Singing by the Rain

IN SOHRA, OR Cherrapunji as the tourists call it, the rain is not an event but a season of the soul. It seeps into concrete, hair, limbs, intentions. From the balcony of my hillside hotel room, the Seven Sisters Waterfall is just vis­ible across the gorge—narrow streams sliding over rock, disappearing into green, not yet in their full monsoon glory. The view changes by the hour. One moment, mist covers everything in a pale silence. But then, the cliffs ap­pear again, and the waterfalls return to their course. The town behaves like its weather: moody, evasive and unwill­ing to commit to clarity. There is a strip of tyre shops, there are souvenir stalls, new vegetarian restaurants, selfie spots, and homestays with names like ‘Misty Morning’ or ‘Cloud’s Nest’, all of which verily vanish by afternoon behind a curtain of fog.

Everyone comes to Sohra for the water: waterfalls, caves that drip slowly into their own echo, living root bridges stretching over streams that run fast and clear, nosing through roots and pebbles, like they have plac­es to be and gossip to deliver. There are caves, like Arwah that cough up fossils, and others like Mawsmai that curl tight around you until your breath forgets its shape. The root bridges—they offer a gentler kind of awe. Travelling with a toddler, I choose the more accessible Umkar root bridge over Nongriat’s famous double-decker bridge. The 15-minute descent is quiet. Moss creeps across every surface. Leaves hang without rustling. At first, the root bridge looks like a tangle—feral, involuted, the kind of form nature invents when no one is watching. But then the weave resolves. From one anchoring tree to another, the roots have been pulled across generations and guided into a braid. They knot, double back, twist. Some are still finding their shape. A second line of roots, slung above the first, creates a laced parapet, loose and tentative, like someone learning to write in cursive. A worker in a cap and sunglasses chips steadily at the stone land­ing on one side of the bridge, whistling a lilting tune that rises and falls like the hills around him, above the low speech of water over rock. It’s a song about the mist, he says. “Ka lyoh ka jubab ia nga. (The mist, it answered me).”

Once the trail is behind and the mist lifts from the mind, you begin to won­der—what else do these hands build? Basketry for instance. In Meghalaya, a basket is not just an object—it is conti­nuity, utility and care, shaped into form by women who rarely speak of what they keep alive. In Mawsynram, the village that claims to be the wettest place on earth and has the peel­ing signboards to prove it, no one seems to know of basket makers. They do know where to buy a knup—a large bamboo-and-palm-leaf rainshield worn like a hood—or a khoh, the pointed conical carrier most often strapped to a woman’s forehead and back. Many villages in Meghalaya boast their own signature weave: the meghum khok, artistic baskets reserved for special occasions, the shang, shallow and wide-mouthed, perfect for displaying market wares, and the kurup, a bamboo umbrella that shields farmers from the capricious rain. But these baskets, in Mawsynram, arrive without a story. No one remembers who made them. They are sold, not inherited. In this noisy, damp market town, a man at a pork stall points vaguely north and says, “Go to Kenbah Syntein”, waving me off like I have been warned.

The road at times dissolves into a jigsaw of stone, mud and moss. On either side there is thick foliage—giant yucca, cigar trees, white teak—and then, quite suddenly, a valley like a bowl of damp green light. Syntein itself is a village of few distractions. A few small shops, lots of children and chickens. English doesn’t travel far here. Luckily I find Kyntiewlang Kynter, 27, divorced, with two children. She speaks surprisingly elegant English, Shillong-acquired, and shows me the baskets for sale at a stall, priced between `80 and `250. No one in Syntein makes them anymore. “They come from Kenbah,” she tells me, “across the stream.” Kynter has high cheeks, clear skin, and a light-footed ease. Her jainkyrshah, secured over one shoulder, is designed for dignity and ease, allowing the body to bend without apology. She works odd jobs but translating for a tourist is new. “You want to see where they make it?” she asks, almost as a challenge. A compact taxi drops us at a market a few minutes away and we cross a red-and-white bridge across a stream. On one end, a bamboo gateway frames the view; on the other, the village unfolds vertically. The incline is immediate. Con­crete steps rise between blue and white homes, flags flap from terraces, laundry sways. My feet are too large for the steps. Kyntiewlang—her name means up­wards—laughs at me kindly, her mouth bloody with kwai or betel nut, like every other woman’s.

THE VILLAGE IS in motion. It is the second day of Shadsuk Mynsiem, the Khasi spring fes­tival. A circle has been cleared for dance and drums. Children sit around, waiting. Men are scarce. Music is being rehearsed on stage. The dancers get ready. In a modest house with a narrow balcony, Tirit Langpen, a weather-worn woman in her 50s, is making a khoh. Her fingers move as if they had never learned to be still. I try, and fail. She laughs and returns to her work. Her house is filled with ciga­rette smoke. Rice steams in an open pot in the kitchen. Above it, baskets hang from a beam—to season, she says, in the rising vapour. “Makes them stronger.”

There are over 300 houses in Kenbah. Dozens of women still weave baskets. I meet Pynkmen Langpen, a basket supplier and life insurance agent, her house painted blue and white like a good school uniform. On the upper floor, she shows me stock—baskets with intricate weaves and polished edges. She lifts a fruit basket with a lid. “Siej,” she says. Bamboo. “Siej is life.” Over a dozen types of bamboo are endemic to Meghalaya: canes used in construction, those with tender shoots that are a pickled delicacy, another used to make paper, one that’s good only for fencing, and straws that are used to thatch houses.

Like bamboo, the Khasi language is supple, resilient and quietly essential. To visitors, it sounds like rain on tin and laughter behind closed doors. It slips between hard consonants and lilting vowels, full of tiny inflections that change meaning. A word for cloud also touches longing. A word for ancestor also means origin. Names here are not ornamental—they announce direction, clan, sometimes prophecy.

ON THE WAY back to Sohra, past picturesque potato and paddy fields, I stop at a stall at Wahmawpat spying a fruit I have never seen before. Sohphie is the kind of fruit that leaves an argument behind. Small, dull-skinned, the colour of old dust and green tea, it sits in roadside heaps like it has nothing to prove. But bite in, and it announces itself at once—sharp, citric, wild, as if lemon and tamarind eloped during a thunderstorm and raised their children in a forest. It slaps your tongue. Then, without apology, it turns soft and floral at the edges, like it has suddenly remembered its manners. Sohphie ap­pears in April and lasts till the monsoon, sold with chilli-salt for tens of rupees.

There is a Presbyterian secondary school around the bend, and a football match is in progress. Girls tackle as hard as boys, and luckily for me, they don’t mind playing with strangers. The state has produced national-level players and has over 150 registered clubs. But on most days, football here is still played for the right reasons: to fill the afternoon, to prove a point, to forget something.

Nearby, a trail veers into the forest. I follow Ri Balian, 48, and her 18-year-old daughter wordlessly, mostly because my Khasi vocabulary begins and ends with greetings. Her daughter skips ahead with a blue plastic pail perched on her head like a crown. The path bends and thick­ens, underfoot and overhead. Twenty minutes pass, or maybe more. The forest does not keep time. Finally, we find the sohphie trees, spilling their secrets along the slopes. Balian plucks each sohphie with the air of a woman settling old scores with the tree. She would have to forage for over two hours to fill her khoh.

Here, the women do the carrying. Chil­dren, baskets, fields, inheritance. The men seem to drift, sometimes present, often not. It is the women who shoulder the weight of a place that rarely says thank you. “It is not easy when the man doesn’t do as much as you,” says Shailoris, 48, who has worked at Ri Kynjai, the lake-facing resort at Umiam, for 18 years. Her village is Umber. “When it rains hard,” she says, adjusting her slipping shawl, “we say she remembers”. ‘She’ is the weeping sister who made this lake. Umiam, the water of sorrow. The tale is older than the dam, but sorrow swelled when the river was stopped and the valley sank. The villages disappeared. The name stayed behind. Now the lake lies still as a closed eye. The trails are soft with pine needles and tur­meric blooms. Nothing is in a hurry.

Shailoris says I should visit Lum Sohpetbneng. The path to the sacred grove begins in an old forest. Here, the ancestors are said to have descended from the sky on a golden vine. The vine was severed. The people stayed. At the summit, stones are arranged in circles. Offerings—betel, rice, a bundle of tur­meric—are left under a tree. The place is not explained. It is observed. Even the birds do not interrupt.

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