As someone raised worlds away from the milieu of Meghalaya’s ancient spiritual traditions, it can sometimes be hard to empathize with the mental state of old school Khasi animists. Understanding how an entire culture could have regarded stones, trees, and wild animals as being suffused with supernatural energy is difficult when you’ve been educated your whole life to view the natural world in purely rational, scientific, terms. But occasionally it is possible for an outsider to grasp, however faintly, why the Khasi animists of old thought the way they did.
For example: Next to Syntung village there is a great balanced rock near the top of a hill which appears, at least to a non-expert such as me, to be geologically inexplicable. The huge rectangular boulder stands precariously on a single corner, as though the rock magically froze in place as it was falling. Even on close examination, it’s hard to determine what’s keeping the stone from tumbling away; though the rock must weigh many tons, very little of it is in contact with the ground.
It usually only takes a cursory glance at the landscape around a balanced rock to see how it came about. The stones are often the result of receding glaciers, or of boulders falling from cliffs and mountain sides and then by chance getting hung up on the ground below. They can also happen when a stratum of erosion-resistant stone is situated above a softer layer that is being eaten away first, leaving fragments of the upper stratum suspended on an ever-narrowing pillar of the more yielding material underneath it.
The balanced rock of Syntung village, however, appears to defy all these explanations. While it is clearly a great hunk of the same limestone that makes up the land around it, the boulder is also, mystifyingly, close to the summit of the hill it occupies. The landscape itself gives no indication as to how such a giant rock could have rolled down from elsewhere; there’s nowhere higher that it could have rolled down from. It also does not seem to be an example of where a softer layer was eroded out under it; the material the boulder rests on is the same as the boulder itself. In another landscape it would be tempting to attribute the rock to a receding glacier. However, to my knowledge, glaciers never covered the Khasi Hills.
In short, I don’t know how the boulder got there. Perhaps an earthquake?
The people of Syntung, also, noticed that this great rock was remarkable, both because it dominated the landscape all around, being visible from quite some distance, and because they recognized, even without the benefit of geology textbooks, that there was no clear explanation of why it should have wound up where it did. Thus, they decided that the balanced stone must have been a supernatural entity, and so they named it the Mawblei, or “Rock God.”
On the penultimate morning of the trek, I found myself sitting in the shadow of the improbably leaning Mawblei, accompanied by a man from Syntung named LK whose relative’s house I had stayed at the previous evening.
LK had shown me around the village, and to what the local tourism council hopes will be the chief draw for visitors: a series of waterfalls to the east of the settlement. These are well worth seeking out. They pour through a narrow ravine, spilling over several rocky ledges at the bases of which are deep, cold, plunge pools. It seems that the state government has sensed a great deal of tourism potential here, having provided Syntung with the funding to build concrete walkways, lighting systems, and large overlooks, all mapped out with easy-to-follow signage and accessed by surprisingly smooth and recently paved roads.
LK was deeply concerned that I should tell the world of the beauty that was Syntung. Unfortunately, I may have come across as less impressed by the falls than I truly was; my exhaustion was too deep that morning for me to appear enthusiastic about much of anything. Still, LK was more than eager to answer any questions I had about the village, and so I pressed him on the existence of living architecture in the area.
“There was once a root bridge, not far from here,” LK told me. “But it fell down, I think, maybe, 31 years ago.”
“You mean, in 1988?”
“1988? Yes, about then…how did you know?”
I told him then about the hazy reports I had received in Lynshing and Wahlahkhiat. Whether this was the same structure that I had been told of, or whether there had just been an unusually strong storm in 1988 that downed several root bridges, was impossible to say.
“And then,” continued LK, “a long time ago there was another one that crossed the Umngot river.”
“It must have been a big one, if it crossed the whole river?”
“Yeah, but more than a hundred years ago some people went and burned it.”
“Why?”
“No idea.”
And that was all he could tell me.
About the Mawblai, however, he had rather more to say.
“You see, people long ago…and maybe a few people today…we cannot be sure…anyway, people who believe in the Khasi traditional religion, they think that this great stone is like a God. They worship it. They think that, if they feed this stone, it will protect them from enemies and disease and misfortune.”
“What did they feed it?”
“I think, mostly rice, but also chickens, like that.”
“How does the stone eat? Where is its mouth?”
“That I don’t know. But what I do know is, as per our tradition, the Mawblei always wants more and more food. That is why it is so big and strong. But the problem is that the stone is greedy. Soon, it demanded so much that the people did not have any food leftover for themselves. So one day, some of the men from the village got together, and they made a plan to go and push that stone over.”
“Did they?”
“No, they went to push it over, but they were not strong enough. Then, one by one, they got sick and died. And this Mawblai, it had a mother, which was, like, a bigger stone. And when she saw the people from the village trying to knock her son over, she got offended. So she went away to Dawki. And you can still see her now. When our people go to Dawki, we always look for that stone and say: ‘Here is our Mawblai’s mother!’”
“Do people still worship the Mawblai?”
“Not anymore. We are all Christian now. That belief in Mawblai, feeding the stone, it’s kind of crazy, no?”
I looked up at the huge, looming, counterintuitively balanced mass of black rock that the two of us were sitting in front of. The stone was still, and yet its attitude was of something in motion. It seemed almost as though it was daring us to give it some excuse to tip over and squash us. If any stone would be inhabited by a dangerously unpredictable spiritual force, it would be this one.
We spent some time next to the Mawblai. At one point I walked around to the other side of it and noticed a few old bits of rice scattered on the ground next to the limestone.
There was still somebody in Syntung who didn’t think it was crazy to feed the Mawblai.
Around midday I departed from Syntung’s brand-new homestay. I was their very first customer. I hope I wasn’t their last.
A year after I passed through, Syntung was in Meghalaya’s headlines, though tragically not in a way that was likely to bolster its tourism industry. On March 8th, 2020, a group of Khasi youths from Shillong came to the village for a picknick. Reportedly, they hung around the waterfalls for a few hours in the afternoon and then happily left in the evening to return to Shillong. But on their way back they took a wrong turn which left them wandering around the backroads between Syntung and Mawsna well after dark.
What happened next is murky. Somehow, a rumor spread like wildfire (mostly over that scourge of the present age, Whatsapp), that the lost picknickers were in fact Menshohnoh, evil blood-hunting servants of the Thlen. How this misapprehension began is not clear from the flurry of press reports that came out following the incident, though one theory is that the vehicle the picnickers were riding in stopped near Mawsna, and one of the visitors asked some children for directions, whereupon the kids decided that the picknickers were up to no good and went running back to their homes screaming that they had just met some Menshohnoh. Then news raced through the nearby villages that black magic was afoot, and that something needed to be done about it.
And something was, which brought shame to the whole area. A lynch mod descended on the picknickers’ vehicle. One of the suspected Menshohnoh was killed and two others were seriously wounded before the survivors managed to escape by fleeing into the jungle. The cops showed up later (the nearest police station was three hours away by car), and around two dozen locals were charged, though it’s unclear how many people participated in the lynch mob, or which villages they were from. The closest settlement was a village called Pashang, though the reporting on the incident makes it sound like the mob included men from several nearby locations. One suspects alcohol was involved.
Just as the rumor of Menshohnoh spread like wildfire, so too did the subsequent media reports that there had been a black magic lynching in the Khasi Hills. The incident was heavily reported in Meghalaya, and even made Indian national news. Syntung was suddenly better known than it had ever been before…not for its tourism potential, but for dangerous superstition. Even at the time of writing, if I search for the term “Menshohnoh” on Google, some of the top results are reports about the lynching incident.
This is unfair bad press. The attack happened several kms from Syntung, and it’s not clear how many men from the village were involved, if any. But virtually all the reporting on the incident mentioned Syntung since it was where the picknickers had visited. Because of this, the village and the lynching came to be intertwined in Meghalaya’s public consciousness. As one guide from Syntung lamented in a Shillong Times article published a few days after the event: “The killing did not happen in our village but how do we correct the misconception? We feel hurt that people have put up unkind memes on social media and warned tourists not to visit Syntung lest they get killed. We are called cannibals and hounds. This is the end of tourism for us…I don’t know if people will ever come to Syntung again.”
The guides’ worries regarding the future of tourism in the area were well founded, though not for the reasons he assumed: Covid-19 would bring Meghalaya to a standstill only a few weeks after the incident. Syntung was hardly alone in having its dreams of becoming a must-see destination abruptly snuffed out in the Spring of 2020.
Now it was time to walk on to my last stop before Jarain: the village of Nonghulew, a place that I knew nothing about other than its name and location. Fortunately, given my extreme fatigue, the way was mostly over a seldom travelled yet well paved road that wound through the limestone country.
I walked at a relaxed pace. The land rolled pleasantly. The weather was cool, and the sky overcast, which made for quite comfortable walking conditions so long as it didn’t begin to rain. There was no hurry to reach Nonghulew, for there wasn’t anywhere to go beyond it that afternoon: between the village and the end of my trek was only one final, vast, gorge.
That canyon was now both ahead of me and off to my right. The course of the Umngot in this part of Meghalaya makes a sudden curve to the west as it heads down from the high country, the bend in the river creating a huge promontory that juts out of the limestone tableland and falls precipitously to the southeast. But the air that day was too laden with mist for me to see much more of the canyon ahead than a great grey wall of murk. Though I knew, intellectually, that Jarain was only around half a dozen kilometers away as the crow flies, the sight of the infinitely deep mist-filled canyon made me feel as far from the end of the trek as when I was making my first few tentative steps uphill from Ranikor.
My muscles were stronger. I’d lost a huge amount of weight. My pack had gotten steadily lighter as I burned through my emergency food. But I didn’t have many more canyons left in me.
Hopefully Nonghulew would prove to be a relatively challenge-free village. I was looking forward to some rest and peace and quiet that evening.
“STOMACH PAINING!”
“STOMACH PAINING!
“STOMACH PAINING!”
“JUUUST NOW!” screeched a crazily energetic chorus made up of the entire under-fifteen population of Nonghulew. I had obtained the permission of the headman to stay the night, and had been given a small room to rest in. But almost the instant I settled down the whole village descended upon me. The adults grew tired of the Phareng Show soon enough, but the children’s enthusiasm only increased as their parents departed. Thus I found myself stranded on a small bed, surrounded by a tumultuous sea of amazed, hyper, young Khasis.
They had taken this opportunity to put on an impromptu musical performance:
“STOMACH PAINING!”
“STOMACH PAINING!”
“STOMACH PAINING!”
“JUUUST NOW!”
The children all playfully rubbed their stomachs and bent over, pretending to have painful diarrhea, a sight made no less horrifying for being hilarious.
Given the fantastic number of Khasi children that can pack themselves into a single room, I suspect that the headman of Nonghulew’s house was the point of highest population density in the whole state of Meghalaya that evening.
“BYE BYE DOCTOR!”
“BYE BYE DOCTOR!”
“BYE BYE DOCTOR!”
“JUUUST NOW!”
Occasionally one or two of the children would break away from the singing masses and try to ask me: “What is your name?!” But I knew better than to answer. Any interaction on my part, being one of the first, if not the first Phareng the children had ever seen, would lead to a great thermo-nuclear blast of hyperactive excitement; of screaming, dancing, jumping, shouting, spitting, fighting, and altogether craziness. Ripples of earsplitting rambunctiousness would spread like shockwaves through the very large crowd of very small people. I didn’t have the energy to deal with that. Thus I sat quietly, doing my best to write in my journal and not encourage the horde.
“GO TO TOILET!!!” screamed dozens of high-pitched voices.
One of the little boys pretended to take a dump in the middle of the floor while the rest of the room pointed at him and burst into a deafening chorus of laughter.
DON’T THINK I CAN TAKE MUCH MORE OF THIS was all I managed to write in my journal.
The headman came in after a few hours, laboriously forcing a path among the children and then shoeing them back to their homes. He then informed me that it was time for dinner. This was a simple meal consisting of rice with lentils and a few vegetables. There was a time when, after a tiring day, I would have longed for richer food. But no longer. As I was midway through the rice, it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a meal that wasn’t 95% carbs since Sohra. But though I would be back in the world of restaurants with long menus in only a few days, I wasn’t looking forward to greasy sit-down meals in the slightest. My eating preferences had shifted to those of a Khasi out of sheer necessity.
Then again, I also noticed that my rib cage was sticking out more than it had for close to a decade.
Now that the house had quieted down, I was finally able to talk to the headman as we sat in front of the glowing embers of a long-lived fire in the kitchen. His name was Tham. He was a thin man, with deeply sunken cheeks, who was several years younger than I was. My coming presented him with his first real test as headman. The man had been voted in the previous Friday, and it was only Tuesday.
From Tham, I was able to ascertain much about the way forward: the path to Jarain was, in the headman’s estimation, physically strenuous but easy to follow. This was most welcome news.
Tham’s English was limited, and so mostly we conversed in a broken Hindi/English/ Sohra Khasi mix. The dialect the people of Nonghulew spoke sounded quite distinct even from that of Syntung and Mawsna, so I tried to learn whatever I could about it, exhausted though I was.
“How do you say ‘Jingkieng Jri’ in Nonghulew’s language?” I asked him, expecting to get something resembling the Sohra Khasi.
“Jingkieng Jri? For that, we say: ‘La Ooh Tchrai.’”
“Can you spell that?”
“Eh…no. We have no written language.”
Something occurred to me.
“Is your language more like the dialect they speak in Amlarem and Jarain?”
“Yes…similar. Maybe there is some difference in pronouncement. But mostly the same.”
This meant that the dialect in Nonghulew could probably be classified as a vernacular form of the Jaintia language. If a person who only knew Sohra Khasi came to the village, they probably would have significant trouble understanding what the locals were saying. While the great trek might not have been quite over, I had done what I had set out to do: I had walked through the whole region where living architecture was found in Meghalaya and had crossed the Khasi speaking world from west to east.
There was nothing left between me and the end of the trek but a giant canyon.
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Patrick Rogers 