Namaste Friends,

This is the last chapter of the Meghalaya series, though I have a few more pieces burning at the back of my mind. This essay series took super long to finish and I did not, intentionally, wanted to hurry through all the lived reality of our Khasi kin. It was a massive responsibility to take up a project of narrating stories as old as time, like that of the Khasi’s. The duty of telling a people’s story through your own frame of reference without making it extractive and commoditised is one to be treated with immense care.

Here are all the chapters in sequence:

Chapter - 1
Chapter - 2
Chapter - 3
Adjacent Essay

I set foot in Meghalaya on January 2025 to find a way out of my suffocating grief of losing two of my beloved ones. I wanted a vast space to mourn, to wonder, and finally to surrender. I wanted to rest, into the strange newness of being in Shillong, that which had become too difficult for me to carry. I told my partner that I craved landscapes, waterfalls, clouds, and cold. A space for my hauntings to finally exhaust its means and merge into the infinite embrace of eternal pastels of greens and blues.

The day after my arrival in Shillong, I texted one of my Khasi friends. As we caught up on each other’s lives, she told me that she had to move to another city in the mainland for work and how deeply she misses home. I half brokered a consolation for her by saying that Shillong is unimaginably quaint, and I can truly empathize with her yearning for home. I received a sombre pause from her end, which I inferred, knowing her, reflectively looking for words. In response, I quietly wove a prayer of thanks to her ancestors for being conduits of healing to Earth. To her, I expressed gratitude for having told me many stories of her beautiful homeland.

This series has shaped me significantly, and I would be moving from this a much different person than the one who began trying to comprehend the cosmologies of Meghalaya that hid in plain sight. I wanted to know more, not in following the tailends of curiosity kind of way. I was hoping that the insights I was looking for would help me find an alternate meaning to existence and morph my inner life significantly. And I have only learned that I know nothing so far. There is a world out there of ecocosmologies that has the potential to completely change the way we relate to this sentient planet and each other. This series has been my attempt to enter into a relationship with the world that is Meghalaya, and try to be in conversation with the powerful presence of what can only be explained as archetypal and ancient.

Khasi Decolonial principle of Antidiscovery

Forestry during colonization was defined by ledger and categorization. The legitimization of land depended on operated mechanics of legibility — areas that are catalogued, mapped, measured, assessed for natural resources and biodiversity. That which is not legible to the colonizer does not exist as sovereign. Discovery then was rendering something into the economy of knowledge so it could enter the economy of extraction. They can only take what they can name. They can only name what they can enter.

Khasis forests are ruled by the forces much beyond human comprehension and protected by wardens of the land who can speak to these forces. Divinity dances on the thick roots of tradition, fear, and reverence that spread across Khasi forests like skies opening up to thunder and lightening when a renegading cyclone passes through the Bengal Delta. The outlandish stretches of oceanic canopy turning over into centuries of muted green sentience standing wordlessly still is an experience that defy both logic and words. The magic-ridden realm of Khasi forests are nature’s stern eye to the world consumed in the pursuit of extracting and accumulating. It is a cosmic mirror into something so bizarre, magnificent, and otherworldly that it would be a folly to not name them as distinct worlds.

Mysticism and mystery are the prime pillars on which the proud forest traditions of Khasis stand. These forests are completely inaccessible to the outsiders by design, and some of them are elusive even within the Khasi community. There are many reserved forests existing in Meghalaya today where no human has entered in a few thousand years. The holy grail like prevalence of mystique is so well accepted in Khasi colloquial that they take a lot of pride in the myth of no one ever having set foot within these holy locations protected by designated clans.

Khasi forestry is antidiscovery in its framework precisely because it is an active, structured refusal of legibility. They have built and maintained systems (mythological and ritual-based governance) that ensure forests cannot become accessible on colonial or capitalist terms. The mysticism is the conservation practice. Fear is a border. The sacred is a sovereign boundary beyond which every verdict is delivered by God.

Types of Forests in Meghalaya

Law Kyntang — the sacred grove, held as the dwelling place of the deity. No human activity is permitted here; it is entirely inviolable. These are some of the oldest undisturbed forest patches in the region.

Law Lyngdoh — forest associated with and protected by the lyngdoh, the traditional priest-chief. It carries ritual sanctity tied to the priestly lineage.

Law Niam — forest connected to Niam Khasi, the indigenous religion. Its protection is grounded in cosmological obligation rather than administrative rule.

Khlaw u Blei (Sacred Forest) — this overlaps in spirit with Law Kyntang but is a broader category: forest belonging to the divine, where extraction is forbidden and the boundary between the human and sacred is literally forested.

Law Shnong (Village Forest) — communally managed forest belonging to a village (shnong). Regulated use is permitted — firewood, timber, minor forest produce — under the oversight of the dorbar shnong (village council).

Law Adong (Prohibited Forest) — forest placed under temporary or permanent prohibition, often declared by the dorbar1 to allow regeneration. It functions like a managed fallow, but with traditional legal force.

Law Ri Raid (Forests of a Clan/Group of Villages) — forest held collectively by a raid, a cluster of villages sharing common ancestry or territorial jurisdiction. Governance is shared; rights are distributed but bounded.

Law Sumar — forest associated with burial grounds. The dead are interred here; this gives the forest a liminal, protective status that discourages disturbance.

Law Lum Jingte — forest on sacred hills or mountain peaks, treated as spiritually charged landscape. The high ground itself is considered sacred.

Law Kur (Clan Forest) — forest belonging to a specific kur (matrilineal clan). Since Khasi society is matrilineal, this forest passes through the female line; it is inalienable from the clan’s identity.

Into Law Lyndoh — Mawphlang

The simple winded uptown of Shillong is best travelled on foot, the only next best thing if speed is your priority, is a scooty. Four-wheelers are not meant for these coiling roads of steep ascent. The stairwells spread across the inner localities announce low-maintenance sustainable design. Those ghibliesque stairs are a convenient shortcut through the inner localities for those who are not afraid of exercising their cardiovascular system. The colonial charm of Upper Laban, where we found an Airbnb with a generous host, did not seem to be standing apart from the rest of the city with its Roman Catholic influence, a region that served as the seat of the Archdiocese of Shillong.

Unlike the Nilgiri ranges fencing the southern states, or the Doon Valley bordering the outer and lesser Himalayas — Meghalaya is not disjointed in its political undercurrents. Khasi heartland is united in not being a soldout to corporations and builders, irrespective of their religious affiliations. Ecospirituality is their foundational philosophy that is totally inseparable from their lived realities. I feel hopeful about this because it shows the resilience of indigenous wisdom. It reveals that no matter the changing skin of culture, the ancestral memory is the fabric that holds these landscapes and its inhabitants together in shared harmony.

On the third day, I discovered that there is a sacred grove a few miles away, that is open to visitors on a strict guided tour. However, we are allowed to tread inside the forest only for a few hundred meters. I obviously relented despite the poor bargain. We already had a rental scooty to go around the town. I was slightly apprehensive of making that one hour ride, in that bone-chilling cold of early January, on such an exceptionally light ride, but we did it anyway. Now that I think about it, that was one of the best spontaneous trips of my life.

We rode across many vibrant Khasi villages, cutting through the frost-bitten winter morning air. Those signature cottages and the morning light rushing like liquid gold through the laden orange and plum trees of their front yards. Families that owned plots near the highway had already set up their respective shops — vending tea and snacks. We spotted several matriarchs, some seemed to be octogenarians, who were running shops all by themselves — a sight only abundant in the North East India. We rode past the cascading waterfalls and foggy hills carefully, as some stretches of the highway were under-construction. We missed a few turns here and there, but finally found our way into the village of Nongrum where the wardens of this particular Lyndoh forest reside.

Our modern centralized world, so obsessed with state power structures and top-down hierarchical design, will find its worthy opponent in the highly functional grassroot institutions that conserves the Khasi forests. The Hima Mawphlang2 governance body was formed by the virtuous Blah (also known as Langblah) clan, who were the original inhabitants of Mawphlang forests. They alongside their kins of Lyngdoh (high priests) clan have been guardians of the 800-years old forest spanning over 192 acres.

The ecosystem comprises species that predate even the first Blah clan ancestors. Some trees in the forest are thousands of years old. The interiority of the forest is abundant in waterfalls and aquifers that sustain a thriving flora and fauna. Species like Rhododendron, Oak, Himalayan Yew, Kaphal, Rudraksha, are a few of the 450 species of flora proliferating across the forest floor. Himalayan mole and grey shrews tread the god-dwelling forests in peace, and also some bigger mammals like leopards, civets, and deer are said to be abundant in the belly of Mawphlang. Avians such as the rare Himalayan Bluetail and Maroon Oriole, alongside 70 other species sing and nest inside the forest canopy unperturbed.

When we reached the upper perimeter looking down at the valley, the immense upturned grasslands opening up to a dense coverage took our breath away. The cold winds swept away any ounce of scepticism about the ancient presence that rules those light-eating acres of wilderness. The dark twisted roots and branches spiralling in all directions throughout the forest felt like the innards of Gods.

We were made to wait alongside another couple for our guide to arrive at the forest entrance. No one is allowed to enter by themselves or even in a group fewer than four people. Three upright stone slabs stood at a little distance from entrance. On walking closer, it revealed more. An eerie, almost heavy sense of foreboding clutched my heart. The erected stones did not look like tombstones, but some kind of enclosed background to another stone slab placed horizontally. Its width and thickness suggested that it is meant to be used as a seat for ceremonial purposes. It looked like a throne.

I felt a primordial presence — a fear almost spiritual in its essence was taking hold over me. I don’t know whether it was the gathering grey right above us or the massive cleared ground opening up absurdly to the dense forest that made a shiver run down my spine. I took a deep breath as I saw John, our guide, pushing a long bamboo pole to lift the uneven earth as he walked towards us. He wasn’t smiling. John made us aware that land upon which we stood were holy grounds where many sacrifices and rituals have been carried since centuries to keep the deity who protects the forest happy. “Labasa3 is our guardian, and this clearing outside of the forest where you are standing is known as Playground of the Gods, so you will do well to keep the customs of being respectful and take not even a single pebble outside of the forest grounds, lest you want to be cursed”. (Labasa is said to assume the form of a tiger or leopard to watch over the land.) I blinked and nodded as another shiver ran down my spine.

Inside the forest, tapestry of leaves and lattice of branches reach heavenwards to form a roof through which only a few golden beams touch the forest floor. Roots ancient than the history of our last few ancestors. Oh the wisdom they contain and the witness that they are of constantly turning time! I walked inside dazed with awe looking at the dry seasonal wintering phase that the trees were in. John was freewheeling his Khasi knowledge. Among many things, he told us that when trees fall and start to get consumed back into the forest they are never moved. Even if the path is obstructed by the fallen giant, people simply find a way to walk around them. He also told us that it is not customary for a Khasi to acquire or possess land in the modern sense of the word. When couples get married, land is gifted to them by the village chief or a matriarch, so that they can build a family. Land is a shared property amongst the clan, and people continue to live in good faith with each other — a centuries-old tradition. There is no concept of private property and hence ownership or inheritance. They are simply here as guardians of the land, and so will be their children after them. What is ownership to those who have the privilege of being citizens of an untaxed and clean ecosystem?

We headed back in late afternoon, which seamlessly transformed into evening within a few miles. A pale-grey mist hung around us the whole time. The cold chastised us with its rapid lashes on our bare faces. The same feeling of foreboding, of being chased made me nauseous. As if a giant metaphorical tiger trailed us unseen, as we raced against the sunset. Let me say this, and in recognition and reverence for the powers that reside in deep time — Meghalaya roads are only safe for its natives at night, because they know how to negotiate with their Gods.

Meghalaya’s forests with their deep spiritual mysticism are far removed from the urban Shillong landscapes. Mawphlang spoke to me — in its sheer scale it bared my instincts and challenged my skepticism. The lore and enigma of this living forest awakened in me an ancient fear which my body could only translate as goosebumps and uneasiness. It affirms to me that storytelling and myth making has been so far the best nature conservation tools. Making a place, a river, a forest, a mountain sacred is to broker peace with the forces that are inexplicable in their exhaustive scale. Torrid droughts, cyclones, earthquakes, wildfires, landslides, tsunamis — every unpredictable climate event that displaces human lives, have been dealt with by the people of that region in myths and stories; religions and rituals. Nature in its mythical form has dominated the realm of human imagination and evoke religious reverence for centuries. In that sense, nature has been the architecture of religion. But the true test of it is to inspire human ethics, which needs to be as transformational and timeless as the forest substrate itself — living and breathing even beneath a dried foliage.

Share

Threshold of Another World

After a couple of days of reliving the whole memory of having visited Mawphlang and writing this essay, I had a strange dream. I was with my Khasi friends, some of them whom I never met in real life, in what resembled like a dark fantasy version of Shillong. We were supposed to pick everyone and drive to the borders. There seems to be a certain confrontation waiting for us there, the nature of which was obscured by dream logic. We were driving along those treacherously carved, typical one-sided cliff roads and a forest of tall dark pines on the other side arrested us in its perpetual gaze. When we arrived at the locality of the last pickup point for one our friends, we moved out of the car to take in the fresh air as we waited for her. Two men who were jittery and nervous throughout the trip moved a little further down the dirt path leading into the pines. When I followed them, I saw something so otherworldly, thinking of which is still giving me chills as I write this.

The men were facing each other — one facing towards me, and the other facing the first guy. A cold breeze swept through the pines, and fog descended upon us like a smoke screen. Their face slowly started to change— widening and darkening in uncanny proportions. Something so non-human about those wide-dilated eyes and thickened bush-like brows sticking out of the side of their faces. Their giant heads were square in shape and muscular, and when they spoke, a deep thunderous growl ricocheted through the empty pines. Even in their unsettling form, there was nothing malicious or threatening about this scene of possession. They spoke to one another, invoking each other’s names from their past lives and previous acts of courage and wisdom. I have recreated the scene below from memory of that dream, only the names are borrowed.

The living forest floor was abuzz a low distorted hum. The two men stood close to one another, silhouetted by the remnant light filtering through the darkening pines. The air tightened, as if it has been drawn inwards. They spoke in hushed growl like the elemental manifesting through bodies

“Lurshai.
Do not bend now.”

The first man did not answer.

The second continued, voice rougher now, layered with another voice beneath it:

“You have forgotten yourself again.”

A long silence.

“Who carried your mother through the floodwater when the bridge broke?”

The first man shut his eyes.

“Who stood at Mawbynna when the others fled the hill fires?”

His breathing steadied slightly.

“You are the grandson of Rishot.
The river-watchers know your name.
The dead remember your acts of courage.”

The first man suddenly looked up, now his face seemed to ease into remembrance.

He spoke slowly, as though remembering words older than himself:

“And you—Tariang, son of Mei Rynjah—who opened the path of forest to feed during the great famine—Don’t forget your wisdom now.”

The other man gave a sharp nod.

“I remember.”

Neither of them looked at me standing nearby. It was as if they had stepped somewhere else entirely.

Then the first man placed his hand against his own chest and said, almost like an invocation:

“I am not only this body.
I am the name I was given.
I am the deeds I did not abandon.”

And the other answered:

“Then stand beside me now.”

I felt as if I was witnessing a ritual without a name. If I had to name it, then I would call it a ritual of resistance. My fear was totally eclipsed by awe when I woke up. Resistance—that word has its locution suspended at the threshold of this otherworld where dreams and memory walk into each other’s realms. Resistance arises from something so subtle, so unspecific that we call it intuition, but resistance is so much more. It is the result of accumulated genetic learnings and quiet knowing when things are wrong. It is an activation of that part of the psyche that tells you that it remembers the threat, it knows the lie, it can read the air like bullet points. It is ancestors awakening and borrowing your inner voice to speak to you. To protect something that has always existed quietly from breaking.

Leave a comment

These protected forests are liminal sanctuaries to as much ancestral memory as they are to biodiversity. Khasi world, as I witnessed it for its inviolable borders, is a sacred circle of myth, memory, and matriarchy. Standing at its metaphorical doors has left me wondering about the threshold of my own ancestral inheritance. It has opened up to me a world more riddled with questions about land, legacy, and ancestral relationships to ecosystems. Memory long lost to time—ripped from the collective narrative and replaced by the more recent and painful ones of wars and migration. I wonder if my ancestors too, were beckoned by the rivers, the wetlands, the mangroves in their dreams. If they too had portals in forests through which they touched the numinous, where rituals were held daily to the psyche’s myriad archetypes. A place of surrender and healing, and a personal God to negotiate with.

I might never know all the answers, but the questions are breadcrumbs of hope that another way of life has existed quietly beneath the sedimentation of memory. I reached Meghalaya lost, bewildered, and breaking under the weight of my grief. Constantly haunted by the vapour-shaped dreams of my father. Stuck in the entrapments of responsibility and regret, my body was melting away in the liminal boundaries between dream and death. But Meghalaya’s vast ritualistic cleansing grounds, where Gods meander by day and play by night has shifted me dimensionally. By the time I left Shillong, something inside was falling into place. It felt like an erroneous compass being calibrated, a broken heart being held tight by the knowing that no matter how big a separation death, loss, and destruction — both personal and ecological—create between us and those that are taken away by time, their names, courage, love, and memory have a silent witness in nature and all its elemental forces. A witness that can never die.

Berkana is a non-stripe based reader-supported publication. Stripe does not enable independent creators from India. To encourage voices like mine that work from the margins, consider becoming my patron through Paypal.

PayPal

The crisis of the modern world is not a crisis of technology or politics or greenhouse gases. It is a spiritual war. What the Machine represents is our ultimate rebellion against nature: against reality itself. We have seen this rebellion before. Now our culture’s rejection of its spiritual core has opened us up to powers and principalities that we have no idea how to manage

― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

In the purple haze of doomerism, my spring keeps unfurling in its indifferent joy. Here sacred, there volatile. Now conjuncted to the carousel of everlasting deride that has gripped this decade in its fistful agony, then awakening to the timeless joy of eternal awareness. Swinging between the heat of summer announcing itself in the humid melancholy of gathering grey, and the cooling heralded by the early Kalbaisakhi (nor’westers) chastising the city veiled in carbon dust.

There is a grief deep and hidden, vapid and transparent, relentless and silent — all the same for which a vast container needs to be assigned. The collective demands despite hopeless frugalities of daily, despite the natural world and its rapid succession of events. What I am resisting most is despair, a gentle eased sense of letting go that threatens obsoletion of words if I let it. I am trying to read more — a shift naturally aided by my inclination to anything else but words. Another thing I find joy in resisting is the fast agile digital world. Books – there is where I rest my frail curiosities. It has, I have discovered lately, become difficult to relearn to focus. The fragmentation of attention has been taken too far. So I refused indulgence in the medium of fragmentation with vengeance — totally without reprisal.

It grieves me that things had to come along this winded weird way. As if the incessant news of death, scathe, and dominion was not enough, the new broadcast has all been about AI replacing the human capabilities (more like incapabilities — lightning speed outputs and tandems of probabilities in the fraction of cost, because the AI slave doesn’t feed a family, pay bills, and buy health insurance, or even rest) without government policies reassuring us otherwise. The digital work world is flooded with agentic AIs that can do almost anything that a person can do albeit faster and cheaper. What has been even more dehumanizing are the conversations around AGIs that will eventually make knowledge work completely unnecessary. This new threat to my survival (writer and designer), has warned me of the harmful simplicity of abundance which cannot be distributed for public good. The billionare’s relentless pursuit of profitability has run into terrains of wilful disregard for accountability.

Exposed to an endless debate of experience and exposure — my mind outgrows itself in every argument. I am forced to reconcile with the possibility that the state of human now is more synthesis than being. We are proudly becoming a byproduct of our own mirages than beings of consciousness, whose mysteries we still struggle to understand. We are now Homo Syntheticus rather than Homo Sapiens. An assembled species of fabricated neurosis, unfiltered influences, synthetic expectations, and borrowed identities — running a race in which the finish line promises absolute loss of being. Heartbreaking is the precipice of civilizational ascent from where a few powerful look down upon the rest and refuse us even the human privilege to err. And all this is being done at a detrimental speed causing fast deterioration of the natural world. Depleting water tables and polluting them at the cost that we are not yet ready to pay.

The capitalistic disregard for the essence of life (consciousness and nature), turn me inwards in a purgatorial rage. The shadow lines of which keep mentoring my attention for change. My prescient will is retracted to the tangibility. Imagination flooded by the visions of green, azure, brown — the texture of elemental grace of Earth that absolves our collective transgressions. The colors and textures of nature sit defiantly under the inner cupola of the holy that is part of the whole. To me, it seems easier to merge into the roots of life than to live in abstractions of the world, and also to create from the same place. ‘If only I could hold a piece of land without the imposition of human structure above it’, I thought to myself. In this comical economy, this little acquisition is out of question. Necessary commodities are touching astronomical price points, let alone pieces of land in an overpopulated country like mine.

These mindless maladies of machinations makes me wonder of the excessive nature of everything in our world that rots under the weight of its own expectations. Will the greed for novel experiences ever saturate, as we fast-track towards self-annihilation? Can we ever have enough? I am forlorn for an answer which, even before its arrival, has already inclined upon denial. However grim our circumstances might be, the way is always through. There is no avoiding the prevalence of the technologies as there is no denial of the wars splitting the axis of the world and collapsing our economy. Both are happening — these apocalyptic outcomes of imagined fear and fragmented human minds. As we navigate its waves, we will learn together how to breathe under its currents and survive its vile accusations against our human weakness.

To such inane human sorrow whose existence has now to be demonstrated by will, the antidote can only be found in imprints and details that are organic — the inner scapes of dreams and memories, the rumbling voice of dissent that doesn’t let accountability slip, the virtue of beauty by which divine designs are identifiable. These three pillars are prominent friction point for the algorithmic systems precisely because these realms do not comply to the human-made frameworks. The mystical structure of our own being is ultimately the only tool to dissect with, the grief of obscuration in an automated world.

Memory is reticent to the other-worldly aspect of time, through which some events negotiate without protocol. It will be two years since my father passed away, but when I close my eyes, I still see him glide through the gleaming tinge of our old house lamps, breaking silence with his lucid movements. Are those movements still living in some textured realms separated from now by the probabilistic branching of time or are they just images sparsing in my memory, I know not.

His lingering announces the progression of grief and love, memory and dreams, following each other’s lead — like blind baby shrews, treading through dangers of navigating the world, holding each other’s tails. Each time he appears at the corners of my liminal interiors, even as a ghost, a visceral familiarity holds me in comfort and knowing. A realm opens up which any vapid derivative of binary system cannot reduce into patterns.

This interlocution between memory and dream is what fascinates me and gives me hope in the prejunctional human intelligence to be far greater than just a bunch of accumulated skills. Our intelligence is both organic and chaotic in its evolution, congenital and learned, practised and experimental — all at the same time. These labyrinths of inner worlds are vast and quietly existential — a challenge to human tendency to label and categorize. Imitating something so mysterious is largely impossible, even if the registers of emotions and architecture of the intelligence can be replicated. But what animates these registers and flows through the architecture of life is not material in nature. To imitate organic intelligence, one needs to birth consciousness, which by definition cannot be birthed or destroyed, only dispersed like seeds through the forest of life by that which we neither understand nor control (a.k.a God, creator, anima, divine, universe).

Sapiens succeeded the last three hundred thousand years against the lash of every age’s biggest tribulations. There is something inadvertently human that stands in the face of all adversities and proclaims victory. What is it, I thought, that is ardent and ancient — something that we still carry in the epigenetics of both body and memory? The composition of dissent and resistance that rises through each molecule of consciousness, and spread like wildfire across our world. What is it that binds us in eternal relationship with the elements of our natural world? From the sea to the mountain, from the forest to the desert, through which God speaks to us when we are ready to yield. What is it that has driven Jesus to roam and fast in the desert and made Buddha sit motionless under the bodhi tree — for several weeks. The constant whirling meditation of action and inaction — that lives eternally through us — of which we are but mere vessels.

When the divinity permeates through the edifice of mundane, a new impulse is ushered. The impulse is akin to life itself. It moves in fractals, imbibed in the fabric of life — the impulse of creation, and the urge to create. So innate to everything animated by the life forces that we can hardly locate its origin. The antithesis to the megalomaniacal machinations, if there is one, is in the reclamation of this creative force. Manifesting in forms of art, language, music — in the most unconventional of ways — by decimating rules and limitations imposed by institutional formulas. By breaking laws of colors, strokes, grammar, rhythms — challenging the colonial conventions set in place to gatekeep that which humans have been doing since centuries. These are the very institutions that foster the underbelly of capitalism. It is by these very conventions of institutions, that corporations legitimize their freehold on human intelligence and demand production out of us like we are machines.

Reclamation of human agency and brilliance lies in rejecting the system and its rules. Because it is precisely on formulas and patterns that AI is trained. It is in the experimental avenues of creativity that we will find a break from the inundated synthetic information generation. It is in our endless pursuit of truth in myriad forms — with confidence, with faith, with love for the world we cohabit — that there is a slight chance that artistic dissent will shatter the glass towers of corporate greed. These monuments of deride built on suffering of you and I, on our sweat and blood, a loud jeer to our intelligence, to our work that brings us closer to the divine. They will come crumbling down if we refuse them our creative dexterity.

As I progress in my path of creating slow and deliberate work like a book built word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, I realise that the only threat to my intelligence is my own inability to laugh at the serious congeniality of AI. Beyond the falsehood of invincibility of this tech, intellectual freedom is quietly waiting in sheer dissent, in vitrified resilience, in anger transmuted into agency — sedimenting into a voice that is so singular and divergent that nothing about it can be generalized, formulized, or copied. It is in the essence of history and ancestry, in the genetic makeup and creative forces of the universe that unique footprints of resistance will emerge, and they take forms in the riveting tales of humanity narrated by you and I.

To persist in the apparently lonely but ultimately uniting folds of creative life, I insist that we go out of our ways to search for hope in the hopeless, joy in the joyless, aid in the aid-less. To steal spark from the stars of collective imagination, to dare breathe beneath oceans, to stagger away with our joints asunder into the respite of beauty and justice, to stir up imagined happiness in the foolish pursuit of holding lamp to the Sun. And do well to remember that through our connection to the natural world — in the language of ocean waves and torrents of winds, rooted-molten pastel of living forests and scorching duststorms of deserts, God is waiting to talk to us.

Berkana is a non-stripe based reader-supported publication. To encourage voices like mine that work from the margins, consider becoming my patron through Paypal.

PayPal

Read more

“Water is the consummate immigrant, trapped in transit, never able to settle.”

― Elif Shafak, There Are Rivers in the Sky

Read more

Read more

Read more

Over the last four years since I began Berkana, it has held space for many conversations and thoughts. I had no clear vision or niche in mind when I started writing because I never meant for Berkana to be about one specific thing. Yet it always leaned toward stories obscured by the tides of time.

There was a vague, self-effacing pressure I created for myself to swim through the ocean of voices I was narrating and find my own. In that way, Berkana has remained, and still is, a writer’s search for self and meaning in a world constantly overcompensating through personal achievement.

I think the point of writing is never being satisfied with knowing enough. The hunger for stories is existential in a writer and perhaps what makes a worthy one.

Read more

When I was a little girl, my parents would let me sleep on our sitting room sofa while a movie ran its course on our box television. My memory recollects those faint footsteps tiptoeing around the couch, and the dialogues streaming seemed like gibberish to my toddler senses. I remember the feeling of receding into a vast ocean of nothingness and the ghostly sweep that gently levitated me and placed me on my bed. My being was made with the lightness of a feather, or so it seemed in the hands of my guardian. It was my father who always carried me.

I wonder if the last moments of life felt the same to him—being held comfortably and carried gently into rest as his body released its earthly limitations, his senses levitating. I prefer not to talk about it often, but I was present in his last moments. He died right in my arms. I did not let him go. And after all this time, I still cannot. It is a childhood debt, ye…

Read more

I am writing this as we step into the festive celebration and worship of Shakti, the all-pervading and all-powerful feminine force of the cosmos. From within the womb of these active days that evoke the divine feminine, I urge you to resist every form of despair. It is only in the fierce presence of the rejuvenating creative energy that Shakti embodies, we can hope to find the balance to keep moving through this treacherous world.

Durga Durga! May you be protected.

Leave a comment

Read more

Namaste Friends,

I have been sitting here in the unfurling of stormy clouds passing over me, feeling caged in my concrete and glass tower. Caged—an unsuspecting word that postulates the sensation of isolation. But words are concepts of the experience rather than the experience itself. What I feel is beyond the subtle separation from the life around me. I feel deeply solitary and poised to observe—the long stretch of road with its busy passersby, the evening lights rising against the faint sapphire of dusk. In the distant roar of the purple fault lines, I dissolve into the distinct silence of my inner solitude. When I lean in, I hear nothing but a stillness that doesn’t respond—it only observes.

This year began with us moving to a new apartment. I quickly set about unpacking things and arranging them in order, while Ak got busy fixing the plumbing and electrical fittings. It took us quite some time before we found our new rhythms and r…

Read more

Namaste Readers,

It is needless to say that at heart I am a spokesperson for my country’s myriad beauty. I have confide in you, my love for its rustic old-world charm, every time I write here — the winding roads climbing the steep hills held in the eternal gaze of the majestic Himalayas in the north; the dusty roads narrowing through crowded little hamlets with coconut palms and banana groves, and the endless shores huddled between the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean along the southern peninsula; the stories of legendary battles to wade off intruders, and the folklores of Rajput castles still drifting over the great sand dunes of the Aravalli in the west; and my beloved Eastern Ghats — paddy fields and wetlands inhabited by hundreds of living…

Read more

Blue-grey horizons dominate the plains, plateaus, valleys, and hills alike as the subcontinent is rejoicing in summer’s loosened grip. I am relieved by the dispersal of hot grief of summer, for it held traumatic memories of the past year. In a happy addition to the party, the muse has decided to whisper again in hushed murmurs of rain-soaked earth and liminality of purple fault lines of thunderstruck monsoon skies. I am but a pellucid ghost to the events of my surroundings – a mere observer of the vastness of experiences, to the flow of the whole range of human emotions. I am but a collective of stories of all the ancestors now called by a name. In certain moments, I am not even there anymore, happily lost in the rhythmic happenings rather than staying fixated.

The dreams of dirt are hidden in my subconscious like hungry beasts, demanding my attention, now so long averted by the inner turmoils …

Read more

Namaste Friends,

As the screeching brightness of the day blazes through the subcontinent, the nights acquiesce to the quiet multitudes of early monsoon showers. I have been sleeping in intervals, my mind restlessly wandering from one vivid dream to another. I am in a season of life that pulls me relentlessly into activity, only to leave me hollow. I bemoan the dreariness of constant happening, yet there is a sense of an obsidian-sharp awakening in this clench of unease. I crave solitude in its inspir…

Read more

I write this in the shadow of renewed conflict between India and Pakistan, where innocent lives have been lost, including Indian tourists in Pahalgam. My heart aches for the people of Jammu and Kashmir, and I condemn all acts of terror that shatter peace. As this essay takes shape, may it carry an intention for peace—for only in such intention can peace prevail.

Read more

Namaste friends,

A lifetime ago, when I lived in Dehradun, I would gaze at the distant beauty of the Himalayan foothills clustering together in the misty horizons of the Garhwal valley and wonder about the future—my own and the world’s. I dreamt of all the places I would see,…

Read more

Namaste Friends,

The subcontinent is awakening from its short winter nap, and spring is on the cusp of bloom. Winter, like a visiting guest, is ready to leave this place in a vapid spur, and I am caught up in a melancholic daze at its withdrawal. I spent the whole winter skinny-dipping in nostalgia and worried anticipation. It was more difficult than in years prior because my mother was unwell and mostly alone—at an age when she deserved none of it.

I have been so worried and split between caregiving and working that I hardly noticed as winter passed by. And now, as it stands at the door, waving back at me, I cannot help but cry at the passage of time. It is this irrevocable loss of the limited treasure of time that awake…

Read more

I received an overwhelming number of responses to the first part of this series, a beckoning of belonging, pouring in from all over the world. I am deeply grateful to you for showing me that I am not alone in seeking an alternate way to exist in harmony with the wild feminine energy that thrives within the untamed beauty of the earth's wilderness.

Read more

We carry witchcraft in our bones
whilst magic still sings
inside our heads.

When the witch hunters
imprisoned our ancestors
when they tried to burn the magic away.

Someone should have
warned them
that magic cannot be tamed.

Because you cannot burn away
what has always
been aflame.

― Nikita Gill

Namaste Friends,

Across the world, a quiet storm is brewing, one that carries with it the weight of history and the echoes of age-old fear. Women's rights, hard-won through centuries of struggle, are shrinking back into the shadows. From the violent erasure of reproductive autonomy in many parts of the United States to the suffocating silence imposed on girls barred from education in Afghanistan, the patterns of control and suppression are becoming disturbingly clear. In Iran, women who dare to raise their voices for freedom are met with unrelenting brutality. In the Global South, traditions wrapped in violence—child marriage, genital mutilation—persist like ghosts of another time, refusing to let go of th…

Read more

"These days, there are angry ghosts all around us. Dead from wars, sickness, starvation, and nobody cares. So you say you're under a curse. So what. So's the whole damn world."
— Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke

Namaste Friends,

We launched ourselves into a world of uncertainty the moment in history we decided it was wise to let an elected few control the global fate. I admit that in times like ours, when our collective anticipatory grief for the world yet to come has taken desperate turns, we humans have often found some solidity in faith. Whether that faith is steeped in religious, political, or sectarian ideologies is of small consequence. Yet the seed of our faith has always manifested in ways far beyond our individual influence.

Take, for example, the juxtapositions of the medieval plague and w…

Read more