Shillong and I play hide and seek

Janice Pariat

Many of us, from the Northeast, have always been told that home was not enough. That here was “trouble”, and limited employment opportunities. To make it, to “succeed” we needed to be in Delhi or Bombay, or better yet, “abroad”. And this narrative, handed down to us, no doubt in concern and love, was a powerful one — until it began to lose its hold over me during the Covid pandemic, a time of shift and questioning. I returned to Shillong in the winter of 2021 (fleeing from Delhi’s hazardous air), and rediscovered, alone and in between lockdowns, what it meant to be “home”. I walked around my neighbourhood. I walked into the pine forest behind our house. Soon enough, I was invited to join a group of avid walkers, led by a storytelling guide (who is now my husband!) and we hiked the Rhododendron Trail, the winding paths in Laitkor forest, then further beyond to Shiliang Jashar from where we trekked to Kshiad Kyrming, a waterfall that plummeted to unfathomable depths. We walked the David Scott Trail, we visited Nong Jrong to watch a sunrise over an ocean of cloud, we travelled to Nong Nah at the very tip of the Shillong Plateau, ringed by majestic mountains. For me, all this was a revelation. There were stories here I wished to listen to; trails, new and forgotten, I wished to follow. Home, I realised, was more than enough.

Now, I spend a lot more time in Shillong, even though I couldn’t really say I’ve “moved back” entirely. I teach at Ashoka University for a semester in spring, when I’m on campus, and this takes me away from my hometown for a few months. But I’m here long enough to have reacquainted myself with her seasons — to know, for example, that the Mad March winds actually begin in February, that the time to catch blood plums in the market is just a week of two in July, that Mawphu oranges are the sweetest in the world and only available in early January, that even during the deepest, darkest monsoon, there will be a break for the clearest sunshine, that the cherry blossom trees will miraculously bloom all through November. Here, I feel I’m in touch with a natural rhythm of things that I’d lost track of elsewhere. I’m able to spend more time with my parents, with extended family, my husband is from Shillong (even though he too has been an elsewhere wanderer like me). My cat is happy here with so many sunspots to follow, and a garden to run around in. He is living, I tell my friends, not jokingly, his best life. We eat vegetables grown in a little “kper” in the backyard, a guava tree stretches outside my small writing shed. Here is a sense of quiet I feel grateful for.

Which doesn’t mean that beyond the quiet of the house, Shillong isn’t changing at a heady, breathless, I-can’t-quite-keep-up pace. It’s a scenario we’re probably all familiar with. A small town, suddenly growing, being constructed in all sorts of unplanned ways, beautiful old buildings torn down, cars doubling, tripling in strength and number, tearing around our small winding roads. I sometimes feel as though Shillong and I are playing hide and seek all over again. Where are you? I ask, when I can’t see her behind a newly constructed shopping mall. Or, when one of her mountain streams has been turned, over the years, into a drain. Or when more trees have been cut in her dwindling green spaces. Each passing year, beyond the boundaries of our neighbourhood, she seems to grow more familiar yet more unrecognisable. And, I admit, I find it difficult sometimes to reconcile the Shillong that is home and the Shillong that is a town cast in concrete across the hills. But we seek each other out, sometimes slipping beyond each other’s reach, but finding each other no matter what, for now, in the early mornings. At home and in town. When the quiet is still all ours, and we are complete in each other’s company.

Pariat, a writer and poet, is assistant professor of Creative Writing and History of Art, Ashoka University