Shai

fuck!”

“Guess you weren’t expecting us?” Dajied asks, jokingly I think at first, but then I realize not. “Kima told me where you were,” he adds, “and I tried to reach you. But I guess my texts didn’t go through.”

“Network,” I mumble vaguely.

The young woman next to him narrows her eyes. “Have we met?”

“Yes, briefly.”

“Was it at . . .”

“The Ever-Living Museum.”

“Raphael’s house . . . ?”

She doesn’t remember.

“At the museum,” I repeat, feeling foolish.

“Are you sure? I thought at Raff’s place . . .” She waves her hand airily. “No matter. I’m Daphisha.” She flashes me a wide, disarming smile. “Nice to meet you.”

I nod. “And you, too.”

Dajied is here on assignment—UCIL’s contentious offer to build a road, connecting these villages to Wahkaji and Nongstoiñ and Shillong, regardless of being allowed to mine or not, has created a stir of interest in the decade-old uranium story. Magazines, newspapers, in Delhi and elsewhere, along with a foreign antinuclear organization, have commissioned him to take photographs, video clips, interviews—to capture anything of significance.

He tells me this now, but doesn’t mention why Daphisha is accompanying him, and I don’t ask. What I notice is the casual intimacy with which he calls her Daphi. They’re here looking for Bah Albert; Dajied’s contact at Wahkaji has fixed them up with him for accommodation. It makes sense: Bah Albert is possibly the only person in the village with an extra room.

They have come here together. The thought drums endlessly through my head. As does: I shouldn’t care, I shouldn’t care.

*  *  *

Through the year, there are times when a depression in the Bay of Bengal causes heavy rain along the edge of the Shillong Plateau—in the East Khasi Hills, and here, where we are, the South West Khasi Hills. It will pour as though it will never stop, as though an ocean has exploded in the sky. In a day, Shillong will receive six inches of rain; Sohra fifteen, sometimes twenty-five. Rivers will swell, the slopes of hills will slide away, and sometimes lives will be lost. This is ‘lap mynsaw, people will whisper, rain that’s fraught with danger. It is sudden and strong and comes at you from nowhere.

We are in winter here in Mawmalang, in deep and dry December, but I find myself wishing for rain like this. A mad thunderous downpour that echoes the whirl inside me.

But nothing of the sort happens.

The day after the newcomers arrive is as peaceful as before, sunny yet mild, and biting cold at night. The rhythms of the village also continue as always. Early rising, long hours at the field, evening around the fire, deep, solid sleep.

Everything is the same, and yet not.

How is it permitted, the great and wholly unexpected?

Somewhere on our planet is an instrument called an interferometer that measures gravitational waves created by merging black holes. It recently detected a signal that lasted one tenth of a second, more than a billion light years away—which means one such merger took place when the universe was about half its present age. And yet here we are, victims of surprise and the unforeseen, with not a single instrument to tell us who will turn up on our doorstep, in our life, unconsidered, unannounced, out of the blue. We can look so very far into the past, and not a day into the future. All this we must reckon with by ourselves, alone.

 

After we tucked Oiñ back into bed that morning, after our mad barefoot capering outside, the household, too, slid back into normalcy. Bah Kit busy at his workshop, carving ladles and spoons, the twins to their play, the sisters Kong Thei and Mem back to cooking and cleaning, Banri and me to tending the livestock and the vegetable garden. We are harvesting baskets of oranges now—Khasi mandarin, glowing golden on the trees.

“Who are those people who’ve come?” she has asked me, and I pretend to be too busy collecting fruit to hear her.

Sadly, I’m unable to employ the same tactic over the phone with Mei.

In our conversations, she’s beginning to sound exasperated: “I don’t understand, Shai. What are you doing there?”

“Not much.”

Sometimes she’ll slip in a “So, when are you coming back?”

What for? I want to ask.

“There are people looking after Oiñ, no?” she’ll say. “You told me so.”

But at this, my obstinacy rises. “Yes, and I’d like to be one of those people.”

She’ll sigh. “Well, what news otherwise?”

No news. Unless she’s interested in the height of the pea shoots.

She is not.

My father I’ve been calling more often. I didn’t think I’d ever say this, but I find him easier to talk to these days. To begin with, he is deeply interested in the height of the pea shoots. He quizzes me on what’s growing, what’s doing well, and I’m happy to comply. The last time we spoke, he had a message for me from his friend Bah Kyn.

Bah Kyn was terribly excited to know of my whereabouts deep in rural Meghalaya. Where was I staying? With whom? What did the family keep in their kitchen and store in their khrum? Anything he could collect for his Ever-Living Museum? I’d laughed, saying I’d seen lots of ancient mohkhiew, and some old pliang. Now he wanted to know what kind of garden hoe exactly, what kind of plates, and, above all, how many I’d be willing to cart back to Shillong for him.

I don’t tell him that at the moment Shillong feels far, far away.

*  *  *

This afternoon, as usual, Banri and I are at Bah Kit’s workshop.

He has recently managed to collect some birch, from a cluster near the stream. I don’t ask how he has come upon it, because I’ve learned over my conversations with him that all the land here is nongkynti—property that does not belong to an individual. “That’s how it always was,” he explained to me, “village land belonged to everyone in the village . . . to everyone in the clan. If you tended a field, it was yours, and if you left it fallow for more than three years, it reverted back to the commons.” This kind of shifting, fluid ownership didn’t sit well with the British. He chuckled. “My grandfather was a rangbah shnong, a village chief, and bilati officers came to him asking if he would sell them land. ‘Sell?’ he said. ‘I have no power to do that . . .’ ‘What do you mean? What powers do you have?’” Bak Kit’s grandfather had pointed to a stone on the ground, saying, as much as that. Now, of course, it’s different, Bah Kit went on to tell me. Private ownership has created a landed elite, corrupt politicians, contractors, and businessmen, ravaging these hills, doing what they will. I hadn’t imagined Bah Kit to feel so strongly about this—or about anything else, to be honest—but he’d spoken about it with quiet outrage.

Now, though, he is in a good mood.

He’s telling us how, whenever he fells a tree, he makes sure to leave something behind. Some fruit, a handful of rice, a vegetable or two. Today, some kwai.

“Nga don tang shi kyntein”—he had only one quarter of a betel nut on him, he says, but at least it was something. “It’s simple. When you take,” he adds, “you must give back.”

Banri is incredulous. “A bit of kwai for a whole tree? Papa, it hardly seems enough.”

“I’ve wondered about this,” he admits, “but I think it’s not about what you leave . . . which may be a small thing . . . but to acknowledge that you are taking.”

“You’ve always said so . . . but why?” his daughter presses.

He looks up at us before saying, “It makes you take less. It makes you grateful.”

Something comes back to me, a faint memory of family picnics, and my father insisting I leave something behind, sweets, a ribbon, for the stones I’d gathered to carry home from the river. “It means,” I say, “that when you take, you also go without.”

Bah Kit looks pleased. “See, she understands. Bym shim kylliang,” he adds. Reciprocity. Ban leh markylliang—to balance on all sides. When you give something back, what you have been given becomes a gift, and gifts, he says, create continuing relationships. It’s not like going to a shop—where you take, pay, leave, forget.

 

Banri and I eat our soh khleh, chopped oranges drizzled with salt, chili flakes, and mustard oil, and watch him work. He is making a new duli for our kitchen—the old one is too small, says Mem, too old, and since nothing is ever thrown away here, I will inherit it as an almirah for my clothes. The twins are playing near us, rolling around in the grass with a litter of plump puppies.

It’s a sunny afternoon, though already glimmering around the edges with winter chill. We have gathered a pile of tyrso today, and our syrwa will be pungent and wholesome this evening. I am thinking about this, enjoying the sun on my back, when Banri nudges me.

“What?” I mutter.

In the distance, the newcomers, walking out of someone’s house.

“What are they doing here?” asks Banri.

It’s too much effort to explain, so I just say work.

“What kind of work? Like a journalist?”

And though this isn’t entirely true, I say yes.

The sun doesn’t seem to have had a soporific effect on her. “Who are they?” she asks brightly. “You know them, no?”

“Only him.” I grunt.

She eyes me questioningly, but my face is as impassive as stone.

“And her?”

“I don’t know her.”

“But she told you her name that day when they arrived?”

“Yes. Daphisha.” Though he calls her Daphi.

Banri is quiet a moment. “She is very pretty.”

I say with no little irritation, “Go be her friend, then, go.”

She takes this seriously. “Em phi . . . why would she want to talk to me?”

“Because,” I say, though I’m not certain Banri’s catching the sarcasm, “I’m sure that’s what she’s here to do, make friends with people.”

 

Later, at the hillock behind the house, I’m on my own, or almost. The girl with the cat is hovering around, as she sometimes does, warily staring out from behind the hibiscus bushes.

I’ve tried to speak with her a few times: Kumno? Phi kyrteng aiu? But ever since I saw her on my first day at Mawmalang, she’s stayed resolutely silent. Whose daughter is she? Nobody knows. People have tried to take her in, but she refuses to live with anyone. So she is fed at many homes, and sleeps god knows where. She seems to turn up and disappear, willfully like a dragonfly.

Up here, my phone’s alive with a slim bar of network. There is only one person I’d like to speak to, really, but when I try Kima’s number, there’s no answer. Almost immediately though, he calls back.

“What the fuck!” I yell. “Why didn’t you tell me about them coming here?”

“I tried,” he protests, “but we got cut off.”

“Who is she?”

Daphisha, he tells me, is from the Mawlong family. As though that will explain everything. He forgets my years away from Shillong have rendered me sadly out of touch with all the local gossip.

“Who?”

Kima sighs. “Remember that rooftop bar we went to that evening? She owns it. That, and half a dozen other ‘high-end’ commercial properties in town, a nature resort in Sohra, an artisanal tea shop in Upper Shillong. And that ‘Shillong from the Air’ festival you’ve seen advertised on hoardings? Guess who the organizers are?”

I see. I hesitate before asking, but a memory has stirred, of conversations between Dajied and me while we were together.

“Is her mother a politician?” I ask.

“Yes, Dorothy Mawlong, East Shillong Constituency.”

“Wasn’t she involved in . . . ?”

“Shillong’s scam of the century? Selling low-quality roofing material to the rural poor so when the rains came they were left with no shelter? The very same.”

Hypocrite. Dajied had condemned the mother, the family, Shillong’s corrupt elite, and here he is . . . dating the daughter. For shame!

Daphi’s the third sister, Kima continues, second-youngest. The eldest is an airline stewardess, married to some Polish bloke and now living in Warsaw. The second sister, a single mum who oversees a swanky shopping mall in Laitumkhrah. “The youngest is still in school, I think.”

“Is there anything you don’t know, Kima?”

“Very little.”

“And Daphisha? What does she do?”

“Actually, that I don’t know. She’s been away from Shillong for a few years . . . and now she’s back . . .”

“And she’s here?”

Kima and I fall silent, the same question running through our heads: What is Daphisha Mawlong doing in Mawmalang?

 

By the time I head back down to the house, evening is beginning to settle.

It’s past the hour we usually begin watering the vegetables, and I see Banri is at it already. I hurry to join her, and we work side by side in silence, neatly wetting row upon row of earth, the smell of mud rising. The beans have been planted with the corn, the ginger with the pineapples, and they are growing well together.

I also spy another stout pumpkin, green for now and plumping, my favorite winter vegetable, sweet and creamy on its own, delectable when cooked, as a special treat, with slivers of smoked meat.

When we finish, I step inside. Dinner is being readied, Bah Kit is playing with the twins, and Oiñ, though frail as ever, is in a rare clear mood. We chat today about old Bollywood movies we’d watched together—we don’t remember any names—and I remind her of one of her favorite scenes that we’d rewind and watch over and again, involving a dashing hero in an open jeep, serenading a doe-eyed heroine in a train.

“Itynnad mo?” she says.

I agree. Yes, very lovely.

 

Later, Banri and I follow where the nong kñia goes, a warm hearth in someone’s home. We meet more often in the winter, she tells me, and I can see why. The days splice swiftly with the nights, darkness settles before you know it, and then there’s little to do in our village.

We follow the nong kñia because, as Banri says, he’s stuffed with stories.

What will it be tonight? How the peacock won his colorful feathers? How lightning came to live in the sky? Or how Ren, the handsome fisherman, stole the heart of a fairy queen?

To ïa ap, to ïa sngap. Let us wait, let us listen.

In a room lit only by the fire, the smell of charcoal and wood in the air. All of us here, children, young lovers, the elderly, me—and the new ones. The young woman, with hair like ‘tiew doh maw, a plant that grows so close to the ground it kisses stone, and the young man I once loved.

We sit around the fire, listening, listening.

Tonight, says the nong kñia, he will tell us an old favorite, the tale of our guardian, the rooster, custodian of day and night, intercessor with the gods, redeemer of wrongs. He strums the duitara, the strings twanging under his fingers.

Long, long ago, when the world was young, a great feast was thrown by all the earth’s living creatures—everyone was invited, men, animals, birds, and also the sun and her brother, the moon.

On the day of the festival, there was much rejoicing, but the siblings arrived late, toward the end, and since the others were otherwise engaged, they danced together. “Look at those two clowns,” hooted the owl. “Dancing alone on the empty grounds!” “Why come at all,” taunted the mole. “You’re too early for the next festival,” teased the frog.

But what hurt the siblings most was the monkey’s indictment. “Are you two brother and sister or husband and wife, dancing so close!”

This so angered the sun that she fled, vowing to never show her face again. She hid in Krem Lamet Latang, the Cave of the Holy Leaf, and the whole world was plunged into darkness.

Everyone was stricken, the nong kñia continues, overcome by remorse, and there was much fear and shedding of tears among the earthlings. They called after the sun, praying for her return, to light up their days again, but in vain. All in darkness, all in darkness. The duitara hummed.

Soon a council was called. They pleaded with the mighty elephant for his help, but he refused, quaking at the thought of confronting the heavenly being. He was also afraid to make the long, treacherous journey to the cave, across rivers and seas, bogs and mountains. “You’re sending me to my doom!”

Who would go if the elephant, strongest and largest of all, would not?

The proud, handsome hornbill came forward—“I will go, my friends! How will she be able to resist me?” And so off he went, but when he presented himself to her, presumptuous and vain, treating this as a courtship, the sun flew into a rage. “You shameless creature! I curse you. You will fly sideways, trying to avoid my golden rays, for all the days of your life!”

Once more there was wailing and crying throughout the land. “Who will bring back the sun?” This time, in fear, no one volunteered. What would happen now, the nong kñia crooned, and we listened and we waited.

The council realized that at their gathering one creature was missing—the rooster, a wretched featherless bird, who wasn’t even considered important enough to summon. “Call him!” they declared, and he appeared. “You who disobeyed and did not even attend the dance festival, you must be punished. Go to the Cave of the Holy Leaf and bring back the sun or be held responsible for all the wrongs in the world.”

The rooster bowed his head. “My fellow beings, I am prepared to go and place myself in danger for your sake. Yet who am I to stand before such royalty as the sun? I am a lowly desperate wretch. Look at me!” Clothe me, he requested, in the resplendent tail of the skylark, in warm, bright feathers and finery, and all sorts of brilliant colors, and I promise to do the deed.

The council granted him all he asked—every bird in the world offering to the rooster a feather. And for his quest, he was endowed with a purple crest to mark him as an emissary to the gods.

Will he succeed, will he succeed? the nong kñia sang.

After he had traveled for many days, across rivers and seas, bog and mountains, and undergone much hardship along the way, the rooster finally arrived at the retreat of the sun. Seeing his modesty, she welcomed him gladly, offering him royal food and a royal bed. But in his humility, he asked only for leftovers of winnowed rice to eat in the courtyard in front of her door—a creature such as him did not deserve more. Impressed, the sun asked, “Why did you come here?” And he told her—“O mother, the whole world is in darkness, and all creatures live in dread. Unless you return, there will be no peace, no joy.” He offered to stand accountable for all the injustices and transgressions of his fellow beings. “From now on, I will be answerable for all their wrongdoings, and I promise to see that no other outrage shall befall you.”

In this way, he vowed to sound his bugle thrice every morning as a sign that the world was fit for her blessings. Listen, says the nong kñia, how he crows through the ages for her still.

 

After the story, we draw away and step outside, pulling our woolen shawls closer. Along the way there is chatter, our daily winding down, our laying out of the next day’s plans, small hopes, gossip from the market, from the fields.

Then we scatter to our houses, each to each, calling out to say we’ve reached, we’ve reached. Thiah suk, thiah suk, sleep peaceful beloved, sleep.

*  *  *

On the rare occasion that my parents and I traveled together, we stayed at a resort about two hours away from Shillong, close to the plains. All of us fretted and fussed about it in our own way and for our own reasons, though a nice-enough time was had by everyone.

What I remember vividly from that trip was a peepul tree that towered over all the others, its roots massively and magnificently coiling from trunk to ground, and deep, deeper below. I was younger, in my mid-twenties, but even then, I stood there, thinking about roots. And when we returned to Shillong, and I met Dajied, I asked him: Where did mine lie?

“Right here.”

We were in his room, on his bed, on a quiet humid afternoon, while his parents were away at work. He was lying next to me, bare-chested, cleanly hairless, the light turning his skin into molten gold—which is what distracted me, I think, for I don’t remember continuing the conversation, but I think about that moment often. Right here. He’d always had a conviction about his place in the world that I envied and longed for. An orientation. North and south. Roots, steady and deep.

He was a sturdy old tree, and I a drifting leaf. If I’d told him this, he’d have laughed and called me sentimental. But it was true.

He was Khasi, born, brought up here, with no intention of ever leaving. “Too much to be done,” he’d always say, and he meant it. He documented faithfully the streets of Shillong, its people, its hawkers, its beggars, with an eye that was sharp and tender. I knew, I’d seen his work—his videos and photographs, shiny black-and-whites, portraits, buildings, parking lots. The town bustling and at rest. Most of all, I heard him talk, late into the night over the phone, on long lazy afternoons, on our day-trip drives on his bike to Sohra and Smit. “I want to do something, Shai,” he’d say. “I really want to make a difference.” And I would beat back all my cynicism, my mother’s voice saying this is a dead-end place, and nod, and ask what? What would you like to do? He’d pause. “Tell these stories.”

He was open, too, sharing his love for Shillong with me, not because he wished me to feel the same, I think, but because he took it for granted that I already did.

How could I not? Impossible not to love our labyrinth of a market, Ïew Duh, where we wandered around looking for cheap, delicious meals. Or the small tea shops we’d visit for sha saw and jingbam every afternoon. Or the tall pine trees towering over us on our walks, the narrow secret winding alleys, the busy streets, the friends he’d stop and speak to, the acquaintances he’d meet.

What I enjoyed most were the festivals he took me to—Shad Suk Mynsiem to celebrate spring and fertility, Nongkrem to invoke a good end-of-year harvest, Chad Sukra to give thanks to Ka Mei Ramew.

He understood why, though, while growing up, I didn’t attend any of these. Not surprising, really, what with convent school, and my family’s conversion to Christianity two generations ago. All this, to me, was lost. Like Khasi, the language I first learned to speak . . . forbidden within our school walls, while at home my mother insisted on English.

“This is why,” Dajied had mused, “your mum doesn’t like me.”

“What,” I’d exclaimed, “no!”

“It’s true,” he’d said ruefully. “I mean, the white people might be gone, but not much has changed. Like them, your mother also thinks I’m an unconverted savage, and all that’s within me is darkness.”

“But you’re with me,” I’d teased. “And I am the light.” I plucked his sunglasses from his pocket and slid them up his nose.

Despite himself he’d laughed, and said yes, I’d saved him.

 

Though, truly, I think he’d saved me—from being wholly untethered, from living a life in Shillong narrowly confined to my parents’ world. With him, a deepening, an enlargement, a frame of reference for all I could see around me.

And yet, and yet, even then I’d often ask myself—and I still do—what do I know of these hills? And their histories?

*  *  *

This morning, I must head to Bah Albert’s shop to pick up a few things, and I hope not to run into the newcomers—as everyone in the village calls them. They aren’t too unsettled by Dajied’s presence; they tell me that because of the mining, they’re used to journalists coming and going, asking questions, disappearing, people from various religious youth groups dropping by to “do good” in a day, a politician or two making a promise-filled appearance, never to be seen again after the elections.

And Mawmalang is one of the few more welcoming villages in the area. Some of the others refuse to engage with any visitors. In fact, one couldn’t just land up there without getting in touch with the rangbah shnong, and asking permission, and being given an appointment.

“They’re fed up,” they tell me. “People from the cities—Shillong, Delhi, elsewhere—showing up and expecting their inquiries to be entertained. As though they’re doing us a favor.” What they’d prefer is some sort of a deeper, more meaningful commitment. “Get us a hospital, a medical clinic, even, a school. And then we’ll talk.”

About Daphisha, the village is admittedly confused. Strutting about in her quilted jacket, her expensive knee-high leather boots, her dark glasses. “There is absolutely nothing for someone like her here.” I silently agree. Rich people from the sor—the city—we have no interest in them, they tell me, or them in us. Unless, of course, they can make a quick and easy buck. Especially the ones in Shillong who declare “Let’s mine the uranium ourselves!” Their idea of exploitation is only when someone other than themselves is doing it. “But let’s see,” they add with a wry smile, “what tidings this young woman will bring.”

 

I’m at the shop counter and the newcomers are nowhere in sight. Good. I’ve managed to avoid them since they arrived—not that they’ve come seeking me out—and, I tell myself, it is better to keep it that way.

Bah Albert is reading a two-day-old Khasi newspaper.

“What news?” I ask.

“Not good,” he says grimly.

The people in a nearby village, Mawthabah, or at least a large majority of them, are willing to give permission for the road to run through their land.

“Oh, but doesn’t it have to be a collective decision?”

He sniffs. “There is no such thing.”

I get a feeling it’s best not to pursue this conversation at the moment. I ask for flour, and dish soap, and a packet of salt, and then casually inquire after his guests.

“Where are they?”

“Out?” he replies, shrugging. “Don’t know.”

I stand there as Bah Albert gathers the items for me, and places them in my shopping bag. Well, I think, hoisting it off the counter, if they’re keeping themselves busy, so will I.

 

Usually, my day revolves around Oiñ anyway.

When she wakes, or goes to sleep, when it’s time for her meals or tea. I like to make her treats, scrambled eggs, steamed fish, or flat rice cooked thick with milk and honey. On some days she eats with relish, on others not at all, and I must coax her—just a little bit more. I notice her clear, bright days seem to be receding, they are fewer now and far between. She has stopped asking me question after nosy question. We rarely browse through her photo album, pointing at pictures, giggling. “Look at your funny face!” More and more, she speaks about the past, but her memories are like the mist, soft and hazy.

“Do you remember,” she asks me, “do you remember, the mulberry tree that grew in the garden?” I don’t, in fact I don’t think there ever was one, but I refrain from saying so. “Remember how in summer the fruit would ripen?” She closes her eyes. “How I long for a taste of that sweetness.”

Sometimes I try to cajole her into recollection—our trips to Ward’s Lake to feed the fish, her dropping me off to school and picking me up, our orange-juice-and-biscuits picnics at the bottom of the garden, catching butterflies and letting them go, her go-to-sleep stories, all the marvelous folk tales. But they return, I realize, only to me.

 

When I’m back from the shop, I step into the kitchen to find Kong Thei seated at the table, speaking to her sister. She sounds hassled. “She doesn’t want to take them anymore,” she’s saying, “I don’t know what to do.”

“What’s happened?” I ask.

The sisters exchange a glance before Mem replies, “Kong Thei was going to go to Mawkyrwat to fetch more medicines for Oiñ . . .”

“Maybe,” I interrupt, “we should get her diagnosed properly first.”

“Yes,” says Mem, “we’ve done our best to explain her symptoms to the doctor. What can we do if she refuses to get checked? Not around here, not in Shillong.” She throws up her hands. “And you’ve seen the condition of the road . . .”

I nod, my cheeks flaming. “Of course, I understand. What is Oiñ saying?”

“She’s being stubborn. No more medicines, she just told Kong Thei. She says she has had enough.”

 

Oiñ’s room glows with bright midday light. The curtains, as always, stay undrawn.

She’s looking outside, and doesn’t notice at first that I’ve entered. I perch at the edge of her bed. I don’t ask how she’s feeling. Do I look any better? she’d barked the last time I’d inquired. Frail as she is, Oiñ can still be sharp as a wasp.

I decide to begin now with a gentle untruth. “I spoke to Mei,” I say. “She was asking about you, how you are, what medicines you’re taking . . .”

Oiñ grunts and continues to stare outside.

This is not going well. She’s in a sullen mood. In the quiet, somewhere a chicken clucks, piglets squeal, and a sharp, wintry wind blows through the trees. I’m undecided—Should I leave?

“You know,” she begins suddenly, “I had a husband once.”

“Yes?” I knew this, though I don’t remember her speaking much about him.

She nods. “He wasn’t . . . he didn’t treat me well.”

My heart constricts. I want to say I’m sorry, Oiñ, but I’m also a little bewildered. Why is she bringing this up now?

“One night,” she continues, “when he’d had so much to drink he collapsed on the bed, I thought, I thought . . .” She looks at me, her eyes filled with something I can’t quite name. “I brought a large pot of water to boil, and I thought I would pour it on him . . . Get it over and done with.” She looks back outside. “I didn’t do it. I just left. The next day, I took the children and I left.”

She’s silent a long while after this, and so am I—I find I have no words. I don’t know what to say. “Oiñ . . .” I begin and stop. Is it true? Does it matter? She hasn’t seemed this lucid in days. It doesn’t matter. You are not a bad person.

She looks at me, and something in her has shifted. “Don’t make that long face,” she chides. “I thought it,” she adds. “That’s all I wanted to say.”

 

Later that day, I’m driven outside filled with some sort of sorrow, heavy as the yellow pomelo ripening on the trees.

I walk, almost run, to stretch my legs, to sweat, to set my heart racing. Granted, the sky is overcast, but the air is crisp and fresh, the hills washed in deep blues and greens, and everything around me, at this year’s end, seems touched by a sense of passing, the new into the old and into the new again. I reach the edge of the forest, through which I’d trudged with Bah Karmel—it seems so long ago now—and then walk back up the road littered with mud and stone.

I’m almost at the bridge when I see Dajied and Daphisha. They’ve spotted me, too, so I cannot scamper down the slope, as I’d prefer to, and hide by the stream until they pass.

“Hello, how’s it going?” Dajied is the first to ask.

“All right,” I say. Perhaps we’ll chat a bit about the weather and then I can be on my way. “So dull this sky,” I begin helpfully.

“I like it,” says Daphisha.

I should’ve known, she’s a contrarian and enjoys it.

“I think it’s quite lovely . . . this shade of silver.”

“Silver?” I’m pleased to hear Dajied sound incredulous.

“You haven’t seen gray until you’ve lived in London.” If I’m expected to ask follow-up questions, I don’t. She continues undeterred. “I was there two years,” she tells me. “I did my masters, stayed on to work for a bit, and now”—she smiles mysteriously—“we’ll see.” She’s back in Shillong, to do something—shouldn’t be too difficult, I think, with all the money your mum’s filched from the poor—and here, accompanying Dajied to see if they can work on a project together.

“What kind of project?” I inquire.

“We’re trying to figure that out,” she says, placing a hand lightly on his shoulder. “I’ve been involved in organizing a few festivals in and around Shillong . . . you know, music, traditional culture, food, that kind of stuff. Recently, Shillong from the Air.”

Oh, I say, I’ve never heard of it.

She’s also interested in initiatives where produce is sourced from local farmers to sell around the country. “You know, turmeric from Lakadong, cashew nuts from the Garo Hills, that sort of thing.” She smiles at Dajied. “So we’ll see. This place is so untapped, don’t you think?”

Ripe and ready for you to pluck and reap for your own benefit. I look down at the stream; it’s darkening now, and the water is so clear it’s invisible. I can see the stones, and our reflections, and the reflections of the sky, and the trees.

“So what do you do?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

She laughs, not quite sure what to make of this. “What do you mean, nothing?”

I shrug. “Exactly that. I spent a whole lot of time doing nothing in Delhi, and now I’m doing a whole lot of nothing here. Except this doesn’t feel like a waste.”

Daphisha widens her eyes. “I don’t get it.”

“It’s like this, a small matter of perspective.” Suddenly, I’m beginning to enjoy myself. “Take Jupiter, for instance . . . what everyone, for the longest time, called a failed star. Why? Because it’s made of the same elements as the sun, hydrogen and helium, and it’s massive, but not massive enough to generate the internal pressure and temperature necessary to turn it into a star. But what if”—and here I pause—“Jupiter’s just really successful at being a planet?”

Daphisha blinks. Dajied, I’m pleased to see, looks quietly amused. “How long have you been here, Shai?” he asks.

I tell him I’ve lost count of weeks and days . . .

“Well, that’s a change,” he says smiling.

“It is,” and I smile back.

Daphisha is watching us. She’s a shrewd one, and misses little, I imagine. I wonder how much Dajied has told her—about us.

“So what’s around here?” she asks suddenly, briskly.

“There are many walks, and trails, down to the river, and to other nearby villages.” I also tell them about the abandoned village, once peopled by the Nongïaid. “Banri and I have been meaning to visit.” I don’t mention anything else—how it’s said to be haunted, some say cursed, and that all this while, no matter how much I’ve tried to persuade her, Banri has refused to take me there on our own.

“Abandoned?” She makes a face. “Well, that’s no good.”

“You know,” muses Dajied, “I read about an event in Italy called the Festival of Abandoned Places . . . where people gather to present papers, share their writing, read poetry, in villages that have long been left empty. It’s evocative, I think.”

Daphisha quickly switches stance—“Well, that does sound cool, actually. Why don’t we go see this place? Maybe it will inspire us.” She laughs, light and delicate. Her ears are studded with a row of small gold rings and they glisten.

Dajied says something vaguely affirmative.

“Let’s!” she presses. “Let’s go see this mysterious village soon.”

I have no wish to accompany them, or to be in her company—but Dajied says okay, and looks at me, and I nod—fool—and agree.

*  *  *

I haven’t always been this compliant when it comes to Dajied.

When we were together, we sometimes visited his filmmaker friend Tarun, who lived in Motinagar, a hill away from my parents’ house in Lum Kynjai. He was a dkhar, an outsider, married to a Khasi woman—for a decade, he’d say, and still we never hear the end of it.

I liked him, he was unpretentious, interested, and never condescending with us the way some adults could be with young people.

What are you two gurujis up to? he’d ask, and we’d tell him. Walks, talks, a visit to a local dance. Books we were reading, movies we’d watched, and documentaries.

Wah, so cultured, he’d tease.

We spent time downstairs, in his study, clustered around his iMac, where he was working on a film on Kashmir, or blues musicians in India. His wife, a lawyer for rural communities, was often away, busy at court, their four children upstairs, at piano lessons, playing video games, or teasing the cats. Their grandmother listening to the radio at a volume audible all the way downstairs. It was a full, noisy household.

In other words, a household very unlike mine.

If we wanted to smoke, we headed to the terrace. An open space where the washing was hung and the chilies were dried. One evening, just after the sun had set, Dajied and I stood there, puffing away, watching the smoke curl against a backdrop of hills and low tin roofs, darkening trees, and a magically lit sky.

“Have you ever found yourself thinking,” Dajied began, “in moments like this, for instance . . . that this is it.”

“This is it?”

“This is what I want in life.”

What did he mean? A wife? Kids? A hard-of-hearing grandmother? A career as a filmmaker? A house and a domestic life like this? When I didn’t reply, he gave me a curious look, or perhaps it was a falling shadow, I don’t know, and perhaps because I felt I must say something, I rushed headlong in a panic and said no, not really . . . I didn’t think so.

Something fell, his face, the cigarette, the evening light.

I often wonder if things would be different if I’d agreed. If I’d smiled at him and said, yes, this is it, I feel the same. Then I tell myself—perhaps as consolation—that it wasn’t that simple, if not for him, for me. I wasn’t meant to be there, those stints in Shillong were escapes from “real life” back in Delhi: the dusty commute, the haggling with auto drivers, the grocery runs and the paying of bills, the fending-off of catcalls, the heat, always the heat, the attempt at building—laughable thought, really—what Mei called a successful career.

“Move back,” he’d tell me, “just move back to Shillong.”

And I’d refuse. Or I’d say I’d think about it. And I would try. But I don’t know if I was even tempted to return, because at the time it seemed unthinkable to me. Where to begin? To tell my mother, “I don’t think I’m happy here, Mei.” I’d imagine her smiling, pity in her eyes. “Happiness isn’t simply handed to us, child . . . It must be earned.” The problem was no one wanted to work hard in our hometown, she often lamented. “See how the youth are so quick to join all these social organizations . . . when elections come along, agitate, get paid off, agitate again . . . at some point join politics, and then it’s all quick and easy money.” No one here wanted to do anything with their life. I don’t remember Mei ever saying it to me directly, but what I grasped was this: that to return was to fail.

How to explain all this to Dajied?

He who knew where he wanted to spend all his days.

Eventually, he told me there was no point, really, in carrying on. “I give up. Me here, you there, and then what?”

He’d never spoken this way before, and it was like cold water being thrown over me. You can’t mean that, I wanted to say. You can’t.

“You’re too scared to burst it, can’t you see?” he’d said bitterly. “The little bubble your family offers you, extending to wherever you are. Boarding school, university, Delhi.”

“But I’m living on my own now,” I’d protested. “Almost.”

“Didn’t you tell me everything would be taken care of for you, someone sent across to be your live-in maid, to cook and clean.”

“I didn’t allow that,” I stuttered.

“Not because you wanted to be fully independent, I’m sure. Maybe you were embarrassed. What would my flatmates think, or some such thing . . .”

To this, I had no retort. Because it was both unkind and not untrue.

He glanced at me and then quickly looked away. He was frowning, squinting at something far and invisible in the distance. “We can’t be together, Shai.”

I heard the words, and I didn’t. My hands and heart cold and clammy. I managed only a feeble “Why?”

“Because being together would mean doing only what suits you—or rather your mother. Don’t you see? Only that would keep your precious bubble intact and safe.”

*  *  *

Early in the new year, the Khasi Students’ Union pays a visit, and we all gather around them as usual. They’ve called a meeting; no one will miss it. People drop whatever it is they’re doing, working, snoozing, and come to listen. I can see the newcomers, too, at the edge of the crowd, Dajied with his camera, Daphisha next to him. There’s little reason to take notice of them, I tell myself, when there are important announcements to listen to—the KSU informs us that a public hearing on the road will take place a few days from now, organized by the Community and Rural Development Department.

This is all good . . . except it will be held in Nongbah Jynrin.

A buzz of confusion arises.

“Yes, to us also it is surprising,” they say. “We think they chose such an out-of-the-way place in the hope that no one would attend . . . But we urge you to go there and make your voices heard.”

“Will the people from Mawthabah also be there?” someone asks. “And more important, who else will say yes to the road?”

The KSU members glance at one another and say hesitantly, “We don’t know. To be honest, we’ve seen quite a mixed reaction so far . . .”

Bah Albert, next to me, clicks his tongue. “It’s true, it is hard to tell,” he says. “It’s trickier because the debate is not directly about whether to mine yellowcake or not . . . it’s about a road. And who doesn’t want a road?”

 

Later, as I water the kper, I’m thinking about land, what goes and what stays, what this means for some and not for others, about Bah Karmel and so many like him, here in the villages around Mawmalang. How some things promise health, hope, light, but at such a cost.

“Banri,” I ask, “what do you think? Road or no road?”

She looks up from harvesting the purple radish. “Doesn’t matter what I think. Sooner or later, they’ll do what they want, the people from the center.”

*  *  *

After our strange conversation that afternoon, Oiñ keeps more to herself than ever. She sleeps all day—or at least this is what it looks like, turned away from us, her face to the wall. “Come,” I try to coax her, “the twins want to sing you a song.” Or “Look! A crop of tomatoes we saved from the birds.” She barely responds, and even when she does, her attention is fleeting, fractured.

Soon she begins to dip low, quite suddenly, quite fast. She refuses her medicine, and then begins to refuse food. We cook rice and plain dal, and strain them into a warm soup—but even this she will not touch. She lies in bed, swaddled in a quilt, a woolen scarf over her head, which I realize, with a stab to my heart, is one of mine that I once used as a teenager and discarded. She breathes like a bird now, so faint it is merely a flutter, and I watch her, waiting for the slightest rise and fall of the blanket.

You must recover.

For a few days, our household hangs in the balance. Oiñ’s nieces and I take turns, watching, waiting. People from the village drop by, offering to help, young men bring us firewood and water, women send hot meals, their husbands bring us vegetables from their fields. When one of us is unwell, all of us are unwell, they say in worry. Kong Thei still does all the heavy lifting—the changing and wiping, the cleaning and washing—and for the tenderness she shows Oiñ while she does all this, she has my heart, even if she doesn’t think much of me. Why? I’ve never quite figured out. Perhaps to her I’ve always been the unwelcome outsider, a city slicker who walked into their lives uninvited, and disrupted, or worse, claimed—as she would see it—a place here.

And there is an intimate internal rhythm that the household falls into in times like these, like some sort of clockwork. The sisters are extraordinarily calm, Bah Kit keeps the twins out of the way, saying they ought not to see Meirad like this, Banri is a silent shadow, flitting in and out of the house, managing everything that we take care of together quite easily on her own. Everyone has their place. And even if after all these weeks, I sometimes fit in a little awkwardly—I tell myself I’m here for Oiñ.

Nothing or no one else is as important. Which is why when Mem says, quietly, casually even, one morning, “I think she wants to go,” I catch my breath, alarmed by the rage I suddenly feel toward her. How can you say that?

“Are you all right?” Banri asks, as I step out into the backyard for some fresh air, some sun, some calm, some quiet.

I think so, I say. I’m not sure.

She comes to stand next to me, but stays silent.

“Have you,” I begin hesitantly, “have you seen . . . sick people before?” I cannot bring myself to say dying.

She nods. “Paieid, Meieid.” Her maternal grandparents. “We looked after them here in the house only.” She waits a moment before asking, “You?”

No, I tell her. My grandparents died when I was in boarding school, at university, at work. I returned home to place flowers and candles at their graves. I was sad, but it seems so sanitized now, so convenient to be able to do whatever I did after it was all over.

She nods again, and says in wisdom, “Most of the time all we can do is make them comfortable.”

 

When I’m heading up the hillock later, the rarest thing happens. My phone rings.

It’s Grace. “Hey,” she says, and suddenly I want to weep, hearing her voice, bright, clear, and clean. “What’s going on?” she asks. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

She’s calling to ask if she can rent out my room to a friend who’s in Delhi for work.

“Of course,” I say distractedly, “that’s fine.”

“You okay? What’s happened?”

She listens without interruption as I tell her about Oiñ.

“You’re there,” she says kindly. “She’ll pull through.”

I tell her I don’t think she wants to.

At this, she pauses before saying, “You know, Shai, the other day, I was speaking to my mum, who told me she’d attended a funeral in Dimapur of a lady who’d been diagnosed with cancer last year . . . But the thing is, she refused all treatment, right from the beginning . . . that’s what her children said . . . that their mother just wanted to pass from this life in peace . . .”

Something catches in my throat. “Oh, God, I hope they didn’t . . .”

“Shai,” she says, and then pauses again. “They let her go.”

To this, I am silent.

“What I’m trying to say is,” she continues, “sometimes we have to ask ourselves . . . Do we have the right?”

We do, we do. We must.

For a long while, I sit up at the hillock in silence. Around me, and beyond, stands the quietness of hibiscus and pine, bamboo and oak, and sinul trees, their leaves green and motionless.

But this is an untruth, an illusion, I know. From the many videos that my father has sent me, I watched one about how, at all times, day and night, tiny stomata present in the leaves of plants open and close and regulate the loss of moisture, the absorption of air—I saw them, too, in the video, under a microscope, vivid green cells, dancing, moving according to how much sunlight was falling on the leaf. I was mesmerized.

The world is never at rest. Even now, looking around me, when it seems so still, with not the slightest breath of wind or life, the world is dancing.

Everything is moving, adjusting. Making space for living and dying.

*  *  *

It must be a dream, for Oiñ is walking beside me, young and strong and steady.

We are on a path, somewhere in the wilderness, curving up a mountain. We walk until we come to a cave, and I know somehow that it is ancient. When we step inside, it towers above us, a place with high ceilings, large enough to house the sun. And even though there is only us, it doesn’t feel empty. On the walls are markings—elephants and hornbills, owls and roosters, while stalagmites rise as towering white pillars from the ground. At the back, the cave narrows into a tunnel; it slopes not up, not level, but down, and we stumble on, deeper, soon losing all light, but then around us something glitters, glowing green and silver, falling like snow.

“Where are we?” I wonder.

And Oiñ lifts her finger to her mouth. “There is a forest,” she says, “at the center of the earth, and that is where we all must go.”

*  *  *

“You went where?” exclaims Mem.

We are sitting on the steps outside her house. She’s splicing kwai, and smearing lime liberally with a knife on the tobacco leaf. She shudders. “The place gives me the creeps.”

“It gave us the creeps, too,” I say.

 

Earlier that day, we walked to the abandoned village, Dajied, Daphisha, Banri—who reluctantly agreed to take us—and me. We gathered at Bah Albert’s shop, manned by his son Mayan, a sparsely mustached youth of about seventeen. He’d been there, too, he said, with his friends, but a while ago.

“My grandmother says the village is haunted,” he told us.

“So I’ve heard.” I was quite thrilled by all this; Banri less so.

Mayan laughed. “Old women’s tales. It was given by the government of India to the Nongïaid.”

Banri frowned. “But they were nomads . . .”

“Yes,” he replied. “Maybe that’s why the government built them a village. They’re always giving people what they don’t need.”

 

It took us an hour to get there.

We followed the trail by the stream, then walked down a dusty track toward a sparse forest, at the edge of which stood the settlement. All the way, we marched in formation, first Banri and I, and the newcomers followed.

The village appeared more deserted than I imagined—and less exciting, too. Most of the huts were reduced to stubby wooden points, the walls flapping in, the roofs missing, and the paths between them wildly overgrown. Everything reusable—wire, metal—had been pried out, stolen away.

Worse, in the air hung the smell of something dead and decaying.

Daphisha wasn’t impressed—“Can we go?”—and for once I was likely to agree with her, but Dajied wished to take some pictures, so we waited. What I noticed was that the lots were evenly distributed—each an equal square, no more no less. It reminded me of the abandoned housing complex on the way to Wahkaji. If what Mayan said was true, that this was built by the government, it would explain the obsessive, orderly neatness.

I could see why stories had sprung up about this place. It was quite wretched. The birds were strangely silent, and even though it was early afternoon, and the sun was out, the trees cast long shadows, and the air felt oppressive and cold.

Were the Nongïaid really forced to live here? How awful. I do not understand the bigness of things, the workings of nations—but I have known a little the cruelty of being told, over and again, that one shouldn’t live the life one wished to live.

 

“Who were the Nongïaid?” I ask Mem. “And why aren’t they there anymore?”

She shrugs. “I don’t know much about them, I’ve heard they didn’t really mix with people from the other villages, that they kept to themselves . . .”

She offers me a kyntein of kwai, I refuse; she shoves it, with relish, into her mouth. “Why don’t you speak to our nong kñia? He knows about all these things.”

“You think he was around then?” I ask in surprise.

Mem laughs. “Don’t you know? He was around when the world was born.”

*  *  *

The nong kñia lives at the edge of the village, near the forest. In a tin-and-wood shack, with a string of drying corn strung up under the rafters. A tumble of toddlers play out front, singing a little rhyme—khynnah rit ba smat ba sting bam shana kulai—a dog gambols happily with them, and in the middle of all this, the nong kñia perches serenely on his mula.

These must be his great-great-grandchildren, I think, as I carefully wend my way toward him. He waves me to a seat.

“It’s you, Shailin,” he says, even though I don’t remember having told him my name. His hands rest gently on his lap; I’m unused to seeing him without a duitara. “Tea?” he asks, but somehow it doesn’t sound like a question.

“Yes, please.”

We sit there in not awkward silence, though I’m wondering whether I ought to explain why I’m here. The squealing children have tumbled off a little farther away. One of the older kids brings us tea, and biskit khlur, star-shaped cookies that taste of cinnamon. “These are my favorite,” he says happily, “all the way from Smit.”

Unlike most people I speak to these days, Mei, Kima, even Dajied, the nong kñia’s first question isn’t “When are you leaving?” Instead he asks, “So have you come for a story?”

He has a directness to his speech that I hadn’t expected—different from when he’s at the hearth, singing a story for us in marvelously convoluted ways.

I say yes, I’m curious about the Nongïaid.

His eyes shine with humor, and something else. “I know a song or two about them,” he says. “Old songs that tell of how they passed through our villages like mad March winds and sudden April showers . . .”

“I’d love to hear them.”

“One of these days, I’ll sing them for you.”

I thank him, saying that would be delightful, and then add, “But what happened? Do you know? Why don’t they live in that village anymore?”

“They were people with many homes right up until Indian independence, and even for some time after,” he begins. “Then to claim citizenship, they were told they had to settle down . . . A nation is such a fixed thing, don’t you think? Its borders, arbitrary at best, suddenly imagined as having been in existence for all time . . . It was even more complicated to impose such a thing in this region, the northeast, with its numerous independent chiefs, of whom few, if anyone at all, wanted to join India . . . Add a nomadic tribe to the mix, and it was too much for the government. They couldn’t handle it . . . So the Nongïaid were given this land, these houses . . . and told to stay! There was resistance, they fought, they perished—and now they exist only in song.”

I say that’s really sad, to be gone like that.

He shakes his head. “Not gone. The time something truly dies is when all stories about it are forgotten. It’s this way with people, too . . .” In the distance, children laugh, squeal, the dog yaps happily. I’m still thinking about what he has said when he asks, “How is Kong Stian?”

Now, too, I decide to be honest. “Oiñ is not dying, but she’s not really . . . living either.”

I can feel his eyes on my face, old but clear and somehow all-perceiving. Maybe he knows already, how she lingers, how we watch for her breath, that we’re not certain how she holds on, what it is that she’s isn’t letting go of, and why.

“There is someone you could consult, you know,” he says. I look at him, there it is again, that look I sometimes catch but cannot decipher. “She’s the best in our hills, some say. Kong Batimai . . . a medicine woman in Domiasiat.”

Oh? This is strange—why haven’t the sisters spoken about her? “Is it far?”

“From here, a little less than two hours.” And he adds, “She might be able to help.” He says it as though he knows something else about it all, but will not reveal it to me yet. Because it is not time or something similarly mysterious. Or maybe I’m only imagining this because he’s the nong kñia and I expect him to be an oracle.

“How long have you lived here, Bah Sumar?”

He sips his tea long and leisurely. “Since men could turn into tigers, and fish would fly from the river into the kitchen, and chilies from their stalks onto your plate, since wounds could be healed by words, and we could bring rain with a song, and stop fire with a mantra, and the tree that was all trees grew quietly in the shade.” He looks at me and smiles. “Every day of my waking life.”

 

I make my way back through the village—past the old men dozing in the sun, the old women peeling oranges. Then someone calls out.

It’s Dajied. He’s sitting on someone’s front steps, fiddling with his camera. Daphisha is, thankfully, nowhere to be seen.

“How’s it going?” I ask as he rises and walks alongside me.

“Slow, as these things always are,” he says.

We pass Bah Albert’s shop; Mayan waves at us from behind the counter.

“Did you catch the KSU meeting the other day?” I ask to make conversation, and add, “I didn’t see Shemphang.” He was the leader who had addressed the village the last time.

Dajied looks surprised. “You know him?”

I nod. “He visited some weeks ago, because of suspicions that the UCIL and AMD are involved in stealth illegal mining operations here. Did you hear about the packet discovered on the border of Manipur? And how it mysteriously disappeared?”

He looks at me, curiously. “You seem to know a lot about this . . .”

“And you seem surprised!”

He laughs. “Only because you were never interested in . . . this stuff before.”

This is true; I can say nothing to dispute that.

I feel him glance at me, quickly. “I think being here . . . you’re different.”

Maybe because I moved out of my bubble.

Dajied is quiet for a moment. “Tell me,” he says, “how has it been, living here?”

I look at him, those eyes, that mouth, the tilt of chin, the high stubbly cheeks. “Do you remember, once at Tarun’s house you asked me: Sometimes in life don’t you feel this is it? That this is all you want?”

“Did I?” His eyes crinkle at the edges, as they do when he’s a little embarrassed.

“You did,” I say, certain he remembers. “If you ask me now, I’d say yes, it is.”

*  *  *

“I don’t understand,” says the man in the striped shirt and black muffler. “Because this Atomic Minerals Directorate, or whoever, they are always telling us one thing and then another, for good or for bad I don’t know, but first they told us they would dig only a little, but they dug a lot. Then they told us that where they were digging, there we should not drink the water. Then later they said the water was perfectly safe. I don’t understand.”

He stands at the center of the makeshift tent—bamboo and tarpaulin to shelter us from the rain. There are so many people in attendance that we spill out onto the slopes, holding umbrellas or large yam leaves over our heads, chewing kwai, kneading tobacco, listening intently.

“Now they say they will build a road for free, as a goodwill gesture, but does this mean later they will do something else?”

The crowd jeers and cheers.

The man in the striped shirt continues, clutching the mic to his chest. “I am a villager,” he says. “I don’t know how to read or write, but I feel that earlier there were fish and fishlings in our rivers, but now I don’t know, I don’t see them anymore, do you?”

The crowd shouts in support. Em em em.

“Let me tell you . . .” he continues. “I come from the hills just across from here, and all I have is a bit of land, and I’ve vowed to make sure it cannot be dug or used to make this road . . . because there’s something that I feel, it’s more like a dream, that something is not right . . . and with that I give you my thanks, for coming and listening to me.”

At this, the crowd erupts, kiw kiw kiw, the young men shout, a word that’s a summoning to war.

 

We have been here all day, after setting out early from Mawmalang.

“Go,” Mem had urged, “it will do you good.” And when I got here, I was glad I’d come. The event had a festive air about it. Families picnicking. Hawkers selling tea and snacks. People trickled in from all over the South West Khasi Hills, walking through mud and rain. And there is, I realized, something nourishing about being amid people who cared about their land as family.

There have been a few other speakers, too—someone from Mawthabah, who spoke in support of the road, and was mostly booed. Bah Syiem, who gave a short, effective speech, making it clear where his village stood on the issue—not all agree to say no to the road, he said—and I remembered Bah Karmel, and looked for him in the crowd but couldn’t see him. “But most of us feel,” Bah Syiem continued, “we deserve a road built by the state government, for the sake of a road, and not with the hand of the UCIL behind it.”

This received thunderous applause.

Now a woman is speaking. She, too, is condemning the move.

“The resistance continues,” Bah Albert tells us, “but there are more subdued faces here than last time.” Also, rumors abound that dissenting voices, those who wished to speak up in support of the road, had been threatened. “It’s happened before,” he adds. “A journalist who supported the mining was beaten up. Many people in the resistance would say this was not a bad thing.”

“What do you think?” asks Dajied.

He doesn’t look entirely comfortable. “I don’t know . . . the journalist lives in Shillong, how can he know our ground realities here?” Then suddenly, Bah Albert glances at us—“I don’t mean to say you don’t understand what we go through . . .”

“We don’t,” says Dajied firmly. “Not in the way people living here would. And it’s important not to pretend we do. How could we possibly understand?”

Afterward, Dajied wanders off to take photographs, and I join the crowd, squeezing in between strangers, but they smile and make room, and one of them hands me a spare yam leaf to hold over my head. “Khublei,” I say, touched by the gesture.

It’s true, me, Dajied, Daphisha—sitting across from where I am, earphones plugged in, trying not to look deathly bored—we’re all townspeople, whom everyone here sees as one and the same. And much as I would like to deny it, it’s true, that I am as complicit in this exploitation as anyone else from Shillong, even if it’s through my long-held ignorance, or worse, not taking the trouble to know better. Daphisha—ten years younger, prettier, richer—and I have this and possibly only this in common. As well as, I suppose, Dajied.

It’s clear she is in love with him, though of the reverse, I’m not so sure. He’s always careful around her when I’m there—but perhaps that’s because he feels awkward, or thinks I would feel awkward.

And me? How do I feel about this? I don’t know. Why dig up what’s buried? It was all so long ago. In truth, I’m confused. And unwilling to reconcile myself to that old cliché: that we only ever want someone when we’ve let them get away.

 

The public hearing is meant to wind up after teatime, but I’d like to leave earlier and return before dark. Banri would like to leave, too—she’s met a few friends, eaten a lot of shana, and she’s done, she says, with her day out.

I tell Dajied we’re off, and he says, “Oh, could Daphi walk back with you? I’m going to be here quite late.”

“Sure.” What else to say?

To be fair, she doesn’t look pleased either. “Can’t I come back with you?”

“Better not wait,” he says firmly. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be.”

She’s sensible enough to know that pleading will not work, so she shrugs, says fine, to convey that it isn’t, and we head off. It will, I expect, be a largely silent walk back home. Banri will retreat into herself in shyness. I don’t feel in the mood for conversation, and Daphi, well, for her we aren’t the most glamorous of companions.

She is, however, keen to talk about Dajied. She tells me how they met. At a shoot last year, a modern-day retelling of the Nohkalikai story—you know the one in which the woman, maddened by grief, throws herself off the cliff and turns into a waterfall?

“Yes,” I say, “I know the story.”

“So I’d adapted it into a short film, as a final project for my master’s, and I was searching for a cameraperson . . . Then this friend put me in touch with Dajied. We were camping out in Cherra, there near Kut Madan, at our resort . . .” She adds casually, “Have you been? You must come. We give all our friends a discount.”

Well, that excludes me, then. I do not say this out loud, of course, and I must admit it isn’t the easiest, being hostile to her. She has an open, even—I say this grudgingly—generous air, as though nothing in the world is too much trouble, probably because it hasn’t ever been. Also, she is painfully, annoyingly pretty, especially now, in the soft, tender glow of dusk. I am aware I haven’t glanced at a mirror in months. That my clothes are crushed and worn, and unlike hers, haven’t been in fashion, if ever, for years.

“How long have you known him?”

“Sorry, who?”

She looks bemused. Dajied.

“Oh, ages,” I mutter. “Since college.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Too long.”

But she’s persistent. “Which year?”

I tell her.

Oh, her mouth rounds, and her eyes widen.

“And how did you meet?”

I tell her that, too. At a wedding, behind the tent, I was looking for a smoke.

“I’m glad he doesn’t smoke anymore,” she says. “Though I would’ve made him stop.”

“Yeah, we both smoked a lot when we dated.”

She slips on a mossy stone but manages to recover. “What?”

“We smoked a lot . . .”

She laughs, a little nervously. “No, not that. You guys dated?”

“Yes . . . did he not say . . . ?”

She furrows her brow. Despite the chill, sweat beads her face. “No, he didn’t.” The path we’re on is particularly muddy, especially after the rain, so we fall into single file for a while. I don’t know what made me say that—but I must admit I’m walking on without the slightest burden of regret. When we’re back on a grassy track, she catches up with me. “How long were you guys together . . . if I may ask?”

I admit I exaggerate a little. Okay, maybe a lot.

“And so . . . then what happened?”

“We didn’t really break up.” Why am I saying this? “Just that he was in Shillong, and I was in Delhi . . . and it was difficult you know, being apart from each other. He came to see me in Delhi, and I would visit Shillong as often as I could . . . but long-distance relationships are hard.” Now, I want to add, I’m back, but I don’t. She must be thinking it, though, for if it wasn’t for the daylight fading, I would say she’s turned a little pale. “It’s the hardest thing, don’t you think? When relationships have to end this way? Not for any major incompatibility, but just a matter of . . . timing.”

This is enough, something tells me. I may even be feeling a twinge of guilt. Should I say something nice about them now? No, that would be inappropriate. And too little, too late.

Best I shut up and walk on.

Soon, though not soon enough, we’re back in Mawmalang.

*  *  *

It’s true. Dajied visited me in Delhi. Once. And it was a disaster.

He arrived at the end of a bitterly cold January, as a birthday surprise, and I was much too shocked to even express gladness. I was living with my mum’s cousin then, Nah Nah Pat, and there was no way he could come over—not because she’d mind my friends dropping in, but because it was him, of whom my mother disapproved.

“Where is it you stay again?” he’d asked.

“Vasant Vihar,” I’d replied. “I think it’s best we meet where you are.”

But he, his parents, and his sister were at a hotel in Lajpat Nagar, on a family holiday, and sharing a large family room. Impossibly awkward for me to go over.

I think it unsettled us both, being in the same place but unable to be together.

In Shillong, we had all the town to ourselves. Now we were reduced to sitting across from each other at a noisy, brightly lit Café Coffee Day.

“It’s nice to see you,” I attempted.

He stirred his coffee and stayed silent.

“What do you want to do? Humayun’s Tomb? Dilli Haat? We could go watch a movie.”

“I wanted to see you, Shai.”

“I’m here,” I said.

“Not like this.” He gestured at the table and accidentally knocked my cup over.

 

When I saw him again, a few months later, in Shillong, it was as though none of that had ever happened. We were safe again, comfortable in our familiar surroundings. Nothing existed beyond the low hills that hemmed our town. It was easy to forget and keep the wider world at bay.

I remember thinking how for certain, we, him and me, could exist nowhere else.

*  *  *

Who knew foraging could be this enjoyable?

For one, I had little idea that our forests were so benevolent. During the rains, there grew an abundance of edible wild mushrooms of every variety imaginable. “Some,” Banri tells me, “even glow in the dark.” At other times of the year, there are plenty of forest greens. Ja ut, jamyrdoh, jalynshir, jalem jatira, wild weeds to toss with lemon or grind with dried fish.

“Never pluck the first one you come across,” Banri has instructed.

“Why?”

“Because it may be the last in the area. And,” she added, matter-of-factly, “you want it to speak well of you to the others. That you were not greedy, and have taken just enough.”

This, I agreed, was important, and I said it not just to please her, for I have felt it—the sting of taking too much. Wild chestnuts, which I was so overjoyed to spy on the forest floor that I gathered and gathered until I filled my pockets, and dark brown nuts were spilling out of my hands. Too much, something told me, though it was more a sense, a sharp tug of a feeling, which I didn’t heed, but as soon as I arrived home with my bounty, my phone dropped, suddenly, out of nowhere—the screen cracked neatly, and it felt as though gentle retribution had been meted out.

“Did you leave something behind?” asked Banri.

I shook my head, guiltily. She hmmm-ed, displeased.

In the forests, also plentiful medicinal herbs. Jajew, with its metallic dark green leaves and pink flowers, used to treat the twins’ diarrhea. Jaraiñ for Kong Thei’s high blood pressure. Khliang syiar, for when Bah Kit suffered a little acidity. And once, when I was blinded by a headache, Mem crushed the leaves of la thynriat into a thick, dark concoction, bitter and effective.

“You know,” I tell everyone at the dinner table. “The nong kñia suggested I go see a medicine woman about Oiñ . . .” Did he? they ask. Who?

“Kong Batimai in Domiasiat.”

For a moment there is silence. Then Bah Kit speaks up. “You should go,” he says. “The nong kñia must have had a reason to tell you so.” Kong Thei looks annoyed.

“What good will come of it? Meirad is refusing the medicines I get for her anyway.”

“But that’s the thing,” I say, “we have to try everything. She can’t not get better, and just . . . exist like this.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to get better,” Kong Thei snaps back.

“How can you say that?” I sound as aghast as I am.

She draws herself up, saying coldly, “I would prefer we respect her wishes, but then, what do I know? I’m a villager. You’ve come from the big city to save us, to tell us how to live, and how to die.”

Once, when I was a child, I accidentally trampled into a clump of stinging nettles, and broke out in sore red welts. This is like that all over again. Kong Thei pushes herself away from the table, picks up her plate, and strides out. I am frozen.

Mem has a worried look in her eyes. “She didn’t mean that . . . she didn’t mean that,” she keeps repeating.

“No,” I say, the rice under my hands cold like stone. “Maybe I have no right . . .”

“No right to what?” she asks.

To have a say in the matter. That it’s best they all—family—decide, I tell her.

Mem snorts, and I’m chided, don’t be silly, if I’m not also family then who is? Her sister, she adds, is a strange one. Always like this. Closed and possessive, not comfortable with change of any kind. “Why, we had a cousin from Mawkyrwat stay with us once, and Kong Thei drove the poor thing crazy. Nothing she did was ever right.” It’s the same with you, but just don’t pay her any attention. “The thing is . . .” she continues, “Kong Batimai doesn’t have a good reputation. I mean, she’s a renowned doctor, people say, but not a good person.”

“What do you mean?” I ask quietly.

“She charges people . . . but she doesn’t ask only for money.”

“Why?”

“She asks for favors, things in return. She’s not a good person . . .” she repeats.

 

That night, I find it difficult to sleep.

I lie on my thin bedding, which has never felt uncomfortable until now. The night is long, and as the hours pass darkness folds upon darkness. At some point I fall into a fitful dream—then I wake.

Through the skylight glows a slit of milky white; it’s almost six. The household will soon be up. I slip out the back door, past the pigs, the chickens, the kper, and I walk.

I need air, I need light. I don’t head up the hillock. Instead, I take the path leading out of the village, past the fields and bridge, toward the forest. I don’t make it that far, though. Sitting by the stream, pinned to a rock, is Dajied. He looks like he hasn’t slept either. Should I greet him? I do. He looks a bit dazed.

I sit on a clump of grass not far from him. The stream trickles on, the quiet punctured by the sound of water and birdsong.

“Bad night?” he asks, without turning to look at me.

“Sort of. You?”

“Same.”

Back to stream and birdsong.

“This isn’t a refreshing morning walk, then?”

He shakes his head. “So . . .” He glances at me. “Apparently you told Daphi we were seeing each other . . . for ages.”

Oh dear. I’d forgotten about that. “I might have.”

“Well, she definitely made it clear that you did.”

“I didn’t know you hadn’t told her . . . anything.” I can’t see his face, but I’m guessing he’s angry. “I’m sorry,” I add, “I shouldn’t have.”

“No, you’re right. I ought to have said something . . . especially since we were going to meet here, of all places.”

My voice is almost a whisper. “Why didn’t you?”

“Stupidity.” He sighs. “Also, she’s never been wholly convinced I want to be with her, and I thought telling her this would somehow feed that fear . . .”

I stare at a grassy spot before me.

“Worse, I think she was right,” he continues. “It hasn’t felt real to me . . . So I didn’t say anything, and now,” he laughs hollowly, “she thinks I came here to find you.”

“What?”

“Yup.”

“Let me speak to her and explain . . .”

“You can do that,” he nods, “whenever you’re back . . . if you’re back . . . in Shillong.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s gone.”

“How? Alone? That’s crazy . . .”

Bah Albert was leaving for Wahkaji to pick up some supplies, at dawn today, so she left with him, and asked for her car to pick her up from there.

No buses for Daphisha Mawlong, I’m thinking.

I tell him I feel terrible. I edge closer, squatting inelegantly on a stone beside the stream. “Why don’t you give me her number? I can talk to her . . .”

He waves away my suggestion. “She hates you. She hates me.”

“She’s twenty, she hates everybody,” I say.

After a moment’s silence—just stream and birdsong—he laughs. “Twenty-three.”

Again, I apologize, and add, though it sticks in my throat, that she seems sweet.

“Yes. And insecure. And I guess justifiably so, now.” Even this morning, he continues, she wanted to leave, she didn’t want to leave . . . “I think she wanted me to come with her . . . but I didn’t say I would and then that upset her even more . . . What a mess.” He says that helplessly, and I feel quite wretched. But . . . Why didn’t you leave?

“Anyway, she didn’t like it here . . . I mean she only tagged along because she—”

“Wanted to be with you?”

“Well . . . I think . . .” He’s blushing. “She wanted to see if there was, you know, potential to develop her business ideas.”

Right.

In the distance, a peacock-pheasant calls, jarring the quiet air.

“Aren’t you mad at me?”

He shrugs. “You know, if it wasn’t you, it would be someone else, if it wasn’t this, it would be something else. I think we were damned anyway. But yes, it didn’t help that you gave her the impression we were still in love . . . and separated only because of distance.”

I make a face. “I think it annoyed me . . . that she was Dorothy Mawlong’s daughter . . .”

“Yes, but if we’re going to be judged by our parents’ actions, we’re all doomed.”

It would be easy for me to agree, but I stay quiet.

“I know,” he says, “black money begets more black money . . .”

“I was going to say it begets another godawful nature resort in Sohra . . . but yes, that, too.”

Across the stream two green pigeons flutter above the water.

“What about you? Are you usually up this early?”

Actually, yes, I lie. I was—and I fabricate as I go along—I was thinking of heading to Domiasiat.

“You were? Now?”

“Later today,” I fumble.

He rises, dusting off his jeans. “I need to go, too, I mean I need to speak to people there, especially Kong Spelity. The lady who’s been leading the mining resistance here all these years.” I wait with bated breath and then he asks, “Maybe we could go together?”

I’m about to agree but stop. “What about . . .”

“Daphi? Bit too late to be considerate for her sake now.”

I nod. True.

“Do you have someone to go with you? A translator? The dialect might be difficult to understand, for us I mean.”

I confess I haven’t yet made many . . . arrangements.

“Well, maybe Banri can take us?”

“No,” I say quickly. “She’s needed . . . at home.”

He frowns. “Okay, then maybe I could request Mayan.”

As we head back toward the village, he asks, “Why are you going there, by the way? Just like that?”

Not really, I tell him. I’d like to try to save a life.

*  *  *

Before the sun is highest in the sky, we are on our way.

Mayan has happily delegated shopkeeping duties to his younger sister and mother and agreed to be our guide. Of the three of us, he’s the most energized and, I think, thrilled at this unexpected opportunity for a change of scene. He tells us he doesn’t usually get to go anywhere now that his friends have left the village for the big towns—with no plans to return.

“What do they do there?” asks Dajied.

“Construction,” he replies. “Many of them drive taxis. Some find coolie work at Ïew Duh. It’s hard to get any other kind of job. My father,” he adds, “won’t let me leave, he says we have a shop here and it’s a better life, but . . .”

He falls silent although I can complete this for him—Who is he to decide?

For most of the way, Mayan chatters. Dajied and I are quiet, mainly because we’re sleep-deprived. Sunlight blurs my vision, and a headache throbs at my temples. Dajied looks similarly troubled. But apart from this, we—or at least I am deeply aware of his presence next to mine.

We headed out of the village, down the road to Wahkaji, but somewhere along the way we turned off and have been following another path winding along the higher slopes. Mayan seems to know the scenic route, and we end up at viewpoint after viewpoint, where the hills undulate—there is no other way to describe it—before us like an endlessly rolling sea.

“You should come here at sunset,” says Mayan proudly.

 

We stop once, for a quick, early lunch, and the mawbynna.

It’s true, they are striking.

“Have you been to Nartiang?” asks Dajied.

“No,” we chorus.

There, in the Jaintia Hills, stands a collection of two hundred or more stone monoliths, some more than twenty feet tall, towering next to paddy fields and a quiet road. But smaller clusters are found far and wide, all across these hills, Dajied tells us. “And for so many reasons, too.”

In their various sizes and arrangements, the stones serve as containers of ash and bone, or resting points for weary travelers, as commemoration for ancestors, or markers for funeral processions—usually placed along the route to a clan’s mawbah, the final resting place of all its family members. Here a group of three, one monolith rising tallest in the center tapering at the top, two smaller ones—“mawpyrsa,” says Dajied—on either side. Before them, the mawkynthei laid flat and low on four small stones. This is the iawbei tynrai, he explains, the root ancestress, the root of roots.

We sit to the side—me as reverently as I can—and unpack lunch. Mayan’s mother, Kong Trill, has packed us rice and fried potato and minced meat cutlets, all wrapped in banana leaf.

“This is the female stone,” Dajied continues, patting the mawkynthei. “And the standing ones . . .”

“Are male, I’m sure,” I complete.

“We still have very little idea how they set them up, you know . . .”

I sense one of his mini lectures coming on, but I’m too hungry to interrupt.

“Some say the stones were lifted not with physical strength alone, but through words, that you needed to utter a prayer, a plea, to seek permission, and only then would they move.”

I’m taken back to the Ever-Living Museum, to Bah Kyn speaking about the circular stone. I look up at the monoliths, knifing the sky. “Wonder who put these up?”

“Difficult to know,” says Dajied. “Probably people from a nearby village.”

“And why?”

“If I’m not mistaken . . . this particular arrangement commemorates the death of the father.”

When I’m done with my meal, I sit there quietly.

“I like that we compute our history like this . . .” Dajied nods, saying, “Who needs script when there’s song and stone.”

 

Domiasiat is a small village, no more than a cluster of huts, tin and wood and sometimes lime-washed, although they are spread farther apart than at Mawmalang.

The people here mostly still practice jhum, Mayan tells us, when I notice that there aren’t many kpers around the houses.

“Jhum?” I repeat. “As in shifting cultivation?” A vague and distant memory stirs of geography classes in school.

“Yes,” he replies, “they burn and plant and move from place to place every few years. My father says we used to do it, too, you know, at least his grandparents and parents did . . . but it was stopped by the British or something, and then the Indian government also . . . I don’t know why.”

“Because they thought it ecologically destructive,” says Dajied. “Which isn’t entirely true. It can actually be good for the soil, replenishing and renewing it to a far greater degree than settled agriculture.”

I give him a curious look.

He shrugs. “Some documentary I edited for an NGO; I didn’t get paid much but I learned a lot.”

The village seems quite desolate. People are probably in their fields. The houses lie quiet and still in the winter sunshine. A calico cat watches us from atop a crumbling stone wall. She appears friendly and butts her head against Dajied’s hand as he strokes her.

“Will you tell us? Where’s everyone?”

She purrs deep and loud, and then leaps off, running along a grassy track that leads sharply up the hill.

So we follow.

Up to the top, to a small lime-washed house, guarded by a lone old lady.

“Phi leit shano? Where did you go? Running around like a mad creature . . .” She’s sitting on her haunches, talking to the cat, and she holds a splicing knife, her hands gnarled but still deft enough to swiftly quarter the kwai. On the ground next to her lies a kukri for which Bah Kyn would probably sell his soul.

When we reach the top, she spots us, and if she feels any surprise or antagonism, she doesn’t let on. We allow Mayan to address her first, to greet her and explain who we are. Dajied stands there smiling; I cannot take my eyes off her face. She has high, sharp cheekbones, with hollows underneath like pools, wild white hair tied in an unruly bun, a long nose, and eyes sunken with age and all the things she has seen.

“She is Kong Spelity,” Mayan says, introducing us. This is her. The lady of rare and ferocious fire, spoken of around here with love and awe. Here she is, stroking a cat she calls Poi Ei, and offering us kwai.

Dajied is pleased; she’s the one he is most keen to meet. She offers us water, and we accept gratefully. The food we’d packed at Mawmalang has sufficed for lunch, but our water has run out, and it was best not to drink from the streams.

I am grateful also to sit and rest. My feet, my head, are aching. I’m offered oranges, and peel one with delight, enjoying the feeling of stillness and warmth, and listening to their conversation. I don’t follow everything, but I come to understand that she owns this hill and the next one, it’s a lot of land, and of course it will pass on to her children—her youngest daughter, who lives with her. Her husband has passed away, and so has her son, at fifty-four, of throat cancer. Suddenly, so fast.

“Since they started digging,” she says, “we’ve lost many members of our clan, to mysterious illnesses, and even now we suffer. There are some who can tell you of skin diseases, epilepsy, and ulcers and other illnesses that have no name. Many women are barren, unable to conceive.” Her voice quietens but her eyes flash silver.

For a moment, we are silent. Somewhere, in the distance, someone calls, and someone replies. Poi Ei has curled up near Kong Spelity’s feet.

Around us stretches an expanse of hills and forest, and it feels as though we are at the very edge of the world.

 

I know I ought to head out to look for Kong Batimai, but I find I cannot rise. I am tired and held there also by Kong Spelity’s voice.

“I’m not well-to-do,” she insists, and insists again. “I’m not rich. At first . . .” She stops. “I admit I was tempted to sell the land; I was considering it . . . but one of the laborers employed by UCIL, who’d also worked in Jadugoda, told me, I thought you hill people were clever, do you not know how much you and your family will suffer? That’s when I decided . . . I don’t want that money.”

UCIL had offered to pay her a sum so large for a thirty-year lease of her land that for the rest of her life, and the rest of her children’s lives, and their children, for as long as her family continued, they would have been more than well-off.

“It was a lot of money to turn down,” Dajied says.

She sits there without uttering a word, splicing the last of the betel nut. She gently nudges Poi Ei out of the way as she rises, and gestures for us to follow.

She walks toward a clump of trees on the next hill, behind her house. Down the slope, and up, and through the scraggly pines. This is not the time to ask where she is taking us, and we say not a word as we walk behind her. In the air, only birdsong and the crunch of our footsteps on the dry winter undergrowth.

Then the trees open up to reveal a small waterfall, and a pool that’s as clear as starlight. She stops, standing there lit by dappled afternoon sun—and I catch myself thinking, What Eden is this?

She begins speaking, slowly at first, and softly, then stronger, faster, more resilient. She’s speaking so volubly now that Mayan has trouble keeping up with his translation, but this is not necessary, for somehow, I know distinctly she’s saying something about freedom, how it is a thing in her hands, as real as mud and root and stone. It is family, and mother, and parent, and if this is so would you sell your own blood? Would you?

This is what she is saying, how selling this land would be like selling her freedom, and when it is gone, and converted into numbers, and notes, and checks and balances, then what can it buy, really?

Can it buy back her freedom?

Can the money buy this flowing stream, this grass, the seasons, this waterfall, these trees?

*  *  *

We are to stay in Bah Freeman’s house for the night.

Earlier we arrived at Kong Batimai’s house to find she wasn’t there. “She’s gone to gather bay leaves and pepper for the weekly market,” a neighbor told us.

Do you know when she’ll be back?

She looked at us as though we’d asked the silliest question. “No, of course not. People come and go here as they please.”

So we decided to take a chance, try again tomorrow, and besides, we were tired.

Bah Freeman is the village headman, Kong Spelity’s son-in-law, married to her eldest daughter. He’s a soft-spoken gentleman who assures us it’s not a problem for his young sons to vacate their room for us. They’re teenagers, he says, they’ll sleep anywhere. Meaning they’ll drag their bedding to the front room and rough it out.

When the spare bedding, borrowed from a neighbor, is brought in for us, only two beds are placed in the room—Mayan insists on sleeping outside with the boys.

“Okay, we’ll see how it goes,” says Dajied, and I make no remark.

We eat an early meal—rice and dal and fish that’s been boiled and mashed with ginger and chilies. It’s light and delicious, and I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. Afterward, we sit out on the steps. Dajied has recently taken to smoking a pipe—I think how Daphisha wouldn’t be pleased.

Bah Freeman sits with us for a while, as does his wife, Kong Bernadethe. A less-regal version of Kong Spelity, perhaps, but with a wide, friendly smile. She hands out kwai to us and a few neighbors who’ve joined in, and this time, out of politeness, I do not refuse.

We talk quietly as the light fades—many of the people here were at the public hearing, I discover, and on the same side as Mawmalang.

We will be punished, though, they say, and when we ask by whom, and what they mean, they look at one another, hesitating.

“It has happened before,” Bah Freeman tells us. “The only school we had has ceased to function, and not a brick has been laid of the health clinic we were promised.”

“We are so small, and so few,” says another gentleman, also smoking a pipe, “that our votes count for little.” He shrugs. “So the government doesn’t care.”

“Yes,” speaks up a lady wrapped snugly in a shawl, “the only thing that gave us importance was the one thing we refused to part with . . . uranium. What will they take from us now? We have little or nothing anyway. They can’t cut off our water, we get it from the stream . . . our electricity comes from the sun.”

We learn that the KSU boys have set up a few solar panels in the village.

Kong Bernadethe speaks now. “It’s not for us so much as for our children. We have to send them so far away to school . . .”

“Yes,” say the others, “we are saving the land for our children, but at this rate they will inherit nothing else . . .”

 

Soon, one by one, people rise to leave, saying thiah suk, thiah suk as they go. Eventually, Bah Freeman also bids us good night, and then it’s only Dajied and me.

He refills his pipe and relights it. The smoke is sweet and pungent and floats out into the late evening—it isn’t brutally beautiful here, like pictures you see that render a place unreal, but it’s quiet and tended and loved, and I think of this and, all of a sudden, I feel terribly sad.

“Do you think it will continue?” I ask. “What Kong Spelity has begun . . .”

For a long while, Dajied doesn’t answer, and I think this is it. In his silence, he’s confirming his uncertainty.

Then he begins: “You know, a few years ago . . . Tarun and I, we somehow managed to con our way into an exposure trip to Jadugoda that UCIL was organizing with some local Khasi notables . . . politicians, contractors, youth leaders, you get the idea. This was to counter the so-called false narrative that the anti-uranium movement was spreading with screenings of Buddha Weeps in Jadugoda . . .”

Yes, I say, I know about that.

“It so happened that this senior Bengali technocrat from UCIL took a liking to us . . . rather, to Tarun.” He laughs, adding, “I haven’t heard him talk so much Tagore before. Anyway, one day we asked him about uranium mining displacing people. He looked at us amazed—what displacement? We will rehabilitate them—it’s so easy. How many have to be rehabilitated? Maximum thousand? We will pay them, make houses for them, give them salaried employment, they will become rich and anyway they are such unproductive people, they may have land, but they don’t know the value of that land, people work hard but don’t get remunerated for it.”

We look across the hills, a light winter mist now hangs over the grass, the ñiang-kongwieng wails long and sharp into the late evening.

“The thing is,” Dajied continues, “what we realized was that for this Bengali man this was freedom. Freedom that comes out of monetizing ownership versus freedom that comes from belonging.”

I think of the man in the striped shirt speaking at the public hearing, of Kong Spelity and the two hills she deemed not wealth but priceless.

“You know, I tease Tarun a lot about giving gyan, but that day he told me something I haven’t forgotten.”

I look at him curiously. “What?”

“Most people in this country, coming from feudal landlessness and exploitation, have no idea how to deal with others who think of land not merely as a factor of production but as imagination, an Eden to live in. The conflict of interpretation that a Marwari, Bengali, or Bihari has with a Munda, a Khasi, or a Naga is this mismatch of history. People who have lived with land being privatized, expropriated, labor being turned into commodity, and hierarchy being sacralized, find it difficult to understand Kong Spelity. It’s a conflict between those who think a bigha of land makes you finally free and those who think many hills don’t make you rich. It’s the world of productivity against the dream of commons lived and kept alive.”

We are both silent for a long moment before I say, “I’ve missed your lectures.”

“Shut up,” he says, but with a smile.

I laugh, and then add, yes, I see what he means—the question is not how long the resistance can be sustained, but whether this mismatch of history can be redressed, realigned.

It is cold already, but at this moment a small insistent sadness passes into the texture of things. Into the dusk, the trees, the silhouette of hills. Something lonely and lovely and out of reach.

Only when Dajied asks, shall we head inside, am I present again, in the cold, on the steps of the house. He takes my pause to mean something else.

“If you prefer, I can sleep with the boys . . . in the front room.”

No, I say, it’s all right.

We wash up at the back, from buckets of water set out for us by the kitchen door. There are no toilets. I must head into the bushes.

“You’ll be okay?” asks Dajied awkwardly.

Yes, I reply as awkwardly back.

It is not easy, and I’m hoping the plant I stepped on isn’t a stinging variety. I can barely see in the late light. Somehow, I make it back. And stumble into the small room. Dajied is fiddling with his camera.

I take off my jacket, but it’s too cold, so I put it back on, and lie down under a quilt that smells of straw.

 

In the darkness I am acutely aware that Dajied is lying not far from me. That this is the first night we’re “spending together” since the last time he slipped into my room, or I into his—I can’t remember when. Foolish, foolish me. He’s probably asleep, dreaming of Daphisha, and here I am, awake, nervous as a teenager, wondering what it might be like to kiss him again, and whether he might want to kiss me.

I turn away from him and tell myself to sleep. Suddenly, in the silence, his voice rises. “Do you think . . .” he begins to ask, and then stops.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

I half sit up, in the dark, I can make out only his sleeping silhouette. “Tell me.”

“Do you think that . . . whenever you go back to Shillong this time, you’ll stay?”

In that moment, I know I should say yes, even if it’s just for now, to make something right, but I cannot. I begin to say something about not knowing when I’ll be leaving Mawmalang, and something about Grace and Delhi, even though I haven’t thought about them in a while, “I don’t know many things,” I finally say.

“Okay,” he says, and falls quiet.

And the moment is lost.

We lie there turned away from each other, in silence.

*  *  *

The morning is cold against my skin, and I’m glad to turn my face to the sun.

The mist has dissipated, the air is green and clear, the hills outlined sharply against the sky. I’m glad, too, for last night, and the things that did not happen. It is better this way.

I awoke earlier than Dajied and slipped quietly out of the room. After a cup of tea and plain putharo, drizzled with honey, I made to set off.

“Should I come with you?” Mayan had asked.

“It’s all right. Wait for Dajied.”

“But won’t you need someone to translate?”

“I’ll manage.”

I probably wouldn’t, but I strongly wished to go alone.

 

I greet the neighbors who had visited us last evening, they’re off to their fields, and Poi Ei bounds alongside as I make my way toward the hut by the forest. It doesn’t look like anyone is around even now—except that clothes flutter on the clothesline that weren’t there yesterday.

“Don mano mano?” I call, but there’s no answer.

I walk around the front, past the laundry, and there toward the back sits a lady on her haunches, clumps of fresh pepper pods and bunches of bay leaves before her. She’s spreading them out in sheaves on a wide flat basket on the ground.

“Kumno?” I call out. “Kong Batimai?”

“Hooid,” she says. She’s tied a cloth around her head and knotted it at the back. Beneath the fabric, I meet a pair of sharp dark eyes, a snub nose, freckles, a strong chin. “What can I do for you?” she says in Khasi, and not in dialect.

I tell her I’ve come to see her on the recommendation of Bah Sumar, the nong kñia at Mawmalang village.

She smiles. “Ah, how is the old man? And what are you doing in Mawmalang? Aren’t you from Shillong?” I wish it wasn’t that obvious. She finishes with the bay leaves, and starts on the pepper pods; they’re small and green, and shine like round jewels in the morning light. “You’ve come on your own?”

I hesitate. “With a friend, who’s here on some work.”

“Let me finish here and then we’ll see if I can help you.”

We don’t drink tea; we drink warm water infused with lemon leaves. It’s like holding summer to my lips.

We are sitting inside her house. It’s a one-room place, and spacious in its bareness. I’d expected . . . well, something like an untidy apothecary, bottles and herbs and powders everywhere, but it’s very neat, and the only hint that she’s a medicine woman lies in the bunches of dried plants strung up in a row from the rafters.

She sees me looking around, and says, “I like keeping it light. Once every five years or so, I move from place to place.” I was in Shillong, too, she adds, which explains her Khasi. “In Demthring.”

I know the area, on the outskirts of town, a large working-class neighborhood filled with car workshops and coal dust from the trucks that travel through it day and night. Once, my father told me, white storks migrated to the paddy fields there in winter.

“Did you like it? In Shillong.”

“Shu biang hi . . . but I spent the least amount of time there.”

“Why?” I ask, even though I feel maybe I oughtn’t to.

“I don’t like towns,” she says simply. “And I like to move.”

“Like the Nongïaid,” I say before I can help it.

She looks bemused, but says, “They were people with many homes. I’ve had only one home at a time.”

After this, Kong Batimai gets down to business. She asks me about Oiñ’s ailments, and I tell her, in as much detail as I can. She listens without interrupting, until I finish, breathless, ending with what I’ve been saying to the others all along, that this wasn’t death, but it was no life.

Kong Batimai stays quiet, lights herself a bidi, and leans against the wall. Even with her legs outstretched, she’s small, yet something about her is formidable. I briefly wish I’d asked Dajied or Mayan to come along.

“What you ask of me is almost impossible . . .”

Heart in mouth, I wait.

She blows out a generous plume of smoke.

“See, your Oiñ is old, but not that old, well enough but not well enough, alive but not quite. Some people are like that. Uncertain, unable to make up their minds. It’s like being on a journey that you don’t wish to turn back from or complete.”

“Yes.” I hesitate. “I see what you mean . . . but I haven’t really known Oiñ to be a confused kind of person. If she wanted to leave, she left . . .”

Kong Batimai narrows her eyes. “Then perhaps it’s not her at all.” She watches my face keenly. “Have you been having unusual dreams?”

“Not really.” I hesitate. “Maybe once recently.” I tell her about the forest, the cave.

Kong Batimai finishes her bidi and throws it into the hearth, where a dull fire glows. “It sounds to me like one of two things: she doesn’t wish to leave you, and you don’t wish to let her go.” She raises an eyebrow. “Or both.”

Of course I don’t wish to let her go. I flare up a little. Is she insinuating that somehow this is my fault? Look, I want to say, will you be able to help me or not? But I’m sure she won’t take kindly to that, and I don’t wish to anger her, so I keep quiet.

Kong Batimai rises, patters to the back of the room, and brings out a kwai basket. I’m thinking I will refuse politely if she offers me some, but when she places it down, I see it contains banana leaves, folded into pouches.

“You know that I usually ask for something in return for my treatments . . . sometimes money, sometimes other things.”

I nod. I’ve stuffed all the cash I had with me in my bag, just in case that’s what she wants. I hope it’s enough.

“But this time it’s neither.”

I frown, and ask her what she means.

“Because what needs to be done must be done not by me, but by you.”

I say I don’t understand.

Kong Batimai smiles. “It’s very simple . . . you must collect a few leaves and put them in here.” She hands me a pouch.

All right, I can do that. “Which leaves?”

Bay, tulsi, pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, orange, and tea.

I’ll write this down, I say, so I don’t forget.

“But . . . there is one thing.”

The way she says it makes me look up sharply.

“All these leaves must be collected from the same plant.”

“What?” I laugh, and shake my head, and wonder whether I’ve heard wrong. “That’s impossible.”

“No,” she says cheerfully. “You collect them, and you wait . . .”

I’m hardly able to ask, “Wait? Where . . . ?”

“There, in the cave, in your dreams.”

Where else?

“That is all,” she says in finality, while I sit, unmoving, bewildered beyond belief.

“But Kong Batimai,” I stutter, “what do you mean?”—but she will not listen.

“I have made clear to you all that is required.”

“But this plant . . . with these leaves . . . I mean, where can I even find it? And this cave? It doesn’t make any sense . . .”

She stands by the door, waiting for me to leave.

*  *  *

By the time we approach Mawmalang later that day, the greens have deepened on the hills as the sun sinks lower, the blues darkened, and the shadows grown picturesquely long across the slopes.

“See,” says Mayan, “what did I tell you? It’s best at sunset.”

And it is, undeniably so, there’s something about the quality of light here, sharp and clear, yet softened by some temper of rare gold. I wish I were in a better mood to enjoy it all, though—our walk back home, our lunch that Kong Bernadethe had so generously packed, the bag of freshly plucked oranges. This day, which insists on being so beautiful. I can’t say it doesn’t irritate me a little that Dajied has had a productive time—he’s managed to speak to many people at Domiasiat, filmed some decent footage, taken photographs.

“What about you?” he asks. “How did it go with Kong Batimai?”

“Fine.”

He looks a little surprised at my reticence, but I’m in no mood to explain. I’m wishing I’d stopped at her door and asked for greater clarity. That’s what I should’ve done. Not just shuffled out meekly like a lamb. I trample down the path, through leaves and stones and mud, quickly, not really in the mood to linger. Dajied leaves me alone, walking behind with Mayan, and they call out to me only when I miss a turning and take the wrong trail.

“You’ll reach Dhaka that way,” chuckles Mayan.

I turn around, climb back, carry on. We’re not far from Mawmalang. I want to be back, and take a bath, and wash this incident off me, but also it niggles, how I left, the squabble with Kong Thei, and my chest contracts—walking to Bangladesh might not be such a bad idea after all.

 

Soon after we arrive at the village, we pass Bah Albert’s house first and I bid them both goodbye, thanking Mayan for his help and time, and I walk on.

“Shai,” calls Dajied, “wait.” He looks embarrassed standing before me. “I wanted to apologize . . . for last night. I didn’t mean to ask you something that made you uncomfortable.”

Stupidly, I want to cry. “It’s . . . it’s fine, really.”

“Are you sure?”

It looks like he wants to say something else, but he doesn’t. He wishes me good night. Thiah suk, thiah suk, I wish him the same.

I head back to the house, where I expect to meet with some disapproval—but Mem looks ecstatic to see me, hugging me as I enter. “I was so worried,” she says, “and then Kong Trill told us you’d left for Domiasiat with Mayan.” She holds me by the shoulders, looks into my face. “Are you okay?”

I nod. “I am.”

“I have told Kong Thei to . . .”

“She was right,” I interrupt. “There was no need for me to visit Kong Batimai. I would like to apologize to her.”

Mem pauses. “That’s a different matter. The point is she should not have spoken to you like that . . . not in my house.”

It’s the first time I’ve heard her lay claim, as the youngest daughter, the khun khadduh, to her inheritance of this place.

“It’s all right,” I say, “really, it’s unnecessary . . .”

“You must be so tired. Go see Meirad, I’ll tell Banri to quickly put up some hot water for you.”

Oiñ, I’m disheartened to see, doesn’t show much improvement. In fact, I think she’s the same as before I left. She stares outside, stares at me, stares back out the window, saying nothing, possibly registering nothing, too.

She’s on a journey that she doesn’t wish to turn back from or to complete.

I try to shake off Kong Batimai’s words though I’ve been carrying them around all day. They mean nothing. She was playing with me, having a laugh. A joke at my expense. But it really does feel now that there’s nothing more I can do to help.

At our evening meal, I greet Kong Thei politely, “Kumno?” I feel wretched and am willing to endure whatever it is she throws at me.

But she is equally polite. “Kumne.”

And this is as far as our reconciliation extends. We go back to doing what we do best: ignoring each other.

 

I head to my room early and lie down. In the darkness, I desperately hope to be taken back to my dream, to Oiñ and me walking, to the cave, to the promise of the deep, light-filled forest—perhaps I’ll find something in there I hadn’t noticed before, some sort of clue, some hope.

But tonight I do not dream that dream. Instead, only blank upon blank of tired oblivion, until I wake to hear the rooster crow. All is well in the world, he is saying to the sun, we are ready to receive your blessings.

*  *  *

For a few days, I don’t venture out.

I spend time with Oiñ, stroking her hair, massaging her hands, all the while speaking to her as though she were there. “Please recover,” I whisper at one point. “Stay and I’ll stay.” And perhaps this is the only thing she hears, for she tightens her grip around my fingers. Is she agreeing? Or saying it is okay?

I stay in the house, tend to the garden as usual, and also learn to darn my T-shirts. Banri is shocked to hear I have never mended anything in my life. “Do you know how to thread a needle?” she asks. “Yes,” I reply, and proceed to do so. “And then?” I look at her helplessly. “What now?” She teaches me to sew, to knot, and to patch.

“There,” she says after we’re done, “no need to throw things away.”

No, and perhaps I’m learning this only now.

 

I don’t see Dajied, though the news is he’s traveled to Mawthabah, the “enemy” village, to speak to people there, and on his return receives a less than warm welcome. This is what I hear. I don’t seek him out, and I assume he won’t come see me either—until he does.

“Hey,” he says, when I step out to find him waiting at the steps. “Walk?”

“Sure.” We set off. “How was Mawthabah?” I ask.

“Oh, they are as convinced about the road as the people here—just about why they should get it.”

“It’s a tricky one, isn’t it? Both sides believe they’re fighting for the good of their community.”

He looks at me. “Yes, that’s exactly it.”

When he does the polite thing and asks about my parents, and how they are, I tell him they’re all right. Funnily enough, over these few months, we’ve fallen into a pattern, much as we did when I was in Delhi—calls over the weekend, and maybe a quick chat once or twice a week.

“I was going to ask,” says Dajied, grinning. “What on earth does your mum make of you being here?”

I laugh. She isn’t thrilled. “But she’s given up asking when I might return.”

“Maybe it’s a new strategy on her part?”

I shrug. “Actually letting me be? Maybe.”

We’ve reached the edge of the village, the sun is setting over the fields, and the air around us is stirred by the quick flit of dragonflies.

“At some point in our lives,” says Dajied quietly, “we will do something or the other that our parents don’t approve of, that they think we ought not to do. And guess what? It’s okay.”

I stand there with sudden clarity, clear as the breeze blowing through the white potato flowers, and wish someone had told me this earlier.

 

Quicker than breath, this becomes routine. I finish my chores for the day, and instead of heading up the hillock on my own, Dajied fetches me, and we wander, down to the stream, the forest, the fields.

We talk, a lot, as though to make up for lost days and years—and suddenly we are young again, as young as we were when we first met in Shillong, and nothing was too complicated, and everything could somehow be worked out because youth gave you that simple belief in more than ample measure. It isn’t the same now, I know, but it is nice to pretend so under Mawmalang’s clear skies and mild sunshine. That some things change only so they can become what they once were. Through all this, he doesn’t make a move—to kiss me, or grab my hand—and neither do I, and I find it strange, this little platonic dance, which we keep up until one day when we are lost in the sacred forest.

That afternoon, we decide on some new exploring. It rained the previous night, the vegetables need no watering, so I’m free earlier, and we have a few extra hours before we lose light. The sacred grove is a quiet place, though wild and unruly—and, we agree, also a little eerie. Is it possible that the trees are taller later in the day? They seem to reach higher, and crowd closer around us.

We also stumble over the cement reservoirs, dotting the ground, still discernible beneath the undergrowth. “Mining waste,” Dajied tells me. “Hopefully all sealed up.”

We’ve just reached the end of a sloping path, when I see the girl—the cat girl—up ahead. “There.” I point her out to him. A little way farther. Was it her or a trick of light? We keep walking, briskly, but when we get to the spot, she’s nowhere in sight. Instead, almost lost behind the tall ferns, stands the entrance to a small hollow.

Is this where she went? Possibly not, the foliage seems undisturbed. We part the leaves and look inside. It’s rocky and moss-lined, and stones the size of fists lie scattered on the ground. Up ahead, a sinkhole has newly caved through, letting in a slant of light. Dust motes rise in the air. We step inside. It’s dry but around us hangs the peculiar smell of earth—of mud and root and rock. We stop at the circle of sunshine falling to the floor.

I dig my foot into the soft, warm soil. “What will grow here now?”

Dajied smiles, and pulls me close. “New life.”

 

On these cold January days, we also spend many evenings together around the hearth, huddling close, trying to capture whatever little warmth escapes the fire. Banri sits close to me, her arm entwined through mine, Dajied close behind.

I can hardly bring myself to say it, but I have never been happier.

On most evenings, it’s the nong kñia strumming his duitara, but tonight the musicians are here to entertain us, and they bring raucous merriment to the air.

Tell us about the rooster! No, no, they say, about this bird we’ve recently heard . . . Young Ren and his fairy lover, then? They shake their heads. Not again, not again . . . Tell us about the Nongïaid! They raise their brows, nodding, saying it’s time, it’s time, to rhyme about these lost and ancient walkers . . .

What do they know, what do they know, where do they go, where do they go?

The ones who walk come like April showers and mad March flowers,

fleet of foot and light as leaves, tripping tripping with the breeze,

the oldest of our tribes, some say, around since the earliest days,

when man and animal would praise the young moon and the sun,

when the Diengiei, the tree that carries all trees, was no more than a sapling, the walkers our oldest tribe, no hill too high for their grappling.

Shadow people who come and go like the wind, like the wind.

The ones who walk are the old ones, unbound by forest or land,

moving through the ages still, through all the days of man,

as villages rose and villages fell. The Nongïaid washed by rain,

darkened by the sun, except one, except one, a woman white

as frost, they say, a woman white as frost on a cold clear winter’s day,

they say, with eyes the color of winter’s skies, from far away,

from far away—oh, did she, did she walk along, beside the ancient walkers?

What do we know, what do we know? How many come, how many go?

The walkers cannot tell us now, they’re long locked up in cages,

the forests emptied, the hills untrodden, their endless winter rages,

they wept to be enclosed by walls, and refused to sleep inside them,

for fear that they would die if upon waking they did not see the sky.

Usually, we step out afterward, pull our shawls closer, and head home, walking with the others until we begin to scatter to our own houses. And Dajied and I will say, with all the promise that these three words hold—see you tomorrow.

Tonight, though, he asks if we can go for a walk.

It’s late, it’s freezing, but I look at his face and say, “Why not?”

For a moment, we stand unmoving. Where shall we go? Toward the stream? The edge of the forest? There’s half a moon out so it isn’t entirely dark, but still there isn’t enough light to venture to either of those places. So I suggest the hillock behind Mem’s house, and we set off.

From up there, the lamps of the village prick the darkness like small stars.

“I haven’t come up here before,” says Dajied, sitting himself down, drawing out his pipe. I sit next to him, close enough to smell the tobacco when he pulls out the pouch. It’s pungent and strong, and from nowhere I feel the old desire to take a drag rising. He lights the pipe, releasing the smoke in a slow stream.

“Shai,” he begins, “I have to leave soon.”

“When?” I try to sound casual.

“Soon,” he repeats. He glances at me, then looks away. “I extended my stay here as long as I could . . . but I have to get back to Shillong now . . . There’s all this material to file, and work to get back to . . .”

And real life. And maybe even Daphisha.

“Of course,” I say. “I mean, you must . . .”

“And you?”

Not far from us, the crickets chirrup. A series of short, sharp taps. The ‘niang kynjah, the insect that’s always lonely.

“Well?”

“Why can’t we just stay here?” I ask, only half in jest.

He laughs, though not in mirth. “There you go, Shai, moving from one bubble to another.”

This stings me more than the cold winter air. I say that isn’t fair.

He turns to me, places an arm on mine. “Sorry. I only mean that you will have to decide, no? At some point . . . What it is that you want to do? Where you want to stay? And what you want to make of your life . . . ?”

I can barely see his face in this low light, but his voice is piercing and insistent. In my chest, a small flutter of panic. I want to say he’s right; I need to figure it all out, but something stops me, and suddenly I laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Rather than annoyed, he sounds bewildered.

“That there’s more in common between you and my mother than you would think . . .”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he says stiffly.

“Look,” I say, gently, “maybe later I’ll come back to Shillong and stay . . . but for now . . .”

“For now?”

“I came here for Oiñ, and I want . . .”

“To be here until she’s gone?”

“Or until she recovers.”

The smoke from the pipe curls slowly between us.

“Is it only that?”

“It is only that.”

If I try to explain to him how it isn’t, it will only be less. It will fall short. Something will be lost. The lights down at the village are almost out; the sound of people talking, laughing, making their way home drift up to us.

“But you will be back?” I can hear it in his voice, the pressing need for certainty. I stay silent, and when I turn to him, I see his eyes glisten. “I can’t believe this,” he says, “that it has happened again.” That he has allowed this to happen again.

“But it’s different this time,” I hear myself insisting. I am different this time.

He shakes his head. “It is the same. Me there, you here . . . sometimes even when we’re in the same place.”

*  *  *

We are at the beginning of Rymphang, the second month of the year.

The days are noticeably warmer, though the evenings and nights still cold, and I still fill a bottle with hot water to take to bed to warm my toes. I go about my chores, feed the chickens, our family of squealing pigs, water and weed and sow—and nothing has changed except I carry a little lighter the remembrance of Dajied.

The days are quiet. Oiñ looks out the window. Kong Thei feeds her tenderly. Banri sits and studies and dreams. These days her mother and father are busy with the twins, who are both down with a sudden cold and fever.

Meanwhile, with the shift in season, our tyrso crop is thinning, but the beans and tomatoes are plentiful, as are the peas. The pumpkins are finished, but already in blossom so hopefully there will be more plumping soon. In the front of the house, I’m trying to plant a few flowers. Some sweet peas I begged Bah Albert to bring from Mawkyrwat market, and a few lady’s slipper orchids I’ve stacked with bunches of moss up a tree. I remember Bah Kyn’s garden, how little interested I was in its abundance. At one point, how little interested I was in abundance of all kinds.

I still head to the hillock every afternoon, though on occasion I don’t even bother taking my phone—screen still neatly cracked. Yet this hasn’t felt a retreat from life so much as an immersion, with all that I’ve been learning.

How it begins with mud and seed and leaf, and how even if you think you need more, this is enough for you to begin to see widely, deeply. For eyes to open not just in your head but in your hands, and skin, and feet. And from here to know, little by little, how to read the signs of the world. When ants carry their food and eggs up a slope or into a gap in a rock, or fish leap in the pools of a river, or the sun is ringed by a brilliant rainbow circle—all these mean heavy rain will soon fall. When the ‘tiew kheiñpor closes its petals it’s a signal that work is done in the fields, and rice must be cooked for the evening meal. Now, around me, the leaves of the sinul tree blaze green, but when they fall, and the ñiang kali chirps, these will herald summer. And if I spy the walnut trees and the cherry blossom flowering early, the year’s harvest will be plentiful.

What does all this mean? That the world is story after story, living, breathing, coming to birth, to life, to death, to retreat—and great joy lies only in knowing deeply.

In the time I’ve spent in Mawmalang, Khasi too falls easier from my tongue. This is because I speak it every day, of course—rather than being thlun, like a blunt knife, it begins a little to sharpen—but I don’t think this is the only reason. It is also because the world reveals itself through these words. I didn’t have anyone to speak Khasi with in Delhi, and somehow, I can’t quite imagine it there, amid the loud, aggressive bustle of the city in the north. Far from these hills where the words have been formed. Language, I think, sounds like the place it comes from, it carries its own landscapes, thrives where the wind and the rain echo its rhythms.

For so long I have wondered, but perhaps now I can begin to know—that to name the seasons in a language that matches them—ka Pyrem, ka Lyiur, ka Synrai, ka Tlang—to know the months by what they bring, black winds in Ïaïong, mustiness in Naitung, rain to form deep, clear pools in Jylliew—this, I think, is what it means to be home.

Sometimes I check in with the others. Messages from Grace, and Kima, filling me in on their news, though nothing from Dajied, and I suppose I cannot blame him. Calls to Mei and Papa, and they seem happily busy. My mother with a visiting cousin and her new baby, a baking class recently offered in Shillong, an education fair she’s been roped in to help organize.

She rarely inquires anymore when it is I plan to return, though once she says, “I forgot to give it to you this time, didn’t I?” What, Mei? “Khaw.” Grains of rice, in a small pouch, pressed into my palm before a trip. A charm for safe travels, the Khasi believe, powered by home, the place in which the rice is grown. And I want to tell her that often it is the “unsafe” journeys, unplanned, on a whim, that lead you to where you need to be.

My father is still saving trees. Most recently, after the pines in our colony, a patch of towering, century-old cedars in the middle of town, slated to be felled to make way for a petrol station. He sat all day, all night for weeks, joined by a group of young climate change activists from neighboring colleges and schools. It was all over the news, and social media. My father is a star.

He hasn’t asked me yet, because he believes plants and people have to find their own roots, but if he ever were to ask if I was all right, I’d remind him how he once told me that houseplants thrive only when placed in a spot where they have a view of the sky.

And from where I am, the sky is blue and vast and undiminished.

 

On this mild, early spring afternoon, I allow myself to think of one of the last day trips Dajied and I made together out of Shillong.

We visited Laitlum, near Smit. We raced out of town, through open countryside, parked the bike near an opening in the hedge, and walked in, past a solitary hut, across grassy openness right to the edge of the slope.

We squatted, lit a joint.

Before us spread a deep, forested valley, with mountains rising endlessly on either side beyond the horizon—Laitlum, where the hills are set free.

I told him that all of this was once underwater. “Some fifty million years ago, a shallow sea extended across the Indian peninsula, all the way from here to Rajasthan.”

“Some of our monsoons could pretty much fill it right back up,” he joked.

I laughed. Truly, they could. “Can you imagine, though, the highest points on earth were once the lowest, deserts were oceans, and continents have been drifting apart and crashing together again since the world began.”

Our joint was strong and smelly and tasted acrid in my mouth.

“What I find most incredible, though, is that all life started with one common ancestor . . .”

“Really?” This, he said, he hadn’t known, or hadn’t really thought about much.

I nodded, passing the joint. “A universal common ancestor that probably lived in high-temperature waters in the deep seas . . . Paths between plants and animals split only a billion and a half years ago.” By this time a pleasant lightness hummed in my head. “All animals trace back to a bilaterian worm, all plants to one green cell.” I gestured around us. “Pine and birch and bamboo, single-celled diatoms, they owe their existence to a tiny algae, eons ago, that swallowed a cyanobacterium and turned into a mini solar power plant.”

Dajied looked amused. “I love that you’re . . . you’re so . . . cosmic.”

“Cosmic?” I thought I was the one who was stoned.

“It’s true,” he continued. “I’m local, provincial, small even, all about the here and now, and this place. And you . . .”

And me?

“You’re something much larger,” he said simply, and fondly, too, I’m sure. But I’m certain that he’s also told himself that this is what pries us and keeps us apart.

Thinking about it now, I don’t know if he is right. Could we not look at it another way? That here contains everywhere, and now, this moment, all time. This place, all places. This leaf—I look at the grass at my feet—is all leaves. Me, at this spot, carrying all my ancestors. Where are my borders? Where the boundary between me and the world? If we look for separation, we will always find it, I want to tell Dajied. It is the easiest thing to do, to split, to splinter, to divide. How much harder to see things in continuity, in extension, in expansion, as uninterruptedness—from the moment, the very second, the universe was born. That is in us, too. We are stardust isn’t just a catchy line in some poem or hippie song—we truly do hold supernovas in our blood and bones. This is where they come from, the elements in our bodies. Iron and oxygen, carbon and calcium. From a star, over the course of billions of years and multiple galactic lifetimes. We are not born now—we are passed on from the first stars to the next, as they burn and die, their elements sweeping out into space, again and yet again, until here we are. We carry stardust. And each speck of this minute grain—invisible to the human eye, as old as our universe—within it carries us.

 

Behind me the birds are calling, the wind rises, soft and sweet, rustling the shrubs, the trees. I look down at the village. Mem’s house. I think of Oiñ. Of a hut by the forest in Domiasiat. Of the medicine woman’s instructions. Bring me all these leaves.

Something strikes me, and I rise and walk down the hillock. I go looking for the musicians, and when I find them, they’re smoking their pipes, chatting; it’s not every afternoon they play music, on these waiting-for-the-harvest days.

“Kumno?” I greet them.

“Kumne,” they reply in chorus.

“I wanted ask you something,” I begin.

How can we, the ñiang-kongwieng of the world, help you?

“In your songs, you sing about a tree . . .”

Tree? Which tree?

“Diengiei,” I say patiently.

How does it go? When the world was young . . . kumno kumto? The lyrics keep changing, they tell me, they keep slipping out of our heads . . . Let’s see, what do we know about the Diengiei? That it covered the world in darkness.

“In the song,” I remind them, “you call it the tree that carries all trees . . .”

Yes, yes, we might have indeed.

“What does that mean?”

They glance at one another. That it’s very big? And then they burst out laughing.

They’re tricksters, happy crickets. So I thank them politely, and leave.

I head to where the nong kñia lives. He has gone for a walk to the stream, I’m told by one of his many grandchildren, and so I follow the route back. But instead of heading into the village, I walk toward the fields, the bridge, the stream, beyond where I found Dajied sitting on a rock early one morning.

Soon enough, I see him. His long, sinewy silhouette wrapped in a checkered shawl. He is standing there, looking out, at the distant hills.

When I approach him, he smiles.

“You were expecting me?” I ask.

His smile grows wider.

We both look out, the sky deepening above us, the hills beyond falling into silhouette.

“I did what you suggested, you know,” I begin. “I went to see Kong Batimai . . .”

“Kong Batimai,” he echoes.

“And she told me I can help Oiñ only if I do something for her.”

“That is her way, yes.”

“But what she’s asked of me is impossible.”

“This, too, has been known to happen.”

I shrug. “What’s the point? I mean . . . it didn’t sound like she wanted to help.”

He hesitates. “There are, fortunately or not, many ways to help someone.”

“Maybe, or maybe she was just playing a trick on me . . . because it’s impossible to collect seven kinds of leaves from the same tree . . .” I steal a glance at him. He remains impassive. “Unless you know of a tree that is all trees like the Diengiei.”

He stays silent a long while, then turns to me, and asks if I can hear it.

“Hear what?”

“The doh thli . . . in the stream. They’ve just spawned.”

I peer into the water, lilting over stone and mud, and cannot see any silver fishlings. Then I turn back to him, take a breath. “What do you know of the Diengiei?”

“What do I know?” His eyes still gaze into the water. “The ones who did are gone now. All I know are descriptions from fragments of songs, many lost, though some remain for those who want to listen, and those who want to sing . . . They exist in many variations . . . Some say it was magnificent, each leaf a different leaf, and in this way, it carried all the trees in the world. Other songs say that a tree that carries all trees could only be a seed, which can grow into anything. The site of all potential.” He looks at me kindly, and repeats, “It varies.”

A dragonfly dances before us, flitting from tip to tip, leaf to leaf. Farther away, a white egret watches and waits.

I remain quiet for a moment, before asking, “But what does it mean to us? The people with the stories about the Diengiei . . . this tree that carries all trees?”

He pulls his shawl closer. “What do any of our stories mean? Every time you tell them, they are different, their meanings as multiple as the versions they exist in. Such a tricky thing, don’t you think? Hard to grasp. But is this bad? When meaning is direct, like an arrow through the heart, it can kill things.”

I can see his eyes following the dance of the dragonfly.

“See?” He points. “How it moves? Darting above the water, from stone to leaf.” He looks at me, he smiles, and says, “I prefer things to be alive.”

 

By the time I return, the household is at rest.

I haven’t been talking to the nong kñia all this time; I left him by the stream and walked through the village, from edge to edge to edge, as though to make a map I could fold and keep with me for always. I’ve been thinking about journeys. Across rivers and seas, and swamps and mountains. The ones that take us where we never thought we’d reach, caves and underworld forests, to a river’s bend. And journeys that lead us to someone else’s journey’s end.

I move through the house quietly. I have come to know it well. Its walls and floor and low ceilings, the smell of ash and wood rising from the kitchen.

Everyone is at rest. The twins, still weak from the fever, are sleeping; Mem and Bah Kit talk quietly in their room; Kong Thei has also retired, and Banri is probably with her, chatting, mending clothes, reading.

I have missed dinner, and although Mem has left out food for me, I put it away. This is not the time to eat.

Instead, I sneak into Oiñ’s room and sit by her bed.

She is asleep, but she’s been unaware of anyone’s presence for many weeks now. She is here but not here, perched on the edge of coming back and going. It cannot be long ago, all of us outside, dancing clumsily on the grass, barefoot, moving, stamping on the ground. To do that, skin on soil, blood on mud, allowed for something from Ka Mei Ramew to run through us, Mem had said, a life-giving force we have long dismissed or forgotten, that connects us to the earth, and the earth to us. I wish it could have sustained Oiñ a little longer, held her stronger and upright. But maybe sometimes it calls us instead, knowing it is time.

I look down at her face, the color of bark, lined as leaves, hair wild as the moon.

This is the point at which I say, Go in peace, Oiñ, go in peace. You go, I stay, and someday in the earth of our earth, we meet.

Through the window, a breeze blows fresh and sweet, and somewhere, beyond the hillock, in a hollow in the forest, newly touched by sun and rain—something stirs, reaching toward the light.