why?”

Mei shrugs. “No idea.”

“But . . . her checkup?”

“I don’t know . . . The line was so bad I could barely make out this much.”

Something in my chest drops.

“Well,” I say, “maybe she recovered, and didn’t need to come anymore.”

Mei is about to step out, but not before saying, “I hope so.”

I stop buttering my toast. “What do you mean?”

“Just that . . . I hope you’re right.”

 

It’s a long, out-of-time night. I lie in bed, looking at a square bit of inky sky from my window. I’d wanted to see Oiñ; her coming had given my being here a gentle sense of purpose, and even lent my journey home, I thought, a grander design.

I doze. I wake. I sip some water.

I’m a white dwarf, I tell myself. A dead star. Exhausted of everything life-giving, heavy not just with the weight of the past, but also the sense that nothing lies beyond, no further evolution. I’m lost and hollow. What to stand in the sun for now? Nothing, I tell myself gloomily. Even Oiñ won’t be coming. Nothing, then, to relive or look forward to.

I don’t know how the hours slip past, how light is restored to the sky, blazing briefly at the edge of night, and then lifting into morning. Suddenly, birdsong. And the crowing of roosters.

I might as well get up.

I do not move.

Eventually, though, a shower—a long, hard scrub of soap and loofah, and water slapping against my skin. I feel more alive, more decisive. I find my mother; she’s in the TV room, reading the papers.

“We should make sure, don’t you think?”

“What?” She peers at me above her spectacles.

“Oiñ. You said earlier that you hoped she’s all right. We should make sure . . .”

She sighs. “I tried calling yesterday . . . all day. It’s impossible to get through.”

“Then maybe we should visit her.”

“I can’t travel,” she says, shaking her head, “not with my blood pressure fluctuating like this. And your father, he’ll be camped you-know-where for days on end . . .”

“Then I’ll go,” I say.

Mei stays quiet.

“I’ll go to see her,” I repeat.

“How? Not on your own.”

“Why not?”

She narrows her eyes. “Do you even know where she lives?” This is met with silence, so she continues. “Mawmalang is at least a day’s journey from here . . . and there might not even be any proper roads.”

But by now I’m determined. I fish out my phone and open up Google Maps. There, I see it, at the edge of Meghalaya. Where my parents and I have never been. Not even close. Even on the map, the space around the name looks empty—and to the south, only the fat meandering blue of a river that flows into Bangladesh. From here, by road, six hours. I could take the bus. Yes, I say, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll go see her, and, if it’s okay with them, I’ll stay a night or two.

“When will you leave?” my mother’s face is drawn tight.

“As soon as I can.”

I can see this doesn’t please her. It means I’m not heading back to Delhi just yet. I brace myself for a flood of questions, for reproval, but they don’t come. Instead, she says quietly, “All right.”

*  *  *

Even at six in the morning, Shillong’s MTC bus stand is all hawkers and hollers, callouts and conductors. The vehicles rattle and roar in front of a sooty gray building just off Khyndai Lad, a junction where nine roads meet—some call it the heart of town—and in the air hangs an unholy blend of smoke, exhaust fumes, urine. Kima, who offered to drop me off, stands over my seat, grinning. “Bougie urbanite makes trip into rural Meghalaya, also known to her as the great big unknown.” I tell him to fuck off before his sorry ass ended up with me in the South West Khasi Hills. Where, incidentally, I point out, he, too, has never set foot. “True,” he admits, “but remember, I have a working-class soul.” I ignore him and try to push my rucksack under the seat in front of me; it won’t fit, so I resign myself to using it as a tall footrest.

“You’ll be okay, no?” Kima asks before he steps off.

“Yes,” I say. I hope.

When we shudder to a start and move off, I do wish he—someone—was coming along. Kima is annoyingly right: I’ve rarely stepped out of Shillong to travel anywhere around here on my own or with my parents. Hard to believe, I know. We weren’t the kind to go on many family holidays—my father hated to leave the garden, my mother the house, so we’ve traveled little together, in the state and outside. Me on a bus now is some kind of rupture, and Mei senses it and is unsettled, and, in all honesty, so am I. But I’m trying to set that aside as I’m taken away from all that’s familiar. What’s more important, I tell myself, is I’m going to see Oiñ, and I’m hoping she’s well, and alive.

This early in the day we leave the city easily behind us, climbing to Upper Shillong, past the Air Force grounds, and turning to take the Mawkyrwat road, which leads us to open countryside and a smattering of small towns. Soon, some traffic, shop shutters lifting, and kids in uniform walking to school. In the bus, along with me, a father and his two boys, a group of women wrapped in shawls, an elderly couple sitting side by side. I wonder if any of them are heading to Mawmalang. Highly unlikely, I soon realize; the road is long, littered with many stops, and the bus rapidly fills and empties. With morning well upon us, we wheeze into Mawkyrwat—here almost everyone disembarks, except for the father and his sons, and plenty more get on.

I step out to stretch my legs, feeling somewhat anomalous in my squeaky clean Keds and light denims. No one is unfriendly, though I do get a few curious looks, and when I ask in Khasi for tea and jingbam, this is met with surprise from the lady in the stall.

“Phi dei Khasi?” she asks.

“Hooid,” I say. “Yes, I’m Khasi.”

 

The road, though already potholed, starts deteriorating rapidly beyond Mawkyrwat.

Despite the bumps, in front of me the two boys have fallen asleep—one on the seat, the other on his father’s lap. The father chats with a man in a cap across the aisle. They’re discussing plans for a main road, joining Shillong and Nongstoiñ with the far reaches of the South West Khasi Hills.

“It can mean only one thing, ymdei?”

The man in the cap is noncommittal. “Perhaps.”

The father continues, “Yes, it’s hard to know about these things.”

I wonder what they mean, but they fall silent, so I stare out the window. We’re high up, looking over an unfolding valley with forested slopes, silvered through by a faraway winding river. We could be at the very end of the world, except I can see clusters of houses, small villages, for whom this is all life, the center of everything. I’m troubled, though, by a persistent question: Phi dei Khasi? I have never really known what this means . . . Is it to speak a certain language? To be born in a certain place? To live somewhere many years? Many of these markers have shifted constantly for me. Not for someone like Dajied. Or even Kima, who’s from Mizoram but has made Shillong his home. Have you thought about leaving? I’ve asked him. Plenty of times, he’s said. “But I can’t leave my mother . . . and honestly, I don’t really want to be anywhere else.” How unfamiliar, this kind of certainty! About place, and people, and belonging. Isn’t life so much messier and more complicated than that? Who knows . . . Right now, I tell myself, I’ll just enjoy the view.

As we near the Domiasiat area, the asphalt road ceases to exist. In fact, it’s more a riverbed, all boulders and deep pits, and our bus is the lone vehicle rafting on these rapids of mud and stone. I am captivated, though, by what lies beyond on either side—wide, wide country, with black knobbly boulders jutting out like knuckles from the earth. Where had I read this? That everything you see for the first time you see for the last time, because either the view changes, or you do. During the rains, I imagine these green peaks lost in lyoh khyndew, low-lying “mud” clouds, but now there is bright clarity to the landscape, the grass cleanly yellow, the hills outlined sharply against the winter sky. What’s odd is that we pass row upon row of compact housing structures lying abandoned and empty—a camp without inmates. What were they meant for? Rather, whom? The buildings rise like ghostly specters against the scrubby landscape.

Soon we will be upon the river, I hear. Ranikor. The two gentlemen talk of how they’ve fished there often in the past, usually with the roots of kharu—I’ve learned from Papa that this is a sedative plant—for carp, silver and common, and for something rarer called the golden mahseer. Not so many to be found now, they declare. “And have you seen,” asks the man with a cap, “Ranikor’s waters have turned green?” But the father is distracted, his young sons have woken up and demand his attention. He distributes Parle-G biscuits and water, and the tenderness of his gestures leaves me moved.

 

The journey begins to seem endless. Copses, hills, goats and cattle, laundry fluttering in the breeze, stubbly harvested paddy fields. Where am I? There is nothing here to orient me—despite the unvarying landscape, all is new and unfamiliar. We pass village after village with unknown names, Diwain, Sohsyniang, Myriem, Dennar, Nongdiloin. How much longer? I cannot tell. My phone lost reception several centuries ago. And by now my legs, my back, are beginning to cramp and ache. Finally, though, we arrive at Wahkaji. A dusty, tin-shack settlement with a desolate frontier air about it. This is where we’re asked to disembark—I’m informed the bus will go no farther.

“Balei?” I ask. Why?

The driver shrugs. “You see for yourself,” he says, “if there’s any road.”

“But I need to reach Mawmalang,” I insist, panic rising in my chest.

“You’ll have to walk,” says someone behind me. It’s the man with the cap. He speaks softly, a cloth bag dangles from his right shoulder.

“How far it is?” I ask. “How long will it take me?”

“More than a few kilometers,” he says. “And it will take you as long as you choose to walk—slowly or fast.”

That’s wonderfully unhelpful, but I hold my tongue and say only that I wonder if the way is easy enough to find and follow. For a moment he is silent, as though sizing up my capacity to survive on my own. I’m certain to disappoint.

“You’re traveling alone?”

I hesitate, though I have no choice but to admit that I am.

He stands undecided. Finally, he beckons, “Come. I’m going there myself,” and I, rucksack strapped to my back, scurry after him.

“Phi kyrteng aiu, Bah?” I ask.

His name he says is Karmel, Bah Karmel. He doesn’t ask for mine.

 

For a while, we walk along a mud track. I stumble on the loose stones, but he doesn’t slow down. My Keds aren’t shiny and clean anymore. We pass a few people—a woman with a khoh strapped to her back, leaning forward against the weight, while two kids prance around her. We tramp past another seemingly abandoned construction, smaller this time, with fewer buildings.

“What is this?” I ask.

“The primary health care center . . . built by UCIL.”

I nod, pretending to be familiar with the abbreviation.

“Is it operational?”

He makes no reply but gives me a look: What do you think?

Soon the mud track ends and we are at the edge of a sloping forest.

“Nangne,” he says.

“What?” I exclaim, suddenly realizing he means “this way.” The bus driver hadn’t been fibbing; there are no roads to Mawmalang.

I must stand there looking particularly pathetic, for the gentleman says it’s all right, it’s not too far. In my head, only one question rings out: Is it safe? But I have no choice, I must keep the faith and follow. He’s wearing open slippers, but the undergrowth doesn’t seem to bother him, even though I’m whipped and snagged by brambles and slip repeatedly on the mossy stones.

We tramp through in silence, until he asks, “Why have you come all this way?”

“To see Kong Stian Kharwar,” I reply. “She lives in Mawmalang.”

“I know her.”

I’m surprised, though I shouldn’t be. If everyone knows one another in Shillong, surely, more so here. “She was my nanny,” I explain, “for many years, and I heard she might not be well.” I hesitate before continuing, “Would you know how she is? We can’t get through on the phone . . .”

He shakes his head, saying he’s sorry to hear that, but he’s been away a few months now, and he’s had no news from Mawmalang.

My heart sinks. Soon, I suppose, I’ll find out.

We come to a stream trickling through the undergrowth, and I stop and bend low, thinking I’ll cleanse my hands and face; it will be refreshing.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he says quickly.

“Oh, why?”

He gives me a strange look and walks on. I follow hurriedly, wondering if I have offended him in some way. Intermittently, we pass big cement tanks—water reserves?—almost at ground level, and I also notice manhole covers littering the forest floor. Animal traps, perhaps, or some kind of hefty storage space.

 

The late afternoon is beginning to wane around us. I want to ask how much longer, but this might seem like a complaint. The rucksack straps dig into my shoulders, my shoes are beginning to bite, and my jeans are uncomfortably thick and stiff for this trek. And maybe because I’m tired, I’m soothed little by the jungle around me—the palm leaves and torrents of poinsettias serve only to obscure the way, the sounds of frogs and crickets are reminders that evening is approaching.

Soon, though, the forest thins and we step onto a road of mud and stone. To our right, the view begins to open—a grassy meadow, and beyond that, more hills. In the distance stands a cluster of houses made of tin and wood; variations on the hut I saw in Bah Kyn’s beloved Ever-Living Museum. It is somewhat unreal. Then a wandering stream, a stone bridge. Ridiculously idyllic.

Bah Karmel stops. “We’re here. And Kong Stian’s house is that way”—he points to the right. I turn to him to say thank you, but he’s already off, going around the other side of the village. Khublei, I call, and he waves his hand in brief acknowledgment. Strange man.

I hitch up my rucksack, heavy as lead now, and walk toward the houses.

*  *  *

The road is empty. On a patch of grass on the side, someone has laid out clothes to dry. Then a neat stack of chopped wood. A basket of potatoes. I round a corner hoping to find someone I can ask for directions, but there’s no one in sight. It’s quiet, my footsteps crunch through the air. In the distance, I hear what, at first, I think is a bird call. Or perhaps a massive swarm of bees. But as I near the houses, it’s unmistakable. It’s the sound of weeping. A chorus of long grieving sobs. My heart is in my mouth. I stumble on something, stones, a clump of mud; I stand at the small window of the house from where the crying rises, and peer inside. I can see the backs of people, women, hunched over, wrapped in black shawls—but nothing more. I’m cold, my limbs frozen. I force myself to walk around to the front.

Suddenly, I know there’s someone behind me, even though they haven’t made a sound. When I turn, I see a girl, no more than ten, slight and skinny, holding a cat.

They carry the same look in their eyes—wide, wary, mistrustful.

“Kumno?” I greet feebly.

They both stare back.

“Mano ba lah khlad?” I ask. Who has died?

I hope she understands me; the Shillong Khasi I speak, and the dialect here might—will probably—vary. She stays mute. I stand there, unable to say anything, as though all my words have fallen away from me.

Then the creature and the girl turn, startled, hearing something I can’t, and scamper off like wild creatures.

Meanwhile, the funeral procession has begun. They are moving outside now. I am a terrible intruder in this space and in their grief. I should wait elsewhere for this to finish, but I can’t bring myself to until I know who has died.

The women in their black shawls move in cohesion; the coffin, a paltry thing, is heaved onto the backs of four men, and they begin their descent down to the road that, I assume, leads to the burial ground.

People have started noticing me now. There are stares and whispers. I should leave. Head back and wait by the edge of the forest. Just then, though, a hand clutches my arm. A woman, and I look into a face that could have been Oiñ’s when she first came to us.

“Dei ma phi?” the woman says. “It’s you, it’s really you?” I have no idea who she means, but I nod. “I told Kong Thei you’d come,” she whispers in delight.

“Who?” I ask.

“My sister. Come, I’ll take you to Meirad.”

I allow myself to be led; I figure it’s easier than trying to ask her questions amid all this. She chatters away—and mostly, I follow her, though she uses certain unfamiliar words and turns of phrase. I think she’s telling me about the mobile network in this part of the world. We don’t walk too far, only across a road, a short slope, and then we stop before a house that stands slightly separate from the rest, and on higher ground. It’s very dusty, the mud dry and loose. I make to take off my shoes at the door, but she stops me.

“Em phi,” she says. “There’s no need for that.”

“Actually, there is, Mem,” says a voice from inside.

A woman emerges from behind the front door, and I can tell they’re sisters.

Next to me, Mem frowns.

“It’s okay,” I say, hastily slipping off my sneakers. I stand there in my socks, my back aching from the weight of the rucksack. “May I put this down?” I ask.

Mem rushes to help. Of course, of course. “Niiii map mo . . .” she apologizes.

“It’s okay,” I say, and slip it off gratefully, placing it on the steps.

The sister, who I assume is Kong Thei, watches. Her eyes sharp and narrow. Her hair tied neatly up into a bun, her jaiñkyrshah spotless. Her feet bare.

Come, I’m summoned by Mem, and I follow.

“Kumno?” I greet Kong Thei as I pass, but this elicits no more than a nod.

We walk into the front room, littered with mulas and one long seat with a worn cushion pushed up against the wall. Beyond that, the house is in shadow, some walls planked with wood, others papered with woven shylliah. The other rooms lead off from this one in the center; we duck into a doorway on the left.

There, by the window, is Oiñ.

 

Before I can call out to her, Mem says, “Peit, Meirad, lah wan mano.”

Oiñ turns away from the window toward us. She’s so frail, my heart aches.

“I expected you earlier,” she says.

At once, I begin to apologize, saying I had to walk from Wahkaji, that there was no road, no bus . . .

“I meant at least five years earlier.”

This silences me. But when I look at her, she’s smiling, and suddenly looking more like her old self again. She gestures for me to come closer, and I do, giving her a hug—in my arms she’s a bird. I sit close, at the edge of the bed. She looks across the room and asks Mem to bring us some tea.

The woman who’d led me here scurries out.

“That’s my grandniece,” says Oiñ.

I say yes, I’d figured that out.

“She looks after me very well.”

“I’m glad.” The words catch in my throat, and not only because I’m speaking Khasi. I tell her how Mem found me at the funeral. Before I can stop myself, I’m saying, “I was so afraid it was . . .”

“Me?” There’s that brusque wickedness in Oiñ’s voice again. She chuckles. “I’m not going anywhere. Though at the rate people die here, who knows?”

“How did Mem know it was me?” I ask.

“She’s seen your pictures, of course.”

“My pictures?”

“Silly child,” she chides me. She digs into the space behind her pillow and draws out a book—no, a photo album, one of those old plastic ones I haven’t seen in years. I flip through it. It’s all me. I’m so touched I want to hurl it out the window.

“There’s your pretty face,” says Oiñ, stabbing a knobbly finger at a photograph. I couldn’t be more than two, in pigtails, and I’m scowling into the camera. Then me and some puppy I’m about to, it looks like, strangle. Me and Oiñ on a sunny grassy patch in the garden—you can barely see my face, I’m wearing such a large floppy hat, but Oiñ is smiling and she’s so young I can hardly recognize her.

“I don’t still look like this, Oiñ,” I protest.

“Oho, here.” She flips the album to the end, and there’s me and her from just before she left us. I’m wearing a sparkly hair band, a purple T-shirt and jeans, and I have my arm around her as though I will never let her go.

Just then, a young girl enters, carrying a tray of tea things, and behind her, Mem. “This is my elder daughter,” she says. Banri, who smiles at me shyly.

“Mem has two more little ones, twins,” adds Oiñ, “but they’re with their father.”

Banri has brought a cup over for me, and a plate heaped with ‘pu-syep. It’s delicious, freshly steamed, and the ground red rice is delicately sweet. In my hunger, I finish three slices—and only notice afterward how everyone else has shared or not eaten any at all. I must be more careful.

“Where’s Thei?” asks Oiñ.

Banri and her mother share a quick glance. “Ngim tip,” they both say in unison.

“She should be here . . . has she said hello?”

“I met her,” I add, “when I came in.”

“Yes, but did she give you a welcome?”

“No one has to,” I say quickly. “Except if Mei visits. She’d expect a grand parade.”

Oiñ chortles. “How is that old thing?” Mei wouldn’t be pleased.

“She sends her love,” I say.

“She let you come like this, on your own?”

I nod.

Oiñ looks pleased. “Finally, she’s accepted that you’ve grown up.”

“When do we ever accept our children have grown up?” chirps Mem.

Oiñ frowns. “I did. My kids learned very early on that I wouldn’t always be there to spoon-feed them and change their dirty nappies.”

“Because you,” I plant a kiss on her head, “are wisest.”

She scoffs but looks terrifically pleased.

 

An hour later, Oiñ is dozing, and I’m also ready to sleep, anywhere, on any surface, cushioned or not. It’s late evening, and all this while, we’ve been talking—they wanted news, about me, my parents, about Delhi and Shillong, and now they wish to know how I found my way to the village through the forest. I tell them about Bah Karmel.

“Really? Bah Karmel Lyngdoh?” Mem sounds surprised. “He brought you?”

“Yes, he did, why?”

She hesitates. “Just that he was away for a few months. We weren’t sure when he was returning, or whether he’d be coming back at all.”

I am happy to bring out the presents—though for Oiñ these are largely practical—jars of Horlicks, liver tonic, strips of multivitamins.

“Where’s my pork chow from Wok?” she demands in jest, noodles from a Chinese restaurant in Shillong, her favorite.

For the others, socks and mufflers, old sweaters, chocolates for the kids.

And then, just like that, my fate is decided. I’d stay not just one night, but a few days—a week, they insist. “You are most welcome to,” says Mem when she senses my hesitation. “Silly child,” adds Oiñ, “you can’t leave now.”

Banri will vacate her small room for me, and though I protest, saying I wish to inconvenience no one, it is settled. They will not hear of anything else. You are our guest, they say, and that is it.

 

Later, when I’m lying on the bedding on the floor, thinking I ought to let Mei know I’ve arrived safely, I fall almost instantly asleep.

During the night, I wake only once to the murmur of voices, the sisters talking, one voice slightly raised—How can she just show up like this? Who does she think she is? How long will she stay?—and the other intoning soothingly, Ym lei lei. Let it be. She’s come a long way. It will be all right.

*  *  *

When I awaken, I’m in a cave.

A sightless underland, ancient and quiet, untouched by sun or sky.

I sit up, and stay still. The room is in an awkward corner of the house, so there are no windows except for a slit near the ceiling letting in pale milky light. Slowly, I pick things out around me—schoolbooks in a pile, a small tin trunk, probably holding clothes, a pair of black bow shoes in the corner. Banri’s small belongings. One of the things Mei had asked me before I left was how will you manage—and all I feel as I sit here is this is more than enough.

The toilet is around the back of the house, a compact double-doored structure, with a bathing area on one side, complete with bucket and stool, and a squatting loo on the other. The loo is scrupulously clean, and I take care to splash into all corners when I’m done. There’s no water coming through the tap, though, and I don’t quite know how to refill the bucket. I stand on the step outside, helpless, and thankfully Banri comes along—“I’ll do it,” she says, and I refuse so vehemently that eventually she tells me there’s a large tank nearby from where to draw water. Whoever uses the loo, she explains, fills the bucket for the next person. I can do that, I think, and resolve not to forget.

 

At our midday meal, I meet the household. The twins, three-year-old toddlers with snotty noses and small, pointy faces like pixies, hiding behind their father, Bah Kitdor, a shy, soft-spoken man who looks like he’d like to hide behind something himself. He can barely meet my eye.

“Nga trei kam dieng,” he tells me when I ask him what he does. He’s a carpenter.

“What are you making these days?” I ask, hoping this will set him a little at ease.

“Ki jingsiang ja,” he says, ladles, and points to the one that’s serving us each a mound of rice. For some reason I am delighted by this; that it was carved by him. I hold it in my hand, light and curved and smooth, and remark on the neatness of the work.

“Khublei,” he says, looking pleased.

Oiñ, I’ve been informed, is feeling brighter today. She ate an egg with her morning tea. “It’s because you’ve come,” says Mem. “She’s so happy.”

“And we’ve started her on new medication,” adds Kong Thei.

I clear my throat.

The syrwa, a stew of mustard leaves and bits of fish, is light and flavorful, but the pudina chutney trails fire in my mouth.

“What exactly is ailing her?”

“Old age,” says Mem.

“We don’t know,” says her sister at the same time.

“Has she not been diagnosed?” I ask, and then catch the look on Kong Thei’s face. Maybe she’s right. I wasn’t around all this while, and now I show up out of nowhere and ask intrusive questions.

Mem says no, and this is why they’d tried to convince Oiñ to get a checkup done in Shillong; she agreed, reluctantly, at first, and then later she flat-out refused.

“Is there anything else we can do?” I add quickly.

The sisters glance at each other; the twins are chirping at the door, wishing to be let out, and Bah Kit excuses himself and obliges. At the other end of the table, Banri is quietly clearing up their plates.

The nearest health clinic used to be in Wahkaji, I’m told, the place where the bus route ended.

“I passed it,” I say. “It looked abandoned.”

“It is now,” says Mem. “Not too long ago, a doctor used to visit once in a while. Still,” she adds, “Kong Thei managed to meet a doctor last week, ymdei?”

Her sister nods.

“Where did you go?” I ask.

“Mawkyrwat.”

“But that’s so far,” I blurt out, and am almost about to add, and the road is terrible, but I stop. In Kong Thei’s eyes, I see a flash of something—anger, I think, that says, well, we have very little choice.

 

At the end of lunch, there’s a loud banging. It’s coming from Oiñ’s room, and we all rush over.

She’s sitting up in bed, walking stick in hand, and she’s thumping it on the floor. “Well, that got your attention.”

“What do you need, Meirad?” asks Kong Thei.

“Company.”

“Your daughter’s here,” says Mem, nudging me forward, and I scurry over and sit on a mula by the bed. First, I’m asked a string of questions—Did I sleep all right? Have I called my mother? Did I eat? Am I comfortable? I know this is not the comfort you’re used to . . . she begins to say.

“I’m fine,” I insist. “I’m very comfortable.”

“Don’t lie.”

I laugh. “But I am!”

She eyes me suspiciously. “If you say so . . . I’ve asked Thei to kill one of our chickens, we’ll make your favorite.” This I won’t refuse—I loved Oiñ’s chicken curry, whenever she cooked it in our house.

Then she lies back, tired from the effort of sitting up and talking. I begin to fuss. Would she like some water? Something to eat? Would she like to rest?

“No, I’m fine . . . apart from my legs. They just don’t listen to me anymore. Slowly, slowly, they went.”

“They’re here, Oiñ,” I say, pressing them from over the blanket.

She sighs. “Here, but not here.”

It was so gradual a deterioration, she hardly noticed it at first. “Old age,” she spits. “I wasn’t old until I got here. I’m luckier than that Kong Tharina, though. She went much faster, and with a lot more pain.”

“What happened to her?”

She shrugs. “Lah kem ksuid.” Caught by a spirit, but I think it means epilepsy. “Her son also died, you know,” she continues, “a few years ago. Only forty-five, and suddenly, from nowhere, throat cancer.”

I try to say something commiserative, that life is so unpredictable, and she snorts in contempt. “You ask them,” she says, “if it’s so simple.”

“Who?”

“The people in the village.” She closes her eyes. Her hair, silver as the moon, frames her face in wisps.

“Shall I leave you to rest?” I ask again.

“No. When I’m in my grave, that’s all I’ll be doing. Now tell me what you have been up to all these years . . .”

And so I do. I tell her that after I finished university, I interned with my aunt one summer, ended up working there several years, and since then I’ve been doing a few things. A city magazine, a lifestyle magazine, a publishing house.

“Hmm . . .” says Oiñ. “Phi biang em?”

I hesitate. She’s asked not if I’m happy, or if everything is all right, but whether I am enough. And this is difficult to answer.

“Of course,” I say.

“You don’t want to get married?”

“Batno?” I ask in return. “Who should I marry?”

She grunts. “Why you asking me?” Then she takes my hand. “You go to church?”

“No.”

“You should.”

We glance at each other and guffaw. She, who never attended mass all her life.

Then I tell her about other things. The flat I share with Grace, the colony park, the evening walks, the scorching Delhi summer, the rains that are brief and fleeting and so unlike here. How Grace loves baking, and we subsist mostly on cake . . . At some point, I don’t know if Oiñ is listening anymore, I think she is asleep, but I keep speaking, on and on, into the quiet afternoon air.

*  *  *

In the week I’m here, my fitting in is clumsy.

As though I’m suffering from some strange sort of jet lag. I’m out of time, fumbling around, unused to the rhythms of the household, which rises early, when the light is barely breaking over the hills, and sleeps not long after sunset. I scramble to bathe and brush and clean, trying not to be late for meals—lunch, for instance, is eaten here at eleven. Dinner at half past five.

Then, whenever I stand at the kitchen door, asking, “How can I help?” Kong Thei ignores me, and her sister sings out, “Nothing, nothing,” from the corner where she’s cooking, and I’m left at a loose end. I sit with Oiñ, and we chat, but I notice she tires easily, so I keep my visits to her room frequent but short.

There isn’t much else to do. I’m hesitant to walk around the village, awkward as I feel about the way I look, the way I dress, my halting Khasi. But it’s hard to keep the village out. People drop in, to chat, to borrow potatoes, children to play with the twins in the front yard, tumbling in and out of the house, and people are curious to see me. I’m shown off by Mem in the front room. “Isn’t she something? She came to visit us all the way from the city,” she’ll say, while I stand there embarrassed by the attention. Small generous gifts are pressed into my palms—plump oranges, a bunch of radishes, rice cakes sweetened with jaggery. Everyone’s faces and names are a flurry; I catch them for a moment, thinking I’ll have little opportunity to get to know them all. And though I tell myself I ought not to generalize like this, I’m struck by their gentleness and their generosity, the singsong cadences of their speech, so new to my ear.

When evening comes, everywhere the smell of wood fires rises, and while I imagine there are rooms behind some doors here that hold unhappiness, it feels pervasively peaceful.

When I do venture out for a stroll, I weave through uneven mud paths, sleeping dogs, grazing goats, and chilies laid out to dry. It doesn’t take me long to make my way across the village; there aren’t more than thirty houses, but I take my time, passing elderly men smoking pipes, shawls wrapped around their heads like turbans, and women winnowing rice, sweeping, splicing kwai. At the other end is Mawmalang’s only shop.

The owner, Bah Albert, greets me warmly enough, though with a touch of wariness in his voice. He looks to be in his late forties, and he perches on his stool like a king surrounded by flour and spices, crates of fizzy drinks, and stacks of tobacco leaf.

The first thing he asks me is whether I’m a journalist.

“Me? No . . .” Does this place make the news?

“Hmmm . . .” He frowns. “They say a journalist is coming next week.”

“Okay,” I say. “Coming here to speak to you?”

“Yes, to the people.”

“What about?”

He looks surprised. “The mining, of course.”

Another customer approaches, so I buy sweets for the twins and a tube of Boroline for Oiñ, and leave. What did he mean? The coal mines aren’t around here, of that I’m certain—they pockmark the Jaintia Hills at the eastern edge of the state. This region produces vast amounts of charcoal, but that isn’t mined, it’s made by burning trees. What then? Only now a glimmering remembrance comes back to me, from a while ago, of news, on the radio, in the local papers, caught in snippets when I was in and out of Shillong, of another kind of mining—for uranium.

Of course, I kick myself, I’m in uranium country.

It had died down by now, as far as I knew, the “uranium issue”—although my knowledge on the subject, I’m ashamed to say, is patchy at best. There had been a tussle for years, between the central government, I think, and NGOs and environmentalists in Meghalaya, as well as the people living here. To mine or not to mine. Curfews and bandhs were called, and protests were strong and furious. But who had won? I’m really not sure . . .

 

The only place to catch a phone signal, I learn, is at the top of a hillock behind Mem’s house. If you’re lucky.

Banri takes me there, after watching me desperately try to make a call. “Come,” she says, and I follow. She leads me outside, past the vegetable garden, the smelly pigpen, a cluster of chickens and their fluffy chicks, and through a small squeaky gate. Banri has a quiet, determined air that somehow reminds me of Grace. Her hair is always neatly tied, hanging down her back in a long braid, her dress faded but clean and darned.

“Are you on school holiday?” I ask.

“Yes,” she replies.

“For how long?”

“Forever.”

“You’re done?” I’m surprised because she looks no older than fifteen.

She isn’t. But she finished at the government secondary school in Wahkaji, and the higher secondary school at Nongstoiñ is too far. There are no schools in Mawmalang.

“Oh,” I utter foolishly, but whatever I say would feel inadequate.

We’ve begun our ascent; a short, sharp climb, and we don’t speak again until we reach the top.

“Oiñ insisted I finish, you know,” she tells me shyly. “Even though it meant I had to stay with a relative in Wahkaji, and it was not very convenient. I think my aunt and Mei would’ve taken me out of school earlier otherwise.”

“I’m glad,” I say, but this, too, sounds feeble.

“See?” She gestures to my phone.

One bar. But it allows me to make contact with Mei, Kima, and to receive a text from Dajied—Nice seeing you the other night. It sounds like he wants to be friends, I suppose. Should I reply? Should I not? What do I say?

You too, I type, and hit send but the message delivery fails.

Mei isn’t entirely pleased about my extended stay. Only when I tell her they said I’ve come all this way, how can you leave in a day, does she fall quiet. Papa has only just realized I’m gone. You went where?

Afterward, I sit looking at the village below. It’s tiny, smaller than a small neighborhood block back in Delhi, lying low and close to the earth. As the sun sets, everything before me turns into white gold, the chirrup of the ñiang-kongwieng pierces the evening silence, louder than I’ve ever heard elsewhere, birds settle to roost in the trees behind me. I’m struck by a rare sense of immensity.

When I tramp back down, through the small, squeaky gate, past the roosting chickens, the smelly pigpen, and the watered vegetable garden, I find the family waiting for me to begin their evening meal, and I gratefully take my place at the table.

*  *  *

The day before I leave, I want to bake a cake. Somehow, Grace has managed to text me the simplest recipe—PLAIN CAKE—with instructions for how this can be made in a pressure cooker. A pressure cooker has been duly procured from Bah Albert, and I’m at his shop buying ingredients. I’d like to replenish supplies for Mem, too—rice, oil, flour. I also overheard Kong Thei saying they were running low on soap, the lumpy brown stuff that brought back memories of my grandmother at the sink, washing dishes.

“Shini, moida, pylleng,” lists Bah Albert. There’s milk at home, and we will have to do without vanilla essence.

“Khublei mo,” I say, handing him the money.

“Phin leit noh, ne?”

I tell him I’m leaving tomorrow. Bah Kit and Banri will accompany me through the forest to Wahkaji, from where I’ll catch a bus back to Shillong. My mother is relieved, my father, too, though he’s happier that they’ve finally managed to save the trees. The new wall, it has been mandated, will be slimmer. A victory for the Treeman of Shillong.

Bah Albert is interested in knowing where it is that I live in town.

“Near Laitumkhrah.”

He nods. He also has been considering leaving the village and moving to Shillong. “Things were bad,” he says, “now they’re a bit better, but who knows when they’ll be bad again. They always return, those diggers.”

“Are they allowed to?” I ask.

Not anymore. “But who waits for permission?” Then he shrugs and adds, “Leit suk.” Travel in peace.

 

All afternoon, I slave over the cake. I hardly ever bake, but this simply must be perfect. I want to offer some tangible proof of my gratitude—for Oiñ, for the others. I don’t know why it must be cake, but I can think of nothing else. Interested parties drop in to check on the proceedings. It’s not going well. I think the mixture is too runny. I can’t even get in touch with Grace unless I run up the hillock and back, so I pour it into a pan, place it into the cooker, and seal it off with a prayer.

An hour later all is revealed, and it is a minor triumph.

When we gather for tea and cake in Oiñ’s room, we do so with an air of festivity—she’s sitting up and orchestrating the proceedings with a wave of her walking stick, the twins run around in squeaky excitement, Banri and her mother are smiling widely, Bah Kit looks the most comfortable I’ve seen him since I arrived, and even Kong Thei appears more relaxed, possibly because I’m leaving. The cake is a little chewy—Grace will tell me I overmixed the batter—but still surprisingly palatable, fragrant with bay leaf in lieu of vanilla essence. Everyone sits around Oiñ’s bed, munching, and there’s plenty to go around.

My heart is fit to burst.

Later, when the room has emptied, I sit by Oiñ. We don’t speak much, except for her telling me she wishes I wasn’t leaving. I’ll come back, I promise, and I mean it, but she looks at me as though to say there will be no next time. I have no words. I hold her hand, gnarled and lined like the slim root of a tree. She closes her eyes, and I make my way to Banri’s room, heart heavy, to pack, to sleep.

I’m awakened, like the first night, by the sound of women talking.

This time, though, there is little attempt to hush up and not disturb me. I’m groggy; is it time to leave? It feels deep and dark, not yet light. The voices are urgent, even fearful, and when I catch what they’re saying, I, too, scramble off the bedding, up from the floor.

The sisters are hurrying in and out of the sickroom. Oiñ has suddenly taken poorly—maybe from all the excitement of the evening. She called for Kong Thei, saying she was feeling light-headed and having difficulty breathing. There’s little we can do, apart from mix a spoon of ORS in some warm water and get her to sip it. We also heap blankets and pillows under her feet, so they’re placed higher than her heart. Her old, strong heart that has held me all my life. For a stretch of time, Oiñ’s breathing drops so low and light it’s barely there. Kong Thei holds her hand out before her nose to check.

“It won’t be long now, I think,” she says.

I don’t even realize I’m crying, tears streaming down my face of their own accord.

You cannot leave, I say silently, you cannot leave. I just got here. Stay and I’ll stay, stay and I’ll stay.

We wait a long time, watching her every breath, holding our own, waiting for her next one, and finally, after what seems like forever, the bad spell passes—her breath is ragged but slightly stronger, some warmth returns to her hands, her face. But not before pale silver light is spilling across the sky. We have been up all night. The sisters sit silent at the foot of the bed, and I to the side; we’re a solemn biblical painting.

“I think she’s resting now,” ventures Kong Thei. Her voice is strained at the edges.

Her sister nods, tiredness pulling around her eyes, and then she looks at me.

“You will have to leave soon, Shai.”

“No,” I say. “If it’s okay with you—both—I’d like to stay.”

*  *  *

Sometimes, on my fleeting visits to Shillong, I’d go for a walk, pass one of many churches, and despite telling myself, Don’t waste your time, I’d enter.

Something there is about an empty church.

The hush. The light. The stoic saints. I’d feel seven again. At the pew with my grandparents. Singing the opening hymn, making the sign of the cross. Bowing, at the end, to everyone around me: Peace be with you. Perhaps this is what is meant by the comfort of ritual. The act of standing, sitting, and kneeling. Of always knowing what to do next or uttering the right response at the right time.

So unlike life.

Where we hurtle through our days, asking frequently, frantically, of ourselves and the universe: Is this right?

“How do we know, Grace?” I’ve often asked her.

And she’d shrug, and say exactly what I expected her to: “You can’t for sure.”

It’s okay, I’ve begun to tell myself. If I can live with far greater ambiguities—Why did flowers emerge? How did life begin on earth?—I can take a leap and hope to land on some sort of ground that will hold me.

 

And so, since I’ve decided to be here, the first thing I do is begin waking up early.

Okay, earlier.

And wash. And breakfast on atta—thick, white parathas—and tea. And even though when I stand at the kitchen door asking how I can help, Kong Thei still ignores me, and her sister sings out, “Nothing, nothing,” from the corner, I now head outside instead and help Banri in the kper, the vegetable garden.

The patch hugs one side of the house and extends all the way to the back, hemmed by an unruly bed of yams, with their large, umbrella leaves, and a row of fruit trees—mandarin and plum, myrtle berry and lime are pointed out to me. I hoped she’d be welcoming of my offer, and she is, except, I confess, I know nothing and have little idea where to begin.

Banri is gracious enough to say I’ll learn. It’s forty-eight hours before the full moon, she explains, a good time for sowing, so that is what we do. Now is the time to plant leafy vegetables, rows of mustard, tyrso, which will be cooked in warming stews through the winter, pungent and sharp on the tongue. It’ll be easy, I assume—and I begin my sowing, scattering the seeds in neat lines in the soil until Banri stops me. “You have to dig a little deep, deep, and space out the seeds so they don’t crowd each other. Now, cover them with just enough soil so water doesn’t run it all off and expose them to the sky, or then they will die.” She shows me, and I learn slowly, and through the mornings we bend and dig and sow and tap-tap-tap the mud. We harvest phan Garo, spindly and red, and fat, fat radishes and winter potatoes.

I smell of earth and earthworm, and my nails are rimmed dirt black. Everything begins to ache: my thighs, my arms, and muscles in my bum I never knew I possessed. By eleven I am starving.

 

After lunch, I climb the hillock.

Up there, I’m mostly alone, though sometimes the girl I saw on my first day here scurries through the bushes with her cat. They don’t approach, though I often see them staring from a distance. Here, I try reconnecting to a world that, after a few days, seems fast receding—my decision to stay weighs less heavy on me than it does on my mother.

When I tell her my plans have changed, I detect in her voice for the first time a trace of panic. She switches tactics. She is soft and soothing. Of course she understands, and how relieved she is to hear Oiñ had pulled through. It will be good to stay with her for a few days, a week at the most? We’ll see, I say, and hang up, and realize that my hands are shaking. Grace, too, has asked when I’ll be back, and I say not this month; Kima is puzzled, wondering if I’m doing a domestic version of a firangi finding herself. My father is unperturbed, and strangely, we have more than usual to talk about. You must unearth the seedlings and replant them, he urges about the mustard, pull them apart into clumps, and sow them a few inches away from each other. This is what replanting does—allows them to grow faster, healthier, to yield more leaves.

Then, it’s time to head back down—for quick tea and more atta, which must sustain us through the afternoon, and then I help feed the livestock, scatter grain for the chickens, and empty the vegetable peels and rice water into basins for the pigs. Banri and I then water the kper—I have bought a new can from Bah Albert’s shop and gifted it to her, and I walk around with the old one that drips diligently all over my feet. When I ask for another at the shop, he says they’re out of stock, but perhaps I could check in a few weeks. Nothing here arrives fast.

Except day’s end.

Even on winter afternoons, the mist rolls in, low and stealthy, enfolding the world in white. The sun is suddenly gone, the air turns sharply cold—dait thah, ice that bites.

We eat our evening meal early, and it is simple. Rice, red and heavy, dal and vegetables, both bright turmeric yellow, sometimes a boiled egg, rarely a piece of fish each, fried to a crisp in mustard oil, salt, and chili. Then I sit with Oiñ.

She has recovered, but only to a shadow of herself.

She has some good days, when she’s wicked and funny and bosses people around, and some that are not. Then she seems to slump into the past. Did I know she had a missing son? “No,” I say gently. He left home, she tells me, when he was old enough to, and never kept in touch. Did I know, for quite a few years, she lived in Assam? “No,” I say, “how come?” “I looked after the children of tea planters.” And she talks about them—Sonny and Pinkie. And I listen with jealousy. Wasn’t I the first and last? I want to ask. But obviously not. And this comes as a shock. That I wasn’t the only one she loved.

Some days are the worst of all—the walking stick lies unthumped, she doesn’t sit upright, and she sleeps for longer. When she’s awake and I’m with her, I usually do most of the talking. I tell her about the tyrso seedlings and how they’re just beginning to show through the soil, and how Banri couldn’t stop laughing when she saw me with my nose to the ground, peering at them in joy. Tomorrow, I tell Oiñ, we are planting peas, and when you are well, we will eat them straight from the pod, like we used to when I was little, and we roamed my grandmother’s garden and stole them fresh off their stalks.

What also arrives fast here is strange deaths.

I sit with Oiñ while the rest of the household attends the funeral of a Bah Borlin, who’d suffered a muscular disease that went undiagnosed. Even when they took him all the way to Shillong. And another soon after, a baby who was stillborn. This, it seems, happens frequently. There’s talk of ksuid lum, ksuid wah, and ksuid suiñ, malicious spirits of the hills and water and air, but Oiñ says it’s been like this ever since those people came, almost twenty years ago . . .

“The ones who dig?” I ask cautiously.

Oiñ nods, then turns, closing her eyes, and so for a few moments, I watch to make sure that she’s breathing.

 

Most disconcerted by my staying are the sisters. The twins are happy enough to have me around—I play catch with them in the afternoon, running about outside. Sometimes I pretend to fall, and moan and groan, and this sets them off into hysterics. Bah Kit has come around to being comfortable enough to say hello without looking like he’d prefer to vanish. Mem, though, has scolded me because she says she doesn’t expect me to work. You’re our guest, she protests, and I tell her she can’t call me Oiñ’s daughter and not consider me part of the family. This seems to mollify her, but not Kong Thei, who, I think, would prefer me out of the way, out of the house, and ideally out of the village. She says nothing about my being here, but I sense she is less than pleased. I get a nod from her every now and then, not much else. I try to not let this unsettle me, silently resolving to earn my place in the household for however long.

But it isn’t easy. I keep messing up.

I leave the chicken coop door open one evening after their feed, and a fox or a cat carries off one of our fattest birds. This is a terrible loss. I also overwater a patch of radishes, and root rot sets in and they all wither. Worse, I forget to fill the loo bucket once or twice, or maybe even three times, and it always so happens that Kong Thei uses it right after. Banri has had to run and fill another bucket and pass it to her behind the door. I’ve apologized, of course, but the older sister meets my words coldly, unforgivingly.

I’m still not considered capable enough to be given any work inside the house, the kitchen, to cook—about which I’m quite relieved. I offer to clean, and once I’m allowed hesitantly by Mem to scrub the dishes and dry them in the sun, but I see them being washed again later by Kong Thei. “Didn’t I do them properly?” I ask anxiously, and Mem tells me not to mind, that her sister just likes doing certain things herself.

I decide then to solely designate the outdoors as my responsibility, along with Banri, if she’ll have me.

“If you help me with the kper, I’ll have more free time.”

“Yes,” I say smiling. “And what will you do with it?”

“I will study,” she says shyly.

 

Sometimes, in the evening, when Oiñ falls asleep earlier than usual, I sit on the front steps with Mem. We chat about this and that—her worry about having to send the twins away to school in Wahkaji. Banri, she’s also a little concerned about, she’s too quiet, that girl. “I’m glad she talks to you,” and she gives my arm a squeeze.

“Did Kong Thei never marry?” I ask when we’re comfortable enough in our acquaintance.

“My sister . . .” she begins and pauses, “hasn’t had the easiest time. Our parents died when we were very young, and she looked after me, and our two brothers . . . both dead now. And even when she fell in love and was meant to be married to this man . . . he left her.”

I mumble, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“She’s very protective of us,” adds Mem. “Of me.”

This much I know. She doesn’t say any more; this story makes me a little sad.

Sometimes I sit on the steps alone, with the household behind me resting in early slumber. Often the chatter at dinner is playful, the twins entertaining us with little songs, Bah Kit telling us funny stories. Sometimes we turn to uranium talk—who knows if the mines are closed, they reply to my query, who knows when the diggers will return, or if they have already.

“Our fight,” says Bah Kit quietly, “has been long. We are tired.”

I sit under a clear sky, thinking how six and a half billion years ago, supernovae out there sent it into space—the uranium found beneath this ground, present from the very early formation of the planet. Then I’m ashamed that I’ve known this and not the story of this land’s resistance.

 

I learn about it by talking to Bah Albert, and Bah Syiem, the village headman, a stocky farmer with wise eyes and a woolen hat drawn over his head. Such a long history. Explorations began here all the way back in the 1950s, and uranium was discovered in 1984. For years, they dug into these hills, taking samples, making minute calculations.

“Did you know,” I ask, “what they were looking for?”

They shake their heads. No, and even now we have no name for it save the one they gave us: yellowcake. Why would we name what we didn’t need? To the people from the government, though, it mattered. So much so that they returned, with bigger smiles and bigger promises. “In the interest of the nation. Always they say that.”

It is late afternoon, the light is softening, and a white mist rises from the slopes.

They look around, saying, “Our nation is this—the hills we see around us, the rivers we know as well as our loved ones, the trees we call by name. And what happens if it’s in the interest of the nation—but not in ours?”

To this, there is no answer.

I listen as they recount how, for years, this land was mined, with machines like monsters opening up the earth, bringing to the surface what ought not to touch air.

We put up with them for a while, they say. With their boozing and teasing and loud outsider ways.

“Then we noticed our birds were dying. Our cows and dogs going mad, our bay trees wilting, our fishes floating. Then our people started bleeding.”

Still, it took time for the resistance to grow. Simply because there was confusion. No harm would come if the mining was done in a safe way, they were assured. “And so . . . why not? Us, poor and forgotten—left to languish. Perhaps all the terrible things that had happened, all the disease and the dying, was the work of evil spirits. The digging would bring us hope, and wealth, and light.”

Now it’s evening; the crickets have set up their chorus, the tap-tap-tap of the ‘niang kynjah, the endless rise and fall of the ñiang-kongwieng.

“What made you change your mind?” I ask.

They say what I did not expect. A documentary.

Buddha Weeps in Jadugoda. Dubbed into Khasi. About a place they’d never heard of, but whose people, too, lived in a land of forests, and played music like them.

We learned that they thought the uranium in their land a curse. That radioactive waste is hard to contain. It runs like water, sits like stone, and rises in the air as dust. And even if it’s “safely” stored, in our hills the rain can break through rock, the winds rattle our sturdiest pines, and earthquakes carve the ground apart like butter. We learned that this thing kills slowly.

All people here, a woman said in the documentary, die young.

So a few years ago, we gathered like a storm in summer, they tell me, led in our march by Kong Spelity, a woman of rare and ferocious fire—vowing to protect our land.

You know, they whisper, it’s difficult to trust even the people from Shillong, the big city, those businessmen and politicians with big cars and big houses. Who tell us, Maybe we can dig for yellowcake ourselves? We find we must protect our land not just from the center—but even from our own people.

Still—they shrug—permissions were finally revoked for exploration, for surveying, and though they left, we suspect they return in secret.

“Like rodents,” spits Bah Albert, “digging in the dirt.”

Only once, recently, did they take matters into their own hands.

I wait, and hold my breath.

They were collecting soil—a scientist and three officials—and we found them, and we waved our khukris and raised our voices and pummeled them until they fled.

Leave it in the ground, we said. Leave it in the ground.

 

The other person with whom I enjoy having long conversations in the village is Bah Kit, who I discover, once he opens up, is quite the historian.

It began one day when I asked if I could drop by his workshop—a small shack some way down the road from the house—and he looked tremendously pleased and nervous. “Maybe you can make something for me,” I said, and he almost choked on his tea.

What could I possibly need?

“Many things,” I told him, “I’m sure.”

It becomes a ritual—after lunch, Banri accompanies me, and we sit outside the workshop in the afternoon sun, eating oranges, the smell of wood shavings in the air. He’s been making more ladles—they’re in great demand, apparently—and also some simple stools and tables. It is calming, to sit and watch him work, and as he shapes, saws, and carves the wood under his hands, he answers questions, he talks.

He tells me when the villages in these areas were founded—some ancient, their origins lost in the distant past, some as recent as the 1960s. That he grew up in a village not far from here, but met Mem at a wedding, and had to move, as was the custom, to his wife’s home. “I come from Jakrem,” he tells me, “the village with the hot sulfur springs.” The waters so warm and mineral-rich they could cure almost anything—at least that’s what they believed, that it came from deep underground and carried with it all the powers of the earth.

“It also made for the best rice beer,” he chuckles.

He knows the landscape well, and speaks of natural sights I’ve never seen—and I’m ashamed to say, have never heard of. Synrangbah Cave, he says, with bats as big as eagles; the secret hollow behind Dongnob Falls, where in winter, the sun turns the stone into gold; Tynrong Manbasa, the timekeeper’s rock, which casts a shadow by which farmers know when to head home for the evening. And near his own village, Lum Symper, protected, it was believed, by a powerful mountain deity. He shudders. “My father told me he’s seen what happens to people who trespass in the forests . . . their heads get twisted around.” He mimics this with his own hands and we squeal.

Banri has also outgrown her shyness and asks many questions.

About my life in Shillong, in Delhi. She cannot believe most of the things I tell her about the city. That you place an order, for food, groceries, laundry services, and people show up at your door. Like magic, she declares. That a taxi can be called from your phone, that invisible money is transferred just like that to the driver.

It sounds—it is—a different world.

We have started also to go for extended walks around the village—up and down hilly tracks, through forests rich with mulch and mushrooms, to a waterfall or two, silvery and small in this dry season. I like exploring the area, mapping the place with my steps and breath. Banri also takes me to the sacred grove, the place that must remain untouched—with not a twig or leaf removed.

“What happens if you do? Bad things?”

She says she doesn’t know anyone who’s dared to disobey.

At the edge of the grove is the stream that later joins the Ranikor River, whose waters are so blue, she says, it looks like the sky has been inverted. “Though when I was small,” she adds, “I remember people saying fish were found dead by the thousands. Belly up and floating.”

She shows me the paths to Nongtynniaw, Domiasiat, and Mawthabah, nearby villages—“We can go there someday, if you like”—and farther away lie Nongjri and Nongkulang. “That’s where babies are born like monsters,” she says sadly.

“What do you mean?” I ask, startled.

“It’s what I’ve heard.”

I then ask her about a track that runs alongside the stream and disappears into the undergrowth. “Where does this go?” Her eyes widen, and she whispers something I don’t catch.

“Where?” I ask.

“The abandoned village,” she repeats.

“Abandoned by whom?”

“The Nongïaid.”

“Who?”

“The ones who walk. Nomads.” There’s no word for nomads in Khasi, so she says “ki briew ki bym shong shi jaka.” The people who do not stay in one place.

How mysterious. I’m intrigued.

“They all deserted it, that’s what Papa told me,” Banri continues. “And even the ones who stayed didn’t survive.”

“But why?” I ask. “Why did they leave?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t think anyone knows . . .”

However much I try to convince her, though, she is unwilling to take me to this place. “People says its haunted. No birds sing there, and no animals will graze on the grass. And even on a hot summer’s day”—she shudders—“it’s cold.”

“How far is it?”

“Far enough. And even if it wasn’t”—she looks at me pointedly—“you shouldn’t go there alone.”

I try on a few more occasions to persuade her—we can visit in the morning, at the brightest hour of day, we’ll take a quick look and turn back—and then I give up.

“Maybe we can go together with some other people,” she finally offers.

And until this can somehow be arranged, I must be content with that.

*  *  *

Today, Mawmalang village has some visitors.

They arrive around lunchtime. A dozen young men, who move about freely, greeting people, and clustering at Bah Albert’s shop for kwai and soft drinks. They seem well known to everyone in the village.

“Who are they?” I ask Banri.

We’ve snuck out to lorni, to nose about the proceedings.

“KSU,” she whispers back.

“Oh, really?” Whatever I was expecting, it wasn’t the Khasi Students’ Union. In fact, all this while, I’ve associated the KSU with why Mei sent me away from home. However noble or justified their causes might have been, according to her, they were the ones fighting the state, creating trouble.

“People say they’ve done a lot of good here,” Banri tells me. The uranium miners were driven away mainly because of them. They rallied people together, screened documentaries, held protest gatherings.

One of the young men, Shemphang, the leader, I assume, stands up to greet us and thank us all for gathering. He says they’re here to update us on some recent developments.

A murmur rises from the crowd, like the low buzzing of bees.

“Several years ago, the central government claimed to withdraw their exploratory digs . . . They even closed the Uranium Corporation of India office in Shillong, but—”

“They keep coming back like flies,” shouts someone from the crowd.

Shemphang nods, waits a moment. “Sadly, it appears so. About a month ago, a package was apprehended in Moreh, at the Indo-Myanmar border. It had an inscription marking it as an explosive. It also carried a voltage charge number, and two tags . . . UCIL and AMD North Eastern Region Headquarters, Shillong.”

A gasp ripples through the gathering, connected by a single troubling thought. That this could mean the extraction and smuggling of uranium are still being carried out. Illegally, and with the involvement of UCIL and AMD.

What did the package contain? we ask.

“Nobody knows.” It disappeared, of course. Without a trace. Gone, like it never existed.

I look around, at the fear written on people’s faces. How can this happen on our land?

But it is hard to keep track. Who comes, who goes. In the shadows, and in the dark of night. How vast and secret these hills, and how much can be hidden from view.

Shemphang asks us to be vigilant, to keep watch. “If there is any mining activity going on, if you see or hear anything, we’ll put a stop to it.”

The crowd buzzes, this time in anger.

He raises his hand to quiet us, and we obey.

“We are here,” he promises. “We will make sure this doesn’t continue.”

It’s reassuring, but not reassuring enough. Around me, people murmur, How will they make sure? They don’t live here.

“The second thing,” he continues, “is that there is a proposal for a highway to be built between Shillong and Wahkaji, and a road down to Mawmalang.”

At this, whisperings begin again. It’s true. The rumors are true.

“Except,” he adds, “the proposal is from the Uranium Corporation of India.”

It comes back to me, the conversation I’d overheard on the bus.

“You see why we must resist this plan. We cannot allow UCIL, the organization that’s looking to extract the uranium, to build the road that will be used to transport it away.”

At this point, someone interrupts him: “But don’t they say they will only build the road . . . and not carry out any mining?” To my surprise, it’s Bah Karmel. He’s standing close by, I hadn’t noticed; from here, I can hear the faint quiver in his voice.

Shemphang shrugs. “Yes, it’s what they’ve said, sure, but that’s like the spider telling the fly, come into my web, I promise I won’t eat you.”

Amid the snickers, Bah Karmel persists. His hands are clenched tightly by his side. “I beg your pardon, but it isn’t the same thing. The road will allow us access to healthcare, to schools, to jobs . . . The road will save us, and many of our loved ones.”

The murmuring continues, in disapproval, in agreement.

Banri whispers into my ear, “She died, you know, his wife.”

My heart stills. “What happened?”

“She was bleeding. They couldn’t get her to a hospital on time. He left Mawmalang, for months . . . He was distraught with grief.”

The long afternoon is reduced to this—the clenched fists, the quiver in his voice, the look in Bah Karmel’s eyes. Here. And when he helped me through the forest.

 

That evening, after the KSU are gone, the village gathers in Bah Syiem’s house. Next to him, I’m told, are his mother, the matriarch of our village, and Bah Sumar, the nong kñia, the storyteller, the bearer of the word. The mood in the room is somber, though restlessness fizzles in corners where young men sit with their khukris.

The village has gathered because it is troubled. The news today has largely not been welcome. I look around for Bah Karmel, but he is not here. Cups of tea are being handed out to bolster our spirits, black and strong and sweet.

“What can we say?” the headman begins. “We live in a small corner of the world and own nothing, and yet people want to take away our land.”

The fire burns fiercely at the hearth, fed with sticks and coal.

“We know people in the city have money . . . But what will we do with riches? Riches may run out at some point, but not land. Our land has always been there for us, our ancestors tilled it, and we take care of it for our children. Without our land, we are lost.”

All of us are turned toward him in silence, our eyes lit by the flames.

Sometimes, in all honesty, I struggle a little to follow; my Khasi has improved over my weeks here, but Bah Syiem speaks a strong and sweet dialect. I’m certain, though, that he’s saying something about us being a people with an intangible past, that we have only our spoken word—ka ktien—and, here he looks around, our collective memory to rely on. In some ways, he says, we don’t have a past. “Perhaps that is why our existence is mainly expressed through land”—he places a hand on the floor, on the hard-baked earth. “The more they try to take it away, the more we will fight. Not because we are its owners, but because we are its caretakers.”

Bah Syiem sips his tea. He sighs. “We can do nothing for now. We wait and watch, and see what rumors the wind brings us, and what we can learn from the birds who know the secrets of the forest. For tonight, perhaps Bah Sumar”—he gestures to the person next to him—“can lift our spirits with a song.”

The nong kñia—so old, he looks like the earth itself, the color of it, its creased texture—unfolds and sits up, longer, straighter. He is holding a stringed instrument, a duitara, and he plucks at it, and says, yes, yes, of course, he would be happy to, and he begins to tune his instrument, and speak, and he slips, almost without us noticing, into narration—not singing, not speaking, but something in between.

“To ïa ap, to ïa sngap,” he begins. Let us wait, let us listen. “What story shall we tell tonight?”

“This is a trick,” whispers Banri into my ear. “He always pretends to ask, but he’s decided already.”

“Tonight, we shall tell the tale of creation, our khanatang, sanctified and true. In the beginning, when there was nothing but emptiness, God created Mei Ramew, the guardian mother spirit of the earth, and her husband, Basa. They lived happily but alone, and soon began to long for the company of children. Please, they prayed, to our god U Blei, bless us with a child or two so our line may continue, and after many such pleas, god granted them their wish five times over. The Sun, their first daughter, their only son, the Moon, then Water, Wind, and Fire, who all grew up into beings of great accomplishment, and shaped the earth with grace and beauty, and gave life to mountains and flowers and trees. But do you know?” says the nong kñia, plucking, singing. “Something was missing.”

Someone who would tend and sow and harvest, who would walk the earth looking after the birds and the beasts. None of them could do this, the sun and the moon were busy roaming the skies, water could not travel freely, wind and fire ran too fast, too wild. Please, prayed Mei Ramew and Basa to our god U Blei, send us someone who will not only be heir to all this bounty, but also be steward of the world.

“And who did U Blei send?” the nong kñia asks.

“Kyllang and Symper,” the children shout in reply.

Two powerful spirits of the mountains, brothers, who once stood next to each other on the road to Mawnai. But as it turns out, they were kept too busy quarreling, squabbling between themselves, to see to the welfare of other living things. And so, our god sent the tiger, ferocious and grand, but the tiger was a despot, a terrifying overlord who began a rule of tyranny and fear.

Eventually, it was decided that none but the sixteen clans living in heaven could be fitting caretakers of the earth, and for them U Blei created a golden ladder on Lum Sohpetbneng, the mountain at the center of the sky, linking the kingdom of god and the kingdom of man, and for many years, there was great happiness and contentment.

“But men,” the nong kñia sang, “men in their terrible greed and selfishness angered our god, as they swerved away from the path of goodness and truth. So he planted a tree, a special, divine tree. As evidence of his displeasure, and to mark the end of the years of joy and light, he planted the Diengiei, the tree of gloom and shadow, the tree of all trees, which grew so huge that its branches covered the sun, and all the world fell into darkness.”

The instrument twangs into the night as his voice rises and falls with the music.

We sit and listen carefully. Banri leans against me, I lean against Mem, and for a long while, we do not move, for everything is entangled.

*  *  *

“You did what?”

I’m trying to speak to Kima, and it’s not going well. The cellular fault lines are worse than ever today, and I’ve spent all my time on the hillock yelling, Can you hear me?

I wanted to tell him about my evening at the headman’s house. About the nong kñia.

“He sang you all a song? What kind of song?”

“Ka khanatang . . . a sacred story . . .”

“A what?”

“Never mind,” I shout back. It is impossible.

“Have you participated in some profound ritual that’s changed you forever, Shai?”

Why does the line clear only when he’s teasing?

“Nothing like that,” I say stiffly.

He chuckles. “I’m glad you’re having a good time, but when are you coming back?”

“Maybe I never will,” I say, only half in jest.

He laughs. “Don’t be silly. You don’t belong there.”

I say nothing, sending only silence down the line.

“Anyway, good you called,” he continues. “I wanted to tell you—”

I’ll never know. The line drops, and when I try to call him back, it doesn’t go through. I sit there a moment, though, thinking about his words. You don’t belong there. How strange he should say that. And how strange that I’m unsettled, but not because I’ve been telling myself with any compulsion that I do. In my time here, I haven’t felt the need—or indeed had a moment—to think it over. It isn’t what people expect, I suppose . . . that you move from a city to the countryside, and slip right in . . . After all, I imagine them wondering, isn’t there an awful lot to miss? But what have I missed? Truthfully, not much. Not the TV, nor my Netflix subscription. Cafés, maybe, and coffee, but definitely not crowded bars and parties at people’s houses, at which I was always, always awkward.

And couldn’t the question be what have you gained? Because to live in a city is also to live without so much . . . Silence, and darkness, and slowness. All these things that allow you to be with yourself . . .

Maybe Kima’s right, though—I shouldn’t pretend my time here is something it’s not, like some foolish romantic. But what is it, and what is it not? And how does one tell?

I’m still a little perturbed as I tramp back down to the house.

In the backyard, I check in on the chickens scratching around, the smelly pigs snuffling in the mud, and the kper, where the tyrso is leafy, and the beans and peas are beginning to show their soft white flowers. It is here that I begin to feel calmer, at the sight of silently growing things, pushing into the soil and out into the world. Next we’ll be planting some turmeric—the queen, Banri tells me, of edible roots. I will probably never be one of these people, like my father, or Kong Nuramon, who remembers botanical names, or can identify plants at a glance. But lately, I have come to find something else—some peace in this cycle of sowing and harvest, this replenishment. Here, a sense of the seasons.

Back in Delhi, I’d tell Grace that I was a bit like Uranus.

“What?” She’d blink at me.

Uranus, the planet with the unfortunate name. Unlike the other planets in our solar system, I’d explain, spinning quietly in the same plane as their orbit, magnetic fields running primly perpendicular, Uranus tumbled around on its side, its orientation changing in all sorts of directions. Often, I felt the same.

Except here.

And thinking about it now, perhaps it hasn’t really happened overnight—the slipping in—but what has helped is being occupied, almost straightaway, in learning to tend and grow, prune and harvest. In this, I’ve found something I hadn’t anywhere before—purpose. Which sounds grand and exalted, I know, but truly, I’ve realized, it is merely to sleep well at night and to wake up knowing you are needed—by someone, a plant, a pet, a person, the world, yourself.

Of course, I am also among people who have allowed me to feel this way—though my decision to stay on was initially met with some puzzlement. Phin leit noh lano sha sor? When are you leaving for the city? they’d ask. And then, after a while, they stopped. Bah Albert treats me as one of his regulars at the shop, Bah Syiem tips his hat when we cross. I’ve grown acquainted with a few others—Kong Dabari with her hearty, cackly laugh; Bah Shaiñ, who insists that he once could shapeshift into a tiger; Kong Midalis, who makes the softest rice cakes in the village. They are curious about me, but not too wary, perhaps because I already have a household here to call my own. I am, in some way, already family.

And so, somehow, something feels . . . aligned. Yes, that’s it. That’s the word. As though I’ve found my orbit. This is a galaxy to which I am attached and gravitationally bound—all of us moving in synchronicity. And I think I feel it more strongly after last night, at the headman’s house, where we were listening, listening. I don’t know how to explain it, what it means to gather together and listen to a story. How in this simplest of acts all of us are participants, listeners, tellers, all responsible for bringing a story into existence and keeping it alive.

 

When I step into the house, there’s no one in the kitchen, stirring the pots on the fire, crushing pepper in the mortar, rushing around to ready lunch. Instead, farther inside, I find a small commotion has broken out. Everyone has gathered noisily in Oiñ’s room.

“What’s happened?” I ask.

Oiñ, they tell me, is insisting on stepping outdoors.

Mem is trying to soothe her—“Let’s see if we can take you out tomorrow.”

“What is she talking about?” exclaims her sister, hiding none of her exasperation. “She hasn’t even been able to stand for months and months.”

This is true, but perhaps that is why, I offer.

Kong Thei snaps at me. “Yes, you know everything.”

I am silenced, but Oiñ is not. “Nga kwah ban ïuh ki kjat ha ka khyndew,” she says. And when none of us make a move, she grows more agitated. What do you mean? we ask. You want to walk? “No.” Her head trembles, as do her limbs. “I want to stamp my feet upon the earth.”

Somehow, we manage to gather her and lift her out of the bed, through the front room, and then down the steps with difficulty—Bah Kit has to help—and finally, we place her down, supporting her on either side.

“Bare feet, bare feet,” she insists.

So I bend down and slip off her socks.

She places her toes on the grass, squealing like a child, and all of us gathered around her can’t help smiling. The tension that was brewing inside dissipates.

“Oh,” cries Oiñ, closing her eyes, turning her face to the winter sun.

The sky is blue, the dust has settled after a brief shower this morning, and something—the brightness of the world—beckons us all out.

Kong Thei and Banri support her as she takes a turn on the grass. The twins shriek and prance about in delight. Bah Kit tries to make sure they don’t bump into Oiñ. Mem and I stand aside, watching, smiling.

“You know,” she tells me, “our elders say we must make it a habit to walk barefoot outside every day . . . that our feet must touch the ground often . . . They believe that the earth has special powers running through it, and doing this strengthens us and keeps us healthy and strong and upright.” Then she laughs. “All this is silly, you think, I’m sure.”

I say I don’t think that at all.

“But we have forgotten, haven’t we?” she adds.

I nod.

“We pave the earth and cover our feet, and we forget to place them on the ground.”

From across the lawn, Oiñ grins at us. “You, too,” she commands, pointing, and so we oblige. We fling off our slippers, pull off our socks, and step on the mud.

It’s sun-warmed and scratchy and uneven. Different from the soil in the kper, which I tread on every day, moist and soft and mulchy. This is hard, resilient. With its own life underneath. I remember the conversation with my father and Kong Nuramon, about the network that webs the deep, dark soil. And here, something else also runs through it—what we’re trying to protect, what could power the earth and destroy it, and scatter us, this circle of imperfect steadiness.

We are so immersed in keeping Oiñ standing, and supported, and in stamping our feet on the grass, that I don’t notice two figures approaching. They walk down the road, hesitant, unsure where to go, and they have heard us and probably wish to ask for directions. Or perhaps they know their way and are merely passing by. It is impossible to say. We are laughing, and Oiñ looks as though she has never spent a day of her life unwell.

The two visitors stand aside, with rucksacks hanging heavy on their backs, almost embarrassed, wishing not to intrude upon our odd gathering—except one of them, the young man, is looking at me, in recognition. Their gaze remains on us, and I lift my head, and turn toward them . . . I stop laughing, moving, breathing. It cannot be, and yet it is.

My voice comes from elsewhere, from someone else, as I blurt out, “What the