“I think that is not possible,” said Rothell as the two of us sipped early morning tea. The shop had just opened, and the owner, the sole worker at the time, looked groggy as she poured the thick sugary beverage into our glasses. I had opted for Indian style tea rather than the milk-free red tea that the locals generally prefer, anticipating a long day ahead. “There is a trail over the Umshi to Mawsna,” the headman continued. “But it will not be easy for you. The problem, you see, is that you are big and fat.”
“Thinner than I was this time last month.”
“Ah, yes, but there are many loose stones. You may slip and fall. Better that you take a vehicle to Mawsna.”
“I’ve walked all the way here from Ranikor, up and down and up and down, day after day, along jungle trails and trails through broom grass and trails that went up the sides of cliffs. I’ve walked so far, and I’m so close to where I mean to stop, that it would feel like cheating to take a vehicle at this point. Also, you learn more when you walk.”
“Yes, yes, I think this is true.”
“So, can you explain to me where the trail to Mawsna begins?”
“There is a problem.”
“What is it?”
“You are big and fat, and there are many loose stones.”
“Well, what if you tell me where it begins, and then I’ll start down it, and if it gets too hard I’ll turn around and come back here?”
“Why not just take a vehicle?”
“Because…”
“We Khasi people would take a vehicle.”
“Yes, I understand that. It’s just…”
“No need to walk so far…”
“Yes, but, the thing is, when you walk, you meet more people, and it’s through meeting people that you learn about the culture.”
“Correct! A very good thought!”
“Thank you. So, if you could just explain to me where the trail begins…”
“You should just take a vehicle.”
I sighed and took a big sip of tea. The conversation then shifted to Rothell’s love of American Country and Western music, and which artists were his favorites.
The only one I recognized was Tammy Wynette.
Anthony came in a few minutes later, and after some pleasantries, he and Rothell started talking in the local dialect. I tried to follow the conversation as best I could. Familiar words arose in quick succession. Terms like “lynti” for path, “klaw” for jungle or field, “sensar” for broom-grass, “jingkieng” for bridge, along with place names like “Umshi” and “Mawsna,” and the rare adjective that I understood, in particular “ginjar!” meaning “difficult,” were repeated enough that I could grasp the basic contours of the discussion. Though my Khasi still had a long way to go, by that point in the trek I had spent so much time around Khasis speaking their native tongue that the language was seeping into my dense head through sheer osmosis. I came to the sad realization that, if it were possible for me to stay in the hills a few more months, or even weeks, I probably would be able to begin forming sentences.
But the time just wasn’t there.
Rothell was putting embarrassingly little faith in my trekking abilities. He pointed to my backpack and excitedly repeated “ginjar! ginjar! ginjar!” making it clear that he felt that my getting to Mawsna with the giant pack would be well-nigh impossible. Anthony, on the other hand, was at least willing to entertain the idea that I might be able to reach the village across the Umshi valley.
“But there is a problem,” Anthony said to me.
“Is it that I’m fat?”
“There is also that. But today is Sunday, so you will not find anyone in the jungle to ask directions. I will have to draw you a map to show you where the trail begins.”
Anthony laid out a rough sketch of where I needed to go. I would have to backtrack down the road from Wahlakhiat until I came to a football pitch. There, I would find a trail at the southwestern corner of the field.
“And from there?” I asked.
“Go down.”
“Simple enough. And is there a bridge over the Umshi?”
“Yes, and after you cross it…go up.”
“Only up!” added Rothell.
I was a smidge worried that Rothell might be offended by my not taking his advice, but his feelings didn’t seem too hurt. In proof of this, he gifted me several great big muffins from the tea shop, and then provided me with his contact information.
“If you are having any trouble in this area, call me. You say that you will walk to Jarain, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Then, you must go first to Mawsna, then Syntung, then Nonghewlu. I have relatives and friends in all of these. Everybody has heard of me there. Tell them that you know me. They will be afraid to harm you if they know you are my friend.”
I wondered for a moment what sort of local leader Rothell was exactly.
The time it took to establish where the trail began, combined with the usual confusion of packing up and leaving a place where one has become a short-lived celebrity, meant that it was already well into the day when I was saying farewell to Rothell and heading into the valley of the Umshi.
Just as Anthony had promised, there was a trail at the southwest corner of the football pitch. This led down to the river at a brutally steep inclination. And that, after weeks of slugging through the Khasi Hills, was entirely expected.
And so down I went, through broom grass and pineapple plantations, among Jackfruit trees and bamboo groves and wild palms. Soon, I caught glimpses through the trees of the stony course of the Umshi below. Having descended 700 meters without so much as a twitch of pain in my legs, I was sure I’d be in Mawsna well before nightfall.
The trail emerged at the bank of the Umshi and then crossed the stream via a long steel bridge next to a deep blue pool dramatically hemmed in by walls of tilted grey bedrock. Adjacent to the bridge was a large ficus tree situated precariously on the side of a rocky slope, leaning out over the water. When viewed from upstream, the plant almost appeared as though it had the metal structure growing out of it.
The tree looked suspiciously like it could have reached all the way across the river in the not-too-distant past. The path I had followed down was clearly old; it almost certainly went back more than a few decades. At the same time, the Umshi in this area was deep, and even in the dry season was not crossable on foot. Was this the site of the root bridge which had disappeared “sometime around 1988?” I certainly thought it likely at the time, though there was sadly no way to confirm this.
I decided to rest up for a while and take a dip. After all, with the trek drawing to a close, there weren’t going to be many more chances to swim in picturesque highland streams like the Umshi.
The huge muffins Rothell had so thoughtfully provided me took up a large amount of space in my bag, so I decided to eat at least two of those. And some dates. And wash it all down with Nescafe. Then it occurred to me that the water would likely be bitterly cold. I’d make a fire to warm up after my swim.
This would all take a good chunk of time, but I wasn’t worried. Looking at the cached Google-Maps images on my phone I could see that my destination for the night was not far. It would be a rough climb, but I’d walked up far higher slopes.
After a long relaxing swim, I had a long relaxing meal, accompanied by a long relaxing fire. Then I happened to look downstream towards the metal bridge and noticed two fellows sitting near the western end of it, smoking pipes and staring at me quizzically as they whispered to one another.
When they saw me looking back, they hushed. Then they just sat, still and silent, eyes fixed on the stranger in their midst.
For most of the day, alone but for the occasional distant bird, I had barely contemplated the fact that the trail I was on, and indeed the entire valley of the Umshi, was a place where tourists, especially foreign ones, never go. The last thing those two silent figures smoking their pipes must have been expecting to see that afternoon was a Phareng sitting on a rock in their jungle eating a big muffin.
They didn’t wave, or smile, or try to communicate with me in any way.
But after a quarter of an hour had passed, they both stood up and silently walked away.
I packed up and made my way back to the trail. This began quite distinctly on the eastern side of the river, and soon led me uphill into the jungle. Figuring that there was still plenty of time, I made a mental note to conserve as much energy as possible, slowly pushing up the trail step by step, stone by stone.
And then I came to an intersection. One way went off to the side, and another led straight up. The path to the side looked clearer, but that wasn’t the direction Mawsna was in. I took the uphill path.
The trail immediately started to fade. Undergrowth closed in around me. Time to turn around. I retreated to the intersection and took the path off to the side. It led me down to the Umshi. I was back where I started.
Now I wished I hadn’t spent so much time dawdling next to the river.
Backtracking once again, I returned to the intersection and started up the first path. The jungle closed in. I pushed on through the undergrowth. Then the almost invisible track came unexpectedly to a small clearing. Much of the vegetation here had been very recently cut down. Newly felled trees littered the ground, while young, green, banana plants were interspersed among them, looking as though they hadn’t been in the dirt for more than a week. Stomping over the fallen trees, I saw no sign of a trail.
The only thing to do was to push on to the upper edge of the clearing and hope that I’d find some sort of a path.
There were several.
I picked the most well-beaten one and pressed up through thick jungle, and then came to…another recent clearing, this one much larger than the last. The ground was broken and stony and covered in fallen trees; while it was still possible to make progress uphill, it was unclear if I was following the trail that led from the bridge, or just a random collection of tracks that would eventually deposit me in wild jungle.
It was time to check Google-Maps. I brought the program up, and it revealed where I was, but the news wasn’t good. First off: the cached imagery was out of date. It didn’t show the clearings at my position, just solid jungle. Second: I had barely made any progress up from the river. The confusing, spindly tracks through the clearings had slowed me down considerably. I was barely a fourth of the way up from the Umshi to Mawsna.
The sun was sinking fast. If I didn’t locate a major trail soon, I’d be stuck out here overnight, lost.
Now I came to a ridge and pushed up along the crest. To my right was trackless jungle, while to the left was a wide expanse of felled trees. This clearing wasn’t the sight of old-fashioned slash and burn farming. Rather, it was a place where a more modern agricultural practice was taking hold. The wild jungle, suitable for mixed cultivation in which relatively small amounts of a wide variety of different crops could be harvested, was being converted into a betel leaf plantation. Not to be mistaken with “betel nut” (which is, confusingly, actually the hard fruit of an Areca Palm), betel leaf is the fragrant green plant, known in Khasi as “thimpo,” which one chews alongside the nut. While the nut is what provides the pleasant narcotic aspect of kwai, and the bit of lime that’s usually taken with it magnifies the effect, the leaf performs a useful function in that it tastes good and so makes the other two elements palatable. Given how addicted Khasis and their Northeast Indian neighbors are to betel nut, “thimpo” is a major cash crop.
Most of the underbrush in the cleared area had been removed, as had a significant number of the trees, the fallen trunks of which littered the ground. Still, many trees remained standing, though these had mostly had their lower branches removed, leaving their trunks exposed to the long betel leaf vines that wound around them and climbed tens of meters up towards their much-reduced canopies. Khasis use several kinds of trees for this sort of agriculture, though the most commonly employed are Jackfruit, which have the advantage of being useful not only as straight pillars around which the leaves can grow, but also for their fruit, which can be made into a wide variety of preparations, and their wood, which is known to be exceptionally hard, moisture resistant, and termite proof.
Dispersed amongst the Jackfruit trees were a few tiny, widely spaced, huts. Though the betel leaf plantation was a very new development, the huts, except for their cheap corrugated metal roofs, would not have appeared out of place in the long distant past. The Jackfruit wood and bamboo structures consisted of small single rooms hoisted a few meters into the air on pillars to keep them free of the bugs, spiders, and reptiles that crawled on the forest floor. It was likely that the people who built the huts and tended the betel leaves were from Mawsna. They had probably established the low-altitude camp to aid in diversifying their agriculture. My hope was thus to locate somebody among the huts who could point out a trail leading out of the gorge and to the village. But though there were plenty of signs of human activity, not a soul was to be found. The huts were all locked.
It was Sunday, after all.
As the evening wore on towards sundown, I climbed further and further up the never-ending slope. Everywhere the land was covered in dead branches and fallen trees. Getting over them was an exhausting endeavor that involved climbing both across the trunks and up a slope at the same time. Finally, I reached the top of the plantations…only to find more jungle crisscrossed with faint, uncertain trails, none of them a definite way up towards Mawsna.
Then, with darkness closing in, I started to hear something off in the distance. It was a whistled tune, not unlike those that float through the ether of the Katarshnong. This gave me hope. Maybe I’d be able to catch up to the person doing the whistling and ask them the way to Mawsna. I pushed on, further up the slope. But the whistling didn’t seem to get any nearer. Always, the notes sounded like they were just beyond the next line of trees.
After following the whistling higher into the ever-darkening jungle for a good long while, it occurred to me that the music was not changing at all. The intervals between repetitions of the little tune were exactly, almost mechanically, identical.
Was it a human being making this music out in the unknown jungle? Or was it some sort of bird or animal that I had never heard before?
Whatever it was, trying to pursue it up the ridge was unwise. Night was closing in fast. I wasn’t getting to Mawsna that evening. It was time to find a spot to bed down.
Now I turned around and started to descend back towards the clearings. But the whistling didn’t stop, and it didn’t seem to be getting any further away. Was something following me?
The last sunlight withdrew from the gorge. Shortly thereafter, the whistling grew more distant, and then faded away altogether. Maybe it had just been a bird after all?
With darkness filling the jungle, I busily strung my hammock between two trees and collected a large supply of firewood.
Then the whistling started up again.
This time, it came from somewhere off to the north, out across the purplish twilight gloom of the clearing. I went and stood at the edge, trying to see what, or who, was making it. Then it stopped again, and all the land around was eerily quiet.
With the light nearly gone, I was about to fall back to my little campsite and have a grim dinner of dried dates and beef jerky when I looked towards the other side of the clearing one last time.
There, in a distant tree, was a still, dark, figure. It seemed like the person was silently looking back at me, but in the gloom, it was impossible to be sure of this. And then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the figure climbed down and disappeared. Perhaps they had never been there to begin with?
But then there were voices, faint, and far away.
The whole evening had me on edge. Being lost at night in the jungle can do that to a person. Still, it was funny that after all these weeks of trekking such a minor setback as having to sleep outside should have affected me as much as it did.
It wouldn’t have if the only thing I had to worry about was the jungle. But the truly unknown quantities were those two guys by the river, the mysterious whistling, that dark figure I had seen in the tree, and those faint voices, somewhere far out in the night, which I still heard, or thought I heard, every few minutes.
As I sat in the darkness a few hours after sunset, writing in my journal with the aid of the red light setting on my headlamp, I heard the whistling again. It was exactly the same little tune, coming in exactly the same intervals. But it was closer now. It must have been in the clearing.
I shut off my light and listened hard for a long time. Silence.
The whistling came a few more times that night as I was drifting off to sleep, always from different directions far out in the blackness. But I never saw any lights, nor heard any footsteps.
For someone lost in the jungle and surrounded by eerie night-whistling of unknown origin, I slept surprisingly well. Being exhausted down to the marrow of my bones probably helped.
When I awoke the next morning and wriggled out of the cocoon of my hammock, the jungle around me was cloaked in a warm mist. I still didn’t have a clue as to where the trail to Mawsna was, but I felt the sort of energy that comes when one is determined to just get on with something. After filling one of my small rubber bowls with dates, almonds, and bits of beef jerky, I washed the cheerless meal down with nasty cold Nescafe, packed up, and got moving.
My hope was that in daylight the trail to Mawsna would be more apparent. I headed for the clearing, assuming that some kind of path must connect the huts with the village uphill. But the morning only illuminated a new problem: Now that I could see further, it was possible to make out many more small, winding, confusing, trails than was possible the previous evening.
And so the morning turned into yet another exhausting scramble stumbling over trees and investigating what looked like promising trails, only to find myself either stopped by insurmountable hurdles of fallen branches or led into trackless undergrowth. Two hours after waking up, I was standing on a fallen tree and looking back down where I had slept the previous night. Already I was hungry, sweaty, and exhausted. A breakfast of dried dates and beef jerky will keep you on your feet, but it won’t exactly send you soaring.
I wandered over to one of the huts and sat down on a rock in front. Then I took out my cell phone and again looked at my position on Google Maps. I had barely moved since the previous evening.
It was time to face the fact that pushing on to Mawsna that morning would just be sadistic and needlessly dangerous. Here, a mere couple of days away from the end of the trek, it looked like I was finally beaten. Retreat to Lynshing was possible, but it was unclear if I’d be able to find a different way across the Umshi valley. If I didn’t have a deadline, a delay of 24 or 48 hours wouldn’t mean much. But my time was running out. I had to be in Shillong in about a week and a half for my living root bridge conference. A day was something I could no longer afford to lose.
Getting 90% of the way from Ranikor to Jarain entirely on foot was still a major achievement I told myself as I started downhill through the clearing. I was reasonably sure nobody from the great state of Delaware could make a similar claim. Still, it was hard not to be disappointed that the trek was ending in the middle of a betel leaf plantation…
“OYE!!”
I jumped.
“OYE! HELLO!” came a concerned voice that pierced the stillness of the morning.
“Hello?” said I.
Nothing for a moment.
And then:
“HELLO!”
“Uhh…where are you?”
“HELLO!!”
I looked in the direction I thought the voice had come from. Here there was only a Jackfruit tree.
“HELLOO!” the tree called out.
Perhaps I was more tired than I thought.
“Uh…What?” I replied, even as I caught myself addressing a talking tree.
“Eh…Where?” asked the tree.
I scanned the trunk. For the life of me, I could not see a person.
“You…go? Kahan ap jao?”
The tree apparently spoke a bit of Hindi. That did it. I had officially gone round the bend.
“You…” the tree broke into Khasi, “shano?” it asked, which means: ‘where are you going?’
“I’m trying to get to Mawsna. Mawsna ka lynti Kaha hai?” I said, throwing bits of three languages at the plant.
“Correct! Mawsna! Correct! Mawsna ka Lynti! Mera shnong Mawsna!” exclaimed the tree, applying a Hindi grammatical construction to mostly Khasi vocabulary. “You,” the tree continued, “above! Eyes…above!”
I craned my neck back, staring towards the very top of the tree. There, finally, was proof that I had not gone crazy…sort of. A little round face was poking out from the side of the tree with an amused, wide-eyed, expression.
I walked around to the other side of the trunk and saw that there was a long bamboo ladder propped up against it. At the top of the ladder was a man in track pants and a striped blue and black collared cotton t-shirt. At his back was a large basket woven out of thin strips of bamboo which he was filling with the betel leaves that grew on the vines that wrapped around the Jackfruit trunk. The man was a rarity among Khasis in that he was rather on the chubby side, especially in the face. If you saw him on the street you’d never assume that this person was a rough and rugged jungle man. But the fact that he was ten meters up a tree in the middle of nowhere at 9 o’clock in the morning showed me exactly what sort of hardy material this round-faced fellow was made of.
Having had his quiet morning interrupted by an unexpected Phareng, the man climbed down.
“Myself Distinguished,” said he by way of introduction upon reaching the ground.
Distinguished spoke less English than I spoke Khasi. But we did both possess a similar smattering of Bazaar Hindi. This was just about enough for him to communicate that I should wait outside his hut for a while.
I sat down as Distinguished went in. A few moments later I began to hear his voice speaking in a raised tone inside. He must have been on a cell phone. I wondered what connection he had. My Airtell Sim card hadn’t gotten any signal since Pynursla.
“Haoid! Phareng! Phareng! PHARENG!” exclaimed Distinguished amazedly to whoever was on the other end.
I sensed the morning was about to take a very strange turn.
“Phareng!” yelled Distinguished once again, followed by a long, excited, conversation. Then, still talking on the phone, he beckoned me to come into his hut. I climbed up the Jackfruit wood ladder into the single-room dwelling, and soon found that the ceiling was barely tall enough for me to sit upright on the bamboo-mat floor. But my newfound host rested comfortably with his feet facing the embers of an old fire. Distinguished had built the hut by himself, with exactly his own proportions in mind. For him, it was a cozy home-away-from-home complete with a hand-crafted wooden rack suspended from the roof above the fire pit, plenty of extra firewood, cooking implements, jungle-work tools, and an assortment of bamboo-woven baskets, some empty, and some already filled with various sorts of produce. As the man continued his long enthusiastic conversation with whoever it was on the other end, I found myself wishing that I had a jungle hut of my own.
“Yes…talk…” said Distinguished, thrusting his little Nokia into my hand.
“Who is it?”
“Talk!”
“Ok.” I brought the phone to my ear. “Hello?” I asked with absolutely no idea who was listening.
“Patrick?!” said a faint, crackly, voice on the other end.
“Yes! Who’s this?”
“Are you Patrick!?”
“Yes! Who’s this?” How could Distinguished have called someone who knew who I was?
“Oh! I’m so happy to hear you!”
“Thanks! But who are you?”
“I am so happy you are not dead!”
“Thanks! But who are you?”
The voice cut out and the call ended.
The signal had disappeared.
There was nothing to do at this point but sit in the hut and wait. Distinguished was determined to have me talk to whoever had been on the other end, no matter how long that took. But I still hadn’t the faintest idea who that person was, or what they wanted.
“Tea?” Distinguished asked.
He set about preparing this, building up his fire and boiling water in a beat-up old kettle, while every few minutes checking his phone. Clouds of signal were drifting through the canyon, but they were too weak to make a call.
The day was slipping by, and I still had no idea where I was going to end up.
Distinguished finished boiling the water and then produced two rather incongruously dainty and decorative teacups for a hand-built hut in the middle of the jungle. He poured in some steaming water from the kettle, added a pinch of sugar to each, and then proffered me one of the cups of literal sugar water.
“No tea leaf,” said he with a sheepish grin.
I took what was offered. One can do worse than sugar water. It occurred to me that I might offer him some Nescafe, though by this stage in the trek, not a single Khasi had taken a sip of my coffee and enjoyed the experience.
Truth be told, neither had I…
The phone rang again. Distinguished gave a start, then looked at the number and handed the Nokia to me.
“Hello?” I said.
“Yes! Yes! Hello!” said the person on the other end.
“Who is this?”
“Are you Patrick?!”
“Yes!”
“Patrick!?”
The signal cut out again.
The phone rang a third time. I brought it to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Patrick?” the voice was the clearest it had been sofar.
“Yes! Yes! That’s me!”
“I am Rothell!”
“Oh! Hi! How?…”
“I thought you were dead!”
“Oh? Well…I’m not.”
“When you did not reach Mawsna last night, I was worried!”
“How did you know?”
“I called the headman in Mawsna. For safety, I called all the headmen in my area! All the villagers have been alerted! Search and rescue! Everybody in this area is looking for you!”
This was an intense combination of touching, embarrassing, and overwhelming. Rothell’s claim to be an important person in this remote corner of the Khasi Hills seemed to be checking out.
“Where will you go now?” demanded Rothell.
“Oh…I guess…if Distinguished can show me the way…”
“I have commanded him to take you where you need to go, but he must know where you want to go!”
“Oh, well…If I can get to Mawsna, then…”
“Yes! Mawsna is his village!”
“I know. Then, if it’s possible to go to Syntung village…”
“Not possible.”
“What? Why?”
“You cannot walk to Shillong.”
Rothell’s voice was starting to crackle.
“Syntung, not Shillong.”
“Yes, you cannot walk to Shillong.”
“Syntung!”
“Not possible!”
The signal cut out.
I had a headache.
“You go…Mawsna?” asked Distinguished.
“Haoid,” I replied in Khasi.
“Chalo,” said he, which means ‘let’s go’ in Hindi.
Now we were off, stomping up and up over the spider’s web of faint trails through the betel leaf plantation. I was still utterly exhausted, and my progress was accordingly painfully slow. But Distinguished had the courtesy not to get too far ahead. And to further impede him, Rothell was calling nonstop…though the signal wasn’t improving. What I heard up the hill above was a constant repetition of “Hello?! Hello?! Hello?!” from Distinguished. To the man’s credit, his patience did not yet seem to be strained. He appeared to be finding the bizarre situation an agreeable mixture of funny and interesting.
It was supremely fortunate that I had met him. There was no way I ever would have been able to navigate the confused network of trails back to where the main route to Mawsna picked up again. Had I not stumbled into exactly the right Jackfruit tree with exactly the right Khasi in it, it’s unlikely I would have made it across the Umshi gorge.
We came within the last few hundred meters of the rim of the canyon. The jungle had given way to broom grass, and we were now looking down on tiny distant Lynshing atop the ridge on the other side of the Umshi. The trail had become so steep that the steps ahead were at eye level. My legs refused to climb any further. I’d hit a wall. Covered in sweat from trekking lower down in the jungle and at the same time freezing due to the cool wind at this higher altitude, I had to take a rest.
Distinguished came down from high above, looking concerned.
“Take rest,” said he as he walked down the stairs towards me.
Then his phone rang. He handed it to me.
“Patrick!” came Rothell’s voice on the other end.
“Yeah,” I replied, too tired to be polite.
“I must say…I am sorry, Patrick, very sorry,” he said gravely, “but I’m afraid that I must inform you that you cannot…” his voice trailed off.
I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. It sounded as though Rothell was trying to dissuade me from doing…something.
The phone rang again.
“Hello,” I mumbled into it.
“Yes! Mr. Patrick?!” said Rothell, much clearer now.
I sighed into the phone.
“Yes, I am very sorry to tell you that you cannot go to Shillong today.”
“I’m not trying to go to Shillong.”
“But you told me…”
“Syntung! I’m trying to get to Syntung.”
“Oh…then I will tell them in Syntung that you are coming. It’s not far, you can reach by the evening. You…”
The signal faded out again.
All I remember of the final push up out of the Umshi gorge is a long, slow, aching, blur, like some strange purgatory suspended on the side of that forgotten valley. After a while, Distinguished volunteered to carry my water bottles, which reduced my burden significantly. He also offered to take my trekking bag, though, as he explained to me with hand gestures, this would mean he would have to leave his huge basket of betel leaves and climb back down to get them later.
That simply wasn’t acceptable.
So I crawled, up, and up, and up.
And then it was over. Coming to the top of the stairway, we arrived at a rough road that led through an undulating limestone country of low barren moors, dense copses of tough sharp-leaved palms, and the sad red and white scars scratched into the land that were the telltale signs of unregulated mining activity. Not far away, houses rose above the nearby hillsides: Mawsna.
We pushed on faster now, but though the land was gentler, my strength had not returned. Before moving on to Syntung, I’d need to eat something more substantial than trail mix.
Maybe I’d be able to have a nice quiet lunch in Mawsna.
Here in the last days of the great trek, having spent so long being the lone Phareng for miles, I thought I was entirely used to being a temporary local celebrity.
But I had never faced anything like what I was staring down that afternoon in Mawsna. Rothell had warned the village that I was coming, and now the whole population was assembled to welcome/gawk at me. As Distinguished and I approached, a crowd of well over a hundred people of all different ages descended on us.
It’s hard to deal with that much attention even when one is full of energy. At the time, ragged and exhausted, probably not smelling too good, ravenously hungry and with a pounding headache, being surrounded by an entire curious village was not exactly what I was in the mood for. There were several young women in the throng who I understood to be teachers from elsewhere in Meghalaya, and through them the whole crowd was putting forward a constant stream of queries ranging from: “what are you doing here?” to “how many brothers and sisters do you have?” to “do you like Donald Trump?” I found myself walking in the middle of a circle of fascinated, tightly packed Khasis at the center of the vast crowd. Whenever I was afforded a brief view beyond the press of inquisitive humanity, I saw more people emptying out of their homes or descending from the hills beyond the village.
During the entire trek up until this point, I had never felt the slightest urge to scream at my Khasi hosts. This was the first time when the thought seriously occurred to me. That afternoon, my will to be polite and gracious, along with my sanity in general, hung by a thread. Diplomacy is hard when you’re about to collapse from exhaustion.
It was Distinguished who prevented me from losing my mind. Since he had been around me longer than everybody else in Mawsna, he had a better idea of what sort of state I was in. He soon took on the job of shoving away curious onlookers and answering most of their questions. I still couldn’t understand him, and from what I had heard of the Mawsna dialect, it seemed to be quite distinct from Sohra Khasi. But familiar vocab, like the names ‘Lynshing’ and ‘Pynursla,’ along with the word ‘thait’ meaning ‘tired,’ kept coming up. It sounded like he was trying to communicate to his neighbors that I had not only come from a faraway land, but also that I had walked a great distance, and everybody needed to back off a bit.
The message slowly seeped into the crowd, and the people clustering around gave me a bit more space. Still, for every onlooker that fell back, new ones came in from behind, continually replenishing the crowd with a fresh host of curious faces.
Gradually, Distinguished and I fought our way to his house, a large, semi-traditional wooden structure with a dark-but cozy kitchen in which a fireplace was situated in the middle with a great big wooden rack hanging from the roof with bamboo rope, an arrangement that Distinguished had replicated in miniature for his jungle work-hut.
As the two of us entered the house, much of the rest of Mawsna followed. I slumped down with a wall at my back, an embarrassing puddle of sweat spreading out from me and across the wooden floor. Dozens of pairs of eyes gazed at me with deep curiosity, while Distinguished did most of the talking, answering his neighbor’s questions as best he could. I wondered what he could have been telling them, given that the two of us couldn’t communicate much verbally. A part of me wanted to be more friendly and effusive and give these folks the Phareng show they were obviously expecting…but I was just too tired.
I was soon provided with a meal of nothing more than plain white rice with a pinch of salt and a few hardboiled eggs. You might think that this would make for a rather meager lunch, but nothing could have been further from the truth. It’s amazing what a difference a full stomach can make. Inhaling one huge clump of white rice after another, the meal only interrupted by several cups of tea and the occasional curious kid coming too close and having to be whisked away by the nearest adult, I felt the life coming back into my bones, and my brain returning to an acceptable degree of functionality. I could smile again. The spirit of diplomacy returned. Much of the assembled crowd wanted to take pictures with me, and though I warned them that I was stinky and filthy to an extent that was unrepresentative of my countrymen, it was nothing but group photos for the next half an hour.
Still, I could feel that the exhaustion of the day was only temporarily defeated. It was a good thing Jarain was just a few kilometers away. I didn’t have much more of this left in me.
There was further to go that day, though the hard part, thankfully, was over. Rothell called a few more times, asked Distinguished to show me the way to Syntung, and arranged a place for me to stay there.
“You just tell them my name in Syntung,” said Rothell over the phone, “and nobody there will harm you.” I had to admit that having Rothell as my guardian angel did have its advantages.
Distinguished and I set out from his house followed by a vast, waving, entourage, the crowd thinning gradually as we marched further into the moors. Finally, the only people sticking by us were a handful of determined children. Still, well out into the countryside, I could turn around and see a huge waving throng in the village we’d left behind, watching us until we were out of their sight. As the last of the kids turned around and left, I gave the crowd one final wave, and all of Mawsna waved back. At least I had entertained them for an afternoon.
Now Distinguished and I traversed a rocky hardscrabble landscape of low limestone hills with large areas given over to grazing land for goats and cows, along with heavily terraced fields for growing grain. We walked under misty overcast skies, crossing this pleasant ground for what might have been two hours, until we came to a place beside a trail where many bundles of wood had been stacked up. Distinguished indicated that we should stop here by sitting down on a rock, taking the palm of his hand and placing it to the ground, and saying “Shong!” which in Sohra Khasi means either ‘sit’ or ‘chair.’
To the east, we could make out the houses of a much larger village than Mawsna rising above the moors: Syntung.
We waited for maybe half an hour as the overcast sky grew darker, and then a small figure came walking slowly towards us from the distant village. This was a guide Rothell had sent from Syntung to show me the way. The man spoke no Hindi or English, so Distinguished did his best to brief him in the local language on my situation. The name Rothell came up many times in their conversation. I knew I had no reason to fear another night lost in the jungle.
Then Distinguished hefted a great bundle of wood on his back and prepared to return to his village.
“Come again!” said he.
“I certainly hope to!”
“Ah…yes,” he replied, clearly not understanding my words, but hopefully getting my meaning.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting me on my Patreon page. There, you can download an extended edition of my book The Green Unknown which includes several chapters available exclusively on Patreon, as well as access a whole slew of other perks.
Patrick Rogers 