It’s said that centuries before the advent of British rule in the Khasi Hills, the founders of Nongblai village fled from the east, driven from their homeland by famine. When the wanderers arrived in the Umrew valley, they came under the protection of a local god who from that point on shielded them from further misfortune. Thus, the settlement they founded came to be known as Nongblai: “God’s Village.” While in recent years Christianity has made significant inroads, the local deity is still widely acknowledged. Even those who profess the Christian faith usually have not rejected the titular god of Nongblai outright, but have instead merely relegated it to a subsidiary position in their cosmology.
While I was never able to ascertain the exact place where the ancestors of Nongblai came from, everyone I talked to in the village agreed that the settlers had started their journey somewhere in the Jaintia hills, and that the language they spoke had more in common with what we now call Jaintia than it did with Sohra Khasi.
Over time, Nongblai’s Jaintia connection faded, but a few linguistic reminders of their eastern origin survive. For example, “I’m going,” in Khasi is: “Ngan Leit noh,” but in the Nongblai dialect this becomes “Nan lai,” which matches the Jaintia. Of course, given that the village is so cut off, its dialect has evolved along its own unique trajectory. The first settlers probably referred to a living root bridge with something resembling the Jaintia phrase “Laa Ohh Chrai,” but rather than adopting the Sohra Khasi “Jingkieng Jri,” the people of Nongblai came to use their own term: “Dongkew Jri.”
That’s a useful phrase in Nongblai. “Dongkew Jris” are the village’s chief claim to fame. A few years back, a flurry of media reports came out lauding the village as the place with the highest concentration of living architecture in the world. This may have been a bit of an overstatement: Nongblai is known to have 18 root bridges on its land, while nearby Rangthylliang, inter-village territorial disputes notwithstanding, has over 20. But these numbers are all a bit iffy, and it seems to me that “The Root Bridge Capital of the World” is best understood as the small area on the eastern bank of the Umrew that contains both villages, rather than any individual settlement.
But why are there so many root bridges here?
The previous day’s misadventure had an unintended advantage: it showed me most of the path I would need to take to Nongblai. Shootingstar and I had met the trail about three quarters of the way to the next village. Had we turned right rather than left, we could have reached Nongblai in about 45 minutes. My walk that morning over mostly familiar ground was thus uneventful. And this was for the best; the agonizing push up the wrong river took something out of me that I wouldn’t recover for the rest of the trek. I’d be running an energy deficit from then on.
Soon, the path brought me down once again to the Nongblai River, which was much gentler here than at the wild canyons and pools downstream. The trail crossed the river via a great, venerable, root bridge. This is the most famous living structure in Nongblai, and one of the few root bridges in the area that one can easily find pictures of online. While only two thirds as long as the vast triple-span living bridge that Shootingstar and I had first approached from Wahkhen, the entire length of Nongblai’s postcard bridge is distributed over a single, enormous, immovable, span. It might not have had the wild hugeness of the triple-span bridge, or the sense of remoteness that the obscure, inaccessible, and far less manicured structures downstream possessed, but it made a fine picture, and one that didn’t entail life threatening adventure to obtain.
My trek for the day was already nearly complete. I knew from previous research that this bridge was only a few minutes’ walk from Nongblai, which partially explains the structure’s online fame. Given that so much had been written about the village already, I assumed that the process of tourism development was well along here, for good, ill, or, most likely, a mix of both. Nongblai, thought I, might be an easy place to visit, where plenty of people, even Pharengs, had gone before. The village might have a rest house where I could get a quiet night’s sleep. Maybe it would even have a restaurant.
The first thing I noticed upon entering Nongblai was the lack of concrete houses. While most of the buildings did not follow the traditional model of Khasi domiciles, they were nonetheless largely handmade from locally sourced materials: mostly bamboo supplemented with some hardwood. This meant that concrete was still a rare commodity in Nongblai, implying that the village was far from a road.
Pharengs were not a common sight here. Children gawked at me with a mix of fascination and horror from distant bamboo houses. The local tourism society was clearly working hard to attract visitors to come see Nongblai’s incredible density of living architecture, but, as of early 2019, they had yet to arrive.
Another sign that visitors to Nongblai were still rare was the speed with which news of my arrival spread through the village along a vector of excited/confused/terrified little kids. This was convenient; I didn’t have to locate the village secretary; he came to me. His name was Amdor, and he was quite amazed that I had come on foot from Wahkhen.
“This is very unusual!” he said to me when I described the path I had taken. “Tourists seldom come this way!”
“But, when they do show up, is there a guesthouse for them in Nongblai?” I asked.
“Not yet. We have been planning to build one, but funding is not there. And, anyway, most people who come only want to see one or two living bridges, and then they go back to their hotel in Shillong. And they never walk from Wahkhen! Where did you come from before that? Shillong?”
“No. Kongthong.”
“You walked all the way from Kongthong!?” he asked in disbelief.
“Yes, and before that…Kshaid, Nongtraw, Sohra, Mawphu, Nongsteng, Thieddieng…”
“Have you been walking for a year?”
“Feels like it.”
“You are crazy.”
What followed was the usual set of tasks that come with settling into a place with limited tourism infrastructure. Permission to stay the night was granted by the village council, and then some discussion occurred as to where I could be put up. Again, it was decided that I should stay in the village community hall. Given its importance to the local government, the hall was one of the few fully concrete buildings in Nongblai. It was also completely empty except for several towers of PVC chairs stacked up to the ceiling against one wall.
Cement may still have been a luxury, but PVC furniture was made for places like Nongblai.
For the next few hours, I wound up sitting beside a small fireplace at one side of the building, discussing all manner of things with the village council as a steadily growing crowd of children collected at the other end of the room. From the way Amdor talked about the village’s adventures in tourism, it sounded as though the settlement had seen a growing, but still somewhat disappointing, trickle of visitors over the previous few years. Though Indian national news outlets had magnified the claim that the village possessed the most root bridges in the world, this had only increased the number of tourists to a handful every few months.
“Why do you think that is?” I asked Amdor.
“Many things. No help from the government. Also, it is too hard to get here. There is no road. You must walk down many steps.”
“But in Nongriat they get lots of visitors,” I countered. “Too many, almost, and you have to walk a long way to get there. But the root bridges in this village are at least as beautiful as the ones in Nongriat, and there are much more of them here.”
“Yes, but if a tourist says, ‘I want to see living bridges,’ and then looks for them online, everything they see is just Nongriat Nongriat Nongriat. So, they all go there. What can we do in Nongblai but hope?”
By the time the village council left it was already pushing nightfall. This was fine by me. All I really wanted to do that evening was get to sleep as early as possible.
But before that could happen, there were two major issues I had to deal with. One was rigging up my hammock inside the building. The other was handling the giant crowd of children that had collected to watch the rare spectacle of a Phareng wrestling with his exotic bedding.
When the village council left, Amdor shooed the kids out of the building. This temporarily scattered them, but once the older folks had turned their backs and started walking home, the kids gradually returned in ones and twos. At first, I was content to ignore the children as they occupied the field outside, too afraid of me to reenter the building. A few of them came to the windows, but all they did was peek in at me and giggle.
Now I threw myself into the task of rigging up and testing my hammock. The community hall had large windows with steel reinforcement rods placed horizontally in the wells, a common arrangement. It looked as though I could string my hammock above the floor by looping the straps at both ends of it around the steel rods on opposite sides of the building.
The problem: there were now multiple small Khasi heads in the windows, and a few brave souls had begun recolonizing the room. None of the kids said anything, other than the occasional furtive whisper, but the sense of being observed by an ever-increasing audience of deeply curious children was becoming a distraction.
Now I went to attach one of the hammock straps to some of the steel rods. The window was open, and kids had started climbing up into it, using the rods like rungs on a ladder. Fortunately, the children were still afraid of me. It didn’t take more than a loud “shoo” to startle the kids out of the window wells like surprised cats and send them, and all their little friends nearby, screaming into the village. I attached the hammock to the windows at both ends, thinking the kid issue was more or less resolved.
With the hammock tied to the steel rods, it was now time to run a test. Gently, I sat down on the fabric, still not putting my whole weight on it.
Furtive whispers came from every direction.
Kids had returned to all the windows and were now giving a running commentary on my odd behavior. Shooing them had backfired. Sending the children fleeing into the village had only attracted more from further afield.
Oh well. I started to sit, putting more weight on the hammock. Then my rear end came down with an undignified thump on the concrete floor, and all the children of Nongblai were heartily delighted. Peals of laughter burst forth and echoed through the village.
There was a relatively simple fix to the hammock being too low: I could tie it to bars higher up in the window wells. But the kids weren’t going away. I built up the fire in the hall’s small hearth and did my best to ignore the ever-growing mass of Khasi youth, but this became more challenging as the evening crept into night and the children’s eyes began to glow red in the reflected light of the flames, their little whispers taking on a sinister note to my ears.
There was a small lightbulb in the community hall, but it was off. All the village outside was pitch black. I’d been told that the power might come on later that night, but not to get my hopes up.
Now I sat on a PVC chair next to the fire, writing in my journal.
“What is your name!?” enquired one of the kids through a window.
I hadn’t finished writing when I noticed a shuffling sound at the other side of the room. A mass of small dark figures was crowding in. A few were close enough to the fire for me to see their faces, but mostly they appeared as pairs of small glinting red eyes suspended in shadow.
“What is your name!!” demanded one of the little shadow people.
I looked away from them and tried to write a bit more in my journal.
“Sir, what is your name!?”
I turned, only to find myself staring down at least two dozen advancing glowing eyed youngsters, with more pouring in every second.
It was time to make a stand.
I jumped up threateningly, grasped my large umbrella, and shouted “My name is Patrick!”
This sent all the children within a fifty-meter radius giggling and screaming into the jungle night.
I was under siege. Trying to work was a lost cause. Every few minutes, the kids would again force their way into the community hall or manifest themselves on the metal bars of the windows. Whenever I turned and scared away the children clinging to the bars on one side of the community hall, I would turn to see glowing eyes in the opposite window well.
The children had started lighting little fires in the field outside. Dozens of kids were hunkered down next to the small blazes, warming their hands like the survivors of a nuclear holocaust, discussing their next moves, sometimes cooking things on the ends of sticks or lighting up bits of plant matter just for the fun of it. Even well into the night, groups of them still approached to ask my name, over and over and over and over and over and over again. Deeply fatigued, alone against the curious horde, I felt like I was going completely insane. How long would this last?
And then the lights suddenly came on, and with them came Amdor, charging in like the Riders of Rohan, scattering the besieging rascals back into the village.
“I apologize for our kids!” said Amdor as he walked into the community hall. “When there is no power, they cannot do their schoolwork, so they came here to play and disturb you. Sorry!”
There was no need to apologize. After all, kids are basically the same no matter where you go.
I awoke with stiff legs the following morning. Every step I took for the next 24 hours felt like I was wearing cinder blocks for shoes. The past few days of hard walking had caught up with me. It was time to take it easy. The morning was spent slowly doing laundry in a stream while being observed with fascination by some local youths.
In the afternoon, with the aid of several big cups of nasty black Nescafe, I forced myself to wander around…slowly. There was more living architecture which needed investigating to the east, further up the valley of the Nongblai River.
A stone trail led down directly from the northern edge of the village to the stream, where a hoary, wide, root bridge was anchored by three large ficus elastica trunks, two on one side of the river and one on the other. This is claimed to be the oldest living structure on Nongblai’s land, though the exact date of its planting is a matter of speculation. Nobody alive in Nongblai today was around when the bridge first came into being, while the village itself is estimated by the locals to be in the vicinity of 600 years old. Even subtracting a century or so of living memory, there is still half a millennium during which the structure could have first been planted.
The once mighty Nongblai River was barely a creek where it passed under the old bridge. It could not have gone much further upstream before it disappeared underground. For the past few days my life had revolved around this river. Yes, it had tried to kill me, but it had also shown me a succession of architectural and natural wonders that few people outside of Nongblai and Wahkhen had ever laid eyes on. Now the river almost seemed like an old friend who I was immensely fond of but knew better than to trust.
There are so many root bridges in and around Nongblai that when one visits it becomes almost possible to forget that living architecture is not common throughout the rest of the world. The village is blessed with countless structures that would be treasured wonders were they found anywhere else. But in God’s Village, any given root bridge is just one architectural marvel among many.
This illustrates something often overlooked by visitors amazed by the sheer beauty of living root bridges: they are, from a purely practical standpoint, a good idea. If they weren’t, there wouldn’t be so many in Nongblai. The people of God’s Village found root bridges to be more useful than bamboo or wooden structures, so they created multitudes which they maintained over many decades, generations, and historical eras. For an isolated village in a tropical climate that had to deal with rivers and streams that rise exponentially in the monsoon season, employing self-sustaining, self-strengthening, architecture made perfect sense.
But the southern Khasi Hills are far from the only place in the world with settlements that face a similar set of challenges. If root bridges are such a commonsense solution to a widespread problem, why are they so rare? Why are there not thousands distributed across South and Southeast Asia? They don’t seem to require too much in the way of specialization to create; one of their chief advantages is that single families or even individuals can hand craft monumental structures, far out in the jungle, that will survive for generations. Likewise, ficus trees can be found across a wide variety of elevations, climates, and terrains. With irrigation, they can even be grown in the deserts of Rajasthan, or for that matter, of the Western U.S. In sprawling Indian cities such as Delhi and Calcutta, the trees are often the last scrap of greenery left in endless seas of concrete.
If ficus trees have spread over a vast section of the globe, why hasn’t architecture made from them done the same?
I pondered this while slowly following a trail that clung to the southern side of the now greatly reduced Nongblai River. Downstream, the river was hard to cross even in the middle of the dry season, but here, where the stream was little more than a series of trickles between rocks, a person could easily traverse it without getting their feet wet.
The last living bridge that spans the river is abandoned; the path down to it is overgrown and rarely used. And yet, the structure is still strong and growing, extending about 20 meters across the river, half that distance above the rocks. But though the individual roots are healthy, they aren’t easy to cross. They don’t have anything that could be called a railing to prevent one from tipping over the side. Even for a nimble Khasi, using the bridge to get across the river would be risky.
My suspicion is that the derelict structure was once a living bridge that had been safe to cross, but then it was wounded by a flood, fire, or landslide, which removed a large part of the bridge, though the organism as a whole survived. Since it was severely damaged, the span was abandoned, but there wasn’t any reason to take it down.
Thus, the derelict bridge hangs uselessly above the Nongblai River to the present day, an architectural ruin and a perfectly healthy tree.
Beyond the derelict bridge, the Nongblai river bifurcated several times and began to disappear beneath the stones for long stretches. As I walked slowly on, it became clear that the headwaters of the stream I had spent the last few days negotiating were located in a complex landscape full of thick jungle and cleft by a succession of steep, narrow, declivities. This was an area that would take energy to explore. I didn’t have much, so I determined what little I did have would be best expended back in the village.
But not long before I made the decision to turn around, I came to one last living bridge. This crossed a side trickle of one of the Nongblai’s many headwater streams. It was a small structure, though it was also wide, with roots several feet thick that looked like they had withstood many decades of intense monsoonal floods. The structure certainly appeared ancient, though nobody in the village I talked to later that night had so much as a guess as to how long it had been alive. There may be dozens, if not hundreds, of small living structures like this deep in the jungles of Meghalaya, far from tourist zones, unknown to all but the handful of people who have some reason to use them.
At almost every turn during my years wandering Southern Meghalaya in search of living architecture, I’ve found that there was always more to the practice than commonly known; that it was, without fail, larger, more diverse, more widespread, and more interesting, than anyone outside of the villages of the Khasi Hills had any reason to suppose as little as a few years ago. That root bridges are genuinely practical and can be grown in large numbers, and yet can also be hidden deep in the jungle and go completely unremarked upon for centuries, leads me to believe that it is possible that there could be other parts of the world where living architecture exists, or once existed, at a large scale. It’s even an established fact that in a few places, such as along the Indo-Burmese border among the Konyaks of Nagaland and at several locations in Indonesia, a handful of isolated living bridges have been grown.
There might once have been other dense concentrations of root bridges in the remote jungles of Asia. But whether any of these survive, or whether there will ever be evidence to prove they once existed, are questions that cannot be answered given the current state of research. It may well be that living architecture was once so ubiquitous across the belt of tropical rainforest stretching from the Indian subcontinent to Borneo that nobody thought it worth reporting. It may also be that the Khasi practice is genuinely unique in scale, and that, while other cultures might have produced a few examples, the Khasis will nonetheless retain their title as the true masters of living architecture.
It should come as no surprise that one of the places with the most living architecture in the world would also contain one of the most unusual examples. What is surprising is that if you don’t know exactly where to look, you’ll probably miss it.
I only happened upon the world’s weirdest piece of living architecture by accident. Later that day, I decided to take a walk to visit the other side of the village where there is a cluster of small but visually satisfying root bridges that span minor rills coming down from the eastern slope of the Umrew gorge. While I was photographing one of these structures, I happened to glance upstream, along a small canyon. In that direction there was a cliff, perhaps ten meters tall, which was covered with a continuous fence of ficus elastica trees, their roots all tangled and twisted together so that it was hard to ascertain where one tree ended and the next began. This needed closer investigation.
I climbed out of the stream bed and up the cliff. The edge of the village extends along the lip of the precipice; in some places the drop-off is literally below villager’s back windows. Were the cliff to erode just a little, much of Nongblai would wind up at the bottom of it.
But this won’t happen anytime soon. A solid wall of ficus elastica trees has been planted along the edge of the cliff to stabilize the escarpment with their roots. My first thought on seeing this remarkable piece of landscaping was that it was not, strictly speaking, architectural. But as I walked through the narrow space between the houses and the edge of the cliff, it became increasingly clear that it was in fact a single planned structure that extended for well over 100 meters, making it the largest piece of living architecture I’ve ever encountered. All the trees had been connected by taking some of their roots and combining them with those of the trees next to them. Numerous ficus strands had also been directed into an extensive living fence that ran uninterrupted along the edge of the cliff. At several points the fence merged into thin woven lattices that extended well out over the stream bed to form a succession of young living platforms.
This neatly demonstrated another practical use for living architecture: creating locally generated, immensely efficient, retaining walls. The roots of the ficus elastica tree can be made to crawl down hillsides and used to firm up unstable slopes, holding large quantities of loose dirt and small rocks in place. And, just like root bridges, living retaining walls have the advantage of only growing stronger over time. Of course, where living retaining walls are perhaps not so useful is in generating interest from tourists. Though the structure next to Nongblai was gigantic, intricate, and unique, it was not photogenic. And I’ve yet to meet a globe-trotting retaining wall connoisseur (though I’m sure such a person must exist).
I think it’s fair to say that living architecture is a hugely important part of human heritage, and that Nongblai is one of the very best places in the world to see it. But even with root bridges all around, there was still much about their history and their place in the local culture that was a complete mystery to me. In particular, why was it that Nongblai had more of the structures than almost any other spot on the globe? That night I hoped to, if not get a complete answer to this question, at least gain enough data to begin addressing it.
Amdor had extremely helpfully offered to introduce me to Nongblai’s chief luminary, a traditional Khasi musician and instrument maker by the name of Nokot Khriam. Incongruously for a person who hails from a place as remote as Nongblai, Nokot is something of a celebrity. His work keeping Khasi musical traditions alive has even been noted by the highest levels of the Indian government. When Amdor and I walked into Nokot’s house, one of the first things I noticed was a twenty-year-old picture of him standing with a plaque in his hand next to the then president of India (Note to non-Indians: The president of India is only the ceremonial head of the government, with the Prime Minister holding most of the true executive power…still, it’s impressive that Nokot had met the guy!).
The organization which had given him the plaque recognizing his work (along with rs. 100,000) was the Sangeet Natak Akademi, or National Academy of Music, Dance, and Drama, which is run by the central government. If you run Nokot’s name through Google, one of the first results you get is the Sangeet Natak Akademi’s listing for him on their website, which reads: “Born in 1944 in Nongblai, Meghalaya, Shri Nokot Khriam is well-known maker of drums and other musical instruments of Meghalaya. He learnt the art from his father Shri Swam Khongphal and has carried it further on the strength of his own creativity and fine craftsman- ship. As a maker of Khasi musical instruments for the last thirty-five years, he has also played an important role in the preservation and development of the culture of his people. A master in his own field, he is also adept in playing Tangmuri, the traditional Khasi flute.Shri Nokot Khriam receives the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award for his contribution to the tradition of making musical instruments in Meghalaya.” [sic]
Beyond his musical pursuits, Nokot has been recognized by the Pynursla-based Living Roots Society as a grower and conservator of living architecture. Over his many decades of life in Nongblai, he witnessed the development and maintenance of dozens of root bridges. My expectation was that Nokot, as a person steeped in the culture of the area, would be a fount of knowledge about living architecture.
He was, however, rather tired when Amdor and I darkened his door.
Nokot was sitting with his large extended family watching football on a big T.V. and eating kwai. The moment I walked in, he said something in my direction, and then the whole room broke into laughter.
“He says,” chuckled Amdor, who would be my translator for the duration of the interview, “that you are so big, when you are as old as he is, your head will touch the ceiling!”
“But I stopped growing years ago!”
“I think he is making fun of you.”
“How old is he?” I asked, trying to get some sense of Nokot’s life story.
This occasioned an unexpectedly long discussion.
“He doesn’t have any exact record,” said Amdor after some time. “He is at least 74. We can say, 74 and possibly above.”
That seemed to be about as close to an answer as I was going to get.
“So,” I said to both Amdor and Nokot, though only Amdor was paying attention, “I’ve heard that the clans which settled this village came from the Jaintia Hills. Does Nokot know if they brought the idea of planting root bridges from the Jaintia side, or if they only started making them after they came here?”
Amdor put the question to Nokot, though this took a while as the game was picking up. There was much hooting at the television. Amdor had to ask Nokot several times, as the old man’s attention was glued to the T.V. I found myself staring blankly at the game, acutely aware that I wasn’t getting anywhere.
Nokot and all his relatives suddenly shouted and wailed at the same time. One of the teams on the T.V. had missed an easy goal, much to Nokot’s extended family’s disgust.
“Volume down,” said Nokot, still fuming at the player’s failure to make the shot.
Now, with the T.V. quiet and the game lost, he turned to Amdor and answered my question.
“No,” said Amdor. “They only started making Jingkieng Jris when they came here.”
Nokot turned to me and asked something in the local language.
“What is your age?” Amdor translated.
“I’m thirty-two.”
Amdor conveyed this to Nokot, whereupon the old man said something that cracked up the whole room.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He says, since you are so tall and big and fat, he thought you were 100 years old!”
Amdor giggled for a while. Then Nokot went and changed the channel. WWE was on. The large men in tights fully engrossed all the Khasis in the room.
“So, does Nokot remember any root bridges being planted in his lifetime?” I asked Amdor as he gazed open mouthed at Brock Lesner hopping around the ring smack talking his fellow wrestlers.
Amdor put the question to Nokot, and a long discussion followed.
“He says, there are some that are below a hundred years, some bridges he still remembers when they were planted. But some of them, they’re above a hundred years in age.”
“Does he know the year when any individual one was planted?”
“No, I think not,” Amdor replied after talking to Nokot. Nokot then added something for Amdor to ask me, pointing to the T.V.
“He wants to know: Is this America?”
“Technically.”
“And that Brock Lesnar, is he American?”
“I think so…but, to be honest, I only learned who Brock Lesnar was when I came to Meghalaya.”
Amdor communicated this to Nokot, who burst out laughing.
“We here are very crazy about these wrestling guys!” said Amdor.
“Anyway,” said I, trying my level best to steer the conversation away from WWE without being a dick about it, “does Nokot know if there are more living root bridges now than there were when he was a child?”
Amdor put the question to Nokot, who thought about it a good long while.
“He says that now there are more than before.”
This was a surprise. Almost without exception, everywhere I went in the Khasi Hills that had once contained living architecture, the perception had been that the practice was now greatly diminished.
“Does he know why that is?” I asked excitedly.
“Woah!!” shouted Nokot, pointing to the T.V. Another vast muscle-mountain of a man who I did not recognize had just thrown Brock Lesnar’s massive form onto the canvas and was triumphantly squatting on him and hailing his cheering audience.
“Do you know Brock Lesnar?” Amdor asked.
“Not personally. So, does Nokot know why there are more root bridges now than there used to be?”
“I will ask him,” said Amdor, who managed to get the question in between epic changes in Brock Lesnar’s fortune. “He says it depends on the population size. The higher the population, the more bridges. This is because, with more people, they must go further to farm, so some of them will go to another river, that’s further away, and then some more people will go even further to another river. Like that.”
This was an interesting tidbit of information, though it didn’t by itself explain why Nongblai had so many more root bridges than other parts of the Khasi Hills. The population of southern Meghalaya is growing at a huge rate, and many villages now take up vastly more ground, and farm their land much more intensively, than they did even a few decades ago. But this has not led to a corresponding recent increase in living architecture throughout the region.
But I didn’t get the chance to enquire further. Nokot had a question for me.
“He is asking if you are married!” laughed Amdor.
“What? No, not yet.”
“Marwai!” (English: Alone) exclaimed Nokot.
“But does he know…”
“He is saying,” interrupted Amdor, “if you are going to get married to a girl in your country, you have to give six or seven oxen to her family.”
“What? I do?”
“He is asking if you have to do that.”
“Oh…no, we don’t. It would seem strange if somebody did that in the U.S.”
“He asks: What about in Spain?”
“I don’t think it’s common. But, anyway,” said I, trying to reestablish my line of questioning, “does Nokot know why, in this village, there are more living root bridges than in other villages in Meghalaya?”
Amdor put the question to Nokot.
“He says, it’s because in this village we have more rivers than in others.”
This was the best I could do by way of an explanation for Nongblai’s profusion of living architecture. It made a certain amount of sense. But, then again, there are other villages in Meghalaya with lots of rivers which don’t have anywhere near as many root bridges as Nongblai. There must be something more to this story, but I wasn’t going to be learning what it was that night.
Nokot stood up and made a gesture like he was pulling something up over his head.
“He is comparing your pants!” laughed Amdor. “He is saying if he wears your pants, they’ll reach up to his head!”
“Well, he’s welcome to borrow them. I have a spare pair.”
Amdor translated this.
“No thank you!” said Nokot in English.
“I think they will not fit him,” added Amdor.
Nokot was clearly the sort of person one could learn a tremendous deal from, but only with time. And mine was running out. I needed to be in Jarain in a few days. The short, distracted interview had rendered up a few interesting pieces of information, and I enjoyed Nokot’s sense of humor, but the question of why Khasi living architecture is so densely concentrated around Nongblai and the other villages on the eastern bank of the Umrew remained largely unanswered.
I pressed on from Nongblai the next morning. It was sad to leave so soon, but I consoled myself with the hope that I might return in the next few years, or, if I couldn’t, someone who was perhaps better qualified would follow in my footsteps and do a better job of picking Nokot’s brain.
But neither of these things were to be. Covid 19 has prevented me, along with almost all foreigners and even most Indian travelers, from visiting Meghalaya. Nongblai’s tourism dreams continue to be, as of the time of writing, unrealized. Nor will anyone ever document the full extent of Nokot’s knowledge of his village’s living architecture. The man died in 2020, and with him went a repository of information on the subject, and many others besides, which can never be recovered.
It may well be that the complete story of Khasi living architecture cannot be told, because those who were alive when the practice was in its heyday, when asphalt roads and concrete and steel were still exotic imports, will soon be gone. But the living structures they created will remain, and grow, even after those who planted them fade into the past.
I walked on from Nongblai and headed east, crossing seven further living bridges as I pressed up the side of the gorge to Pynursla. Each was unique, spectacular, and unknowably old. Most were planted well before there would have been any record of who created them. And with the protection of the Nongblai village council, the structures have a good chance of lasting generations, if not centuries, as living monuments to a lost world.
But now I climbed and left the astounding living architecture of Nongblai behind. The small track I followed met with a narrow stone stairway. This led me up out of the hot jungle to an agricultural camp on a grassy, windswept, ridge. From the camp, I ascended hundreds of meters along a wide traditional Khasi throughfare of foot-worn steps, above the clouds, to the rim of the Umrew Gorge and the little plateau-top village of Shutim. At the village there was a dirt road. This met a highway. And that highway led me to Pynursla, and the 21st century.
A day begun in deep jungle ended among tea stalls and general stores and auto repair shops. I was out of the Umrew Gorge, and ahead of me there was only one more grand canyon to cross.
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Patrick Rogers 