Our view is of a sacred forest grove outside Mawphlang village. We are eight of us and a better hike group has never been assembled in human history (well, after Alexander anyway). There's Bob, our trek guide, about whom I should write a blog - sorry, a book - sometime. None of us can ever aspire to be Yul Brynner. Bob does not just aspire, he is Yul Brynner from The King And I, with his grin and corny Whatsapp humour and a head that last saw hair around the French Revolution. When he does not guide groups like ours, he loses money in cryptocurrency, but has theories to justify that (and everything). Serious. Then there's the rest of us - mavericks, conformists, seekers, philosophers-after-gin-and-tonic, followers, vegans. A vegan can be a philosopher and seeker, I am informed, but Set Theory - the stuff where you do circles and intersections - was never a forte. I learn on this hike that there is a Set Theory of sorts at play with the Khasis and their sacred groves in Meghalaya too: a family could have Catholics and traditional believers, the new and the old, the real and, well, the ethereal.
The traditionalists believed in their spiritualism - though now in terminal, regrettable decline - a relic of symbolism and spirits that has ensured the preservation of its sacred groves, dolmens and stones of memory. This sacred forest in front of us - with a panoptic view of stunning rich green, radiating in the midday sun - is real and ethereal as well. Will it last, bearing the onslaught of religion? It is a dismaying thought but we must not worry about what we cannot control.....
(As an aside, and for your intellectual refurbishment, here is what the world's finest town newspaper has to say https://theshillongtimes.com/2016/01/07/the-traditional-religion-of-the-khasis/)
Mawphlang village has its clothes put out to dry - washing laundry is an obsession in Khasi-land. Some cultures have totem poles, Mawphlang has its laundry on a wire and its shoes - scrubbed white to blind - on a rod. Perhaps, as the Mahatma on the NREGA tablet will attest, the essence is the same.We are in high spirits, following in the footsteps of David Scott who took this path - on his high horse, no doubt - to Sylhet in Bangladesh and then got it named after him (no, not Sylhet, but the trail). By all accounts, he was quite an odd fellow, which is true of all Scots who have ever existed- it's something to do with all that peated whisky that they have tucked in and the cold in Aberdeen (no one who is remotely normal could have invented golf).
As we descend into the valley - the gradual incline begins almost at once - the view of the forest is fetching and hypnotic: rich green interspersed with pink blossoms dot the hill on our right and the rolling hills go on and on. We are told by Bob that all of this land is in private hands or owned by a community. This beggars belief (well, for me anyway): these incredibly rich jewels of biodiversity owned by individuals who can do what they wish with it?
You see what I mean?
There is pine as well - the old villain of montane forests, that has destroyed native forests and implanted its monoculture to devastating effect. As we walk, we see denuded, deforested, sliced hillsides and I now have a part answer: where logging forests and getting the timber out is impossible, it's left alone. For the rest, there is much to be worried about. Cassandra - and timber contractors - would be in business here.
We stop by a lovely little stream to fill our bottles, soak our heads in its trickle and delay the hike. Streams like these are my raison d'etre and I dream of a life spent in a tent alongside their clear flow; but then, that moment is now. Those large shrubs could be small trees, or the other way around and those stones have much to tell us in their shapes.....they are meant to slow the water - and us - down. Nothing like philosophy in verse. Or the inverse of philosophy.
Hanumanth must be the closest an Indian has reached to looking like David Scott - note the hat.....
....or is it the other way around: that David Scott bore a resemblance to Hanumanth? Priorities, Watson, priorities.
Then, there is Millie. And, where there is Millie, there is food. None of us complain, though the Tempo Traveller we go around in takes a dim view of it all. And, after all the food has been loaded in the back seat, the person sitting there has a dim view too (and a happy bounce).
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Millie, gentle mystic, vegan, follower, leader-cum-feeder, cheese-maker.
She carried so much food in from Bangalore that
the excess baggage fare has lifted Indigo's quarterly profit estimates. |
We begin walking (a sentence that has inspired a dozen songs and a million Instagrammers who have no idea what it is - walking, that is, not Instagram). And, while we are in that valley, the forests envelop us in a warm, comfortable embrace.
Yet, we sense something is wrong here; it is a visceral feeling, a sense of absence, a void in the canopy, for we hear no bird calls. None at all, in this dark, melancholic, rich, wet deciduous and evergreen forest. I berate myself for noticing what isn't there, rather than what is, but that too is, in every way, visceral. Hunting, Bob tells us, is a way of life. Or rather, of taking life away. I wish it could be all different, but then if wishes were horses......
We cross the bridge over the Umiam river, on its mildly swaying suspended span. Like the other head water rivers of Meghalaya, this is clean, a pleasant green and, in mid-March, shallow. Rivers do something to me; I want to dive in right away and swim lightly with the current, yet fear it for its depth and for what might lie beneath, unknown. That too is visceral. We walk alongside the river, stopping to smell flowers, take in the air and see - as there inevitably will be - the bend in the river. The waters cut through rock and create a channel between two hills. This could be another - perhaps the main - reason I fear a river as much as I adore it, it has magnificent power that is well concealed beneath its placid waters, a grip that can thrall but throttle, charm yet choke.
Rivers. I could go on and on......
I love that phrase - the bend in the river. Do you?
We walk down to another valley, cross a stream that joins the Umiam and then climb up again. When you are on a hike, much of this seems pointless really, a down-up-down routine, yet there are conversations you have: with the others, the odd passer-by and with yourself. You stop to take in the beauty and to etch that scene in an otherwise-fickle and often flexible memory.
We walk past what seems like an invasive plant with pretty yellow flowers and landscapes of ferns, delicate and dainty and of use in local cuisine. Nothing could be more charming to see, tall trees on the sides and ferns in the folds, with trickles of water flowing by them. As with everything evolutionary, there is some magic at work here.
We are in the village with no name (or so I think). There is Maggi to be eaten (yuck) and tea and the noisy company of four software engineers who work in Bangalore, all with immense self-belief and nonchalance. I would rather not take photos with them, despite the common connection. Rather, there are these two who steal my heart with their nonchalance too, an air of living for today, hakuna matata.
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| Now, this gets my goat |
This guy - the man on the side, not the goat above - has his priorities right. Basking in the sun, with a lazy line in the stream and that conical basket behind him to hold his catch. This basket must be a cultural totem (ignore those white shoes), for they are everywhere and used for everything: it isn't odd to see the occasional Khasi lady climb a hill with a baby peeping out of this wonder of a cone, the sturdy strap of which goes over her head. It is an image I grew up with in Digboi, filled with nostalgia of another day (as an aside, if you didn't already think of it, the goat has its priorities right too. Until it meets the butcher, that is). The landscape changes from here on - there are people along the village stream and beyond, an unusual interlocked-stone bridge over it (absolutely riveting, with the pun thrown in) that, if it was designed by Mr. Scott, should make him the ultimate ol' world Scotsman (who were as talented as they were nuts).
........and immense deforestation that I have no wish to remember but needs to be recorded. The perils of private ownership of forests (or a pitch against capitalism in conserving them) is hardly a subject for intellectual discussion on this walk. It is QED - quod erat demonstrandum - proven, in a way, beyond argument.
I look away to my left and an immense rock formation looms high above, an overhang with a large open cave. What would it have been like in the old days to live beneath that, to peep out on a starry night and shiver in the Khasi monsoons, to encounter fauna that seeks your place to rest and worship all that you never understood? To wonder about this - and a hundred other 'ifs' and wishes and winter's kisses - that is why we hike. Up and down hills and valleys.
In a bit we are done. We wait by the road head as the Tempo Traveller rolls up with a groan, and clamber in for the last leg to Sohra or Cherrapunjee, as the Brits knew it. A long day and I am beyond thinking now.
As always, where thought ends, the trail does too.
