Namaste Friends,

I wrote this essay while surrendering my body as a vessel for listening, starving my attention of the noise that fragmented it, and tuning myself to the whispers of the forests. My understanding came as much from research as it did from deep listening. My intention is to listen, relate, and compassionately bridge the gulf between lost ecological wisdom and us. I hope the insights arrive on their own, without force and pretense. This essay is a long and slow unravelling, so I suggest that you bookmark it, and sit down with it when you are at leisure.

Despite the deeply ungratifying power structures of our modern world, we still live and function from within them. No matter how decoupled we think we have designed our lives to be, the nature of interconnectedness pushes mundane systemic structures to percolate through all of our lives. Some part of our existence is always inadvertently in dissonance because of global phenomenon like catastrophic environmental collapse, wars, genocide, ecocide — destruction of both human and more-than-human world. Under such circumstances, those of us who want to live at the intersection of ethics and equity need to hasten towards an opening that can envision an alternative future.

There is an urgency with which we need to challenge the modern economic and social models created at the expense of both marginalised human and more-than-human world. But the grammar we use to do that cannot be borrowed from the archive developed by oppressive systems. Therefore we need to discover new grammar and modus operandi to deconstruct and reconstruct — perhaps through imaginative and experiential avenues, both in theory and practice — the layers of social structure that root the material back to its mystical depth. The libraries of knowledge we are searching for already pre-exist in indigenous cosmologies. The Khasi matrilineal tradition has entrenched within its roots wisdom traditions that can perhaps lead us back to the joy of relating to the planet beyond seeing it as a resource mine.

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Who Prays and Who Listens

I remember my childhood being pruned and kempt by stories. All kinds of stories. Mostly those of epics and myths, ghosts and spirits, dark dangerous creatures wandering through the wet plains and forests. The keepers of these stories have always been a long line of matriarchs. Women who knew the sound of words and rhythms of earth like the back of their hands. Women who sang the songs of changing moon cycles. My aunt1 is the most immediate surviving matriarch of our line. Although my family is not matrilineal in the conventional sense, it is matri-hierarchal in order and precedence. The most important and immediate elders of the family are all women, and without their counsel no stone is ever moved.

When it comes to generational stories, some have a deeper impact than others. On our trip to Mayapur last summer, my aunt recounted one such story about my grandmother and her mysterious powers to heal a disease ravaging her children. To you, dear reader, who is scientifically tempered and sanctified by modern rationality, my grandmother’s story might seem to be of superstitious propensities. It seemed the same to me when I inherited these stories. However, my recent pilgrimage into wilderness and its spiritually invoking presence has forced me to re-evaluate the relationship my ancestors shared with it.

It was during an unusual summer in the late 1960s, a mysterious illness was ravaging my grandmother’s children. My uncles and aunties were suffering with fever for several days. Eventually their calves seemed to be bending, protruding away from their bodies at mysterious angles and curves. Doctors couldn’t diagnose the exact reason for their malaise. My grandmother spent several sleepless nights nursing her children and lighting midnight prayer lamps to her personal deity. Riddled in sorrow and tears of anguish, she traversed into those nightmarish scapes of suffering. My mother was her youngest, and was the only one who was spared from the malaise.

One night, on the edge of surrender, she had a vision. No-one in the family knows any specific details of this vision. From the bits that are still in the colloquial of my family, the story goes that a goddess — possibly a wild forest entity — appeared in her dream and gave her a beej mantra2 and the identity of an herb found in certain wetland ecosystems that would save the lives of her children and many others living in that area. She was instructed to never reveal the name of the herb. She had to first hunt for the herb by herself in the wild, invoke its power by reciting the beej mantra, and then hide it in a maduli3 and tie it around the waist or neck of the children. Needly to say that the cure was effective and not only did it heal but prevented the disease from finding new hosts. Later, my grandmother gave the cure to many desperate mothers whose children were suffering from similar symptoms, when they chanced upon her mystical abilities.

The forest as the highest expression of the earth’s fertility and productivity is symbolised in yet another form as the Earth Mother, as Vana Durga, or the Tree Goddess

Writes ecofeminist Vandana Shiva, echoing the ancient wisdom of past civilizations that the inherent nature of forests is maternal—a realm protected by the presence of nurturing feminine spirits. This understanding then directly informs the lived experiences of my ancestors. My grandmother’s dream vision story stands as a testimony to such presence. This story strengthened my position of regarding the forest as a feminine force and her wisdom carriers as daughters — women who can hear her whispers and move with her cycles.

The Roots That Move With Time

For a long time now I have been haunted by a spectre of doubt — more of an emergence than a prominent philosophy, but adamant nonetheless. Is the ecological layer of the forest deeply embedded in its mythic layer? It is my understanding that a forest’s most fundamental composition is its mythic layer, in addition to its complex biomass. At the intersection of survival and spiritual growth is a forest’s profound impact on human life. It provides, teaches, and humbles increasingly with every encounter.

For humans of eras preceding modern science — dream manifestations and states of alternate consciousness, usually induced by entheogens, were conduits to commune with God. We know that waking life experiences and memory have a lot to do with our dreams. I suspect the mythical layer of the forest unravelled itself inside the psyche of the earliest Khasi elders. Since they spent significant time inside forests — foraging, collecting, hunting, cultivating — their subconscious got mired with the wilderness. Boles and branches, roots and rot, shadows and shade emerged in dream realms as manifestations of gods and goddesses, spirits of ancestors, and the malevolence of misguided souls. The forest speaks to the Khasis in the howl of breeze through the canopies of evergreen Oaks, in the changing flow of streams with the rhythms of monsoon. They treat nature’s elements and inhabitants as guides. So when a herd of wild boars does not touch a shrub, the Khasis banish it too; when the elephant defers its daily path, the Khasis follow in their footsteps; and when the hornbills and robins do not nest in a tree, the Khasis too mark it as off-limits. It is in relationship with nature that the Khasis find their wisdom to move in harmony and live in equanimity.

It is remarkable that even when this ongoing relationship to nature is foundational to all indigenous cultures, the world at large and its predominant skepticism has successfully buried the wisdom of relational existence under the debris of extractive wealth. In the wide repertoire of Khasi myths, the forewarning of modern disconnection has also been pre-recorded. There is a Khasi myth that addresses one particular selfish act committed by human beings against nature that severed them from divine connection — the act of cutting the divine Diengiei tree.

Interestingly, each oral recollection of the fall of Diengiei is recalled in different connotations amongst different clans. Largely, Diengiei was believed to be a colossal tree that once stood at the navel of the earth. Its branches and canopy were so vast that it rose from the human realm up into the heavens. It functioned as a living axis, a bridge between U Blei (the Divine) and the human world. Through this tree, beings could move between planes. Some versions of the myth tell that human beings began to neglect their sacred responsibilities or forget the ka niam (moral law). The bond between heaven and earth weakened. Diengiei was eventually cut down — in some versions by divine will, and in others as a consequence of human failing. When the tree fell, the pathway between realms closed.

One thing that is clear from every version of this myth is that the Khasi revere trees as living mediators to the cosmic realm, and that the beginning of disconnection points directly in the direction of human interference with the mythical realm of the forest. Simply put, when people acted in self-interest towards forests, it stopped being a conduit to the divine.

Keepers of Wombs and Woods

Long jait na ka kynthei
From the woman sprang the clan.

It is in this ideology that the matrilineal Khasi ethos is rooted.
“Descent line in a Khasi family is reckoned only from the mother’s clan or ‘kur’, as a result of which the children belong to the descent group of the mother. Therefore, it is customary for them to speak of a family of brothers and sisters who are great-grandchildren of one great-grandmother, and identify themselves as ‘shikpoh’, which literally means ‘one womb’ — that is, the issue of one womb,” explains Rekha M. Shangpliang.4

Like Khasi ancestry, its forestry and agriculture are also matrilineal in aspects of knowledge transfer. Knowledge-keeping in the pre-colonial forestry era, before the advent of what Vandana Shiva calls the “masculine science of forestry,” has been oral. Khasi women, as we now know, have been keepers of oral myths and a repertoire of lore that would teach generations to come about the visceral forces of nature and how to coexist with them. They also pass down practical skills orally, such as the craft of foraging, pollarding, and collecting forest produce for survival in case of crop failures. The forest-first approach to life has made them creative in their approach to solving food crises within their communities.

Mycelial Matrilineality (Experimental Sociology)

A few weeks ago, in another essay in the Khasi anthology, and I began discussing an interview about mycologist Merlin Sheldrake and his fascinating understanding of consciousness through a deeper study of how mycelium creates pathways of communication in the forest substrate. Thanks to Jonathan’s stimulating presence5, I could synthesise a theory by superimposing Sheldrake’s study of mycelial nature onto the matrilineal world of the Khasi.

The structural ecology of the Khasis resonates with that of mycelium intelligence. It is not unusual for people to adapt the blueprints of nature, almost subconsciously, within their world. However, what is resounding and unique about the Khasi way of doing it is the perfect mirroring of the mycelium’s symbiotic relationship — the “wood wide web,” as some scientists call it.

The relationship that mycelium has with the forest is reciprocal in nature. Sugars move from trees to fungus, and in turn the fungus provides trees with minerals and water. Similarly, the Khasis understand that the forest is a relational field. They thrive in reciprocal relationship by both harnessing and conserving the wild so that it remains a permanent abode of abundance and refuge. Law Kyntang (sacred groves) and other reserved forested land cover 76% of the landed area of Meghalaya — a state abundant in gorges, waterfalls, and lakes — making it a significant amount of land prohibited from human encroachment. Nature has spoken; she has reclaimed her rights in these parts.

What does any of this have to do with the matrilineal worldview, you may ask? Picture those early women then, as resource managers and collectors of NTFPs (Non-Timber Forest Products) like mushrooms and other wild tubers since time immemorial. Over time, these women studied those wild sources of nutrition with observational curiosity — often dismissed by the colonial vernacular of forestry, as ‘empirical without methodology’. They must have signposted dead and decaying giant conifers along their foraging paths and waited to learn that decimated nutrients from the old giant’s body became the mushroom emergence hotspots. During the same season, new sprouts would emerge across the forest, indicating that mycelium not only exchanges but also distributes throughout the forest floor. They would have, by instinct, understood that mycelium is one body, even if it appears as different nodes shooting up here and there.

If we allow ourselves some imaginative latitude, this theory doesn’t seem so far-fetched. We can agree that those curious mushroom hunters, with their keen observations and recording of regular occurrences, would have developed subconscious models of mycelial intelligence. In a way, the mushrooms speak to them — an interspecies parlance unique to their surroundings and the necessities that emerged out of it. I am convinced that women and mushrooms protected and co-inhabited the forest realms together. It is no wonder then that indigenous women were spearheading various conservation efforts across India6 some of which I will explore more deeply in future essays.

The matrilineal Khasi structure, even if it appears to be dominated by women, is not so. Power is distributed among various nodes across the family. Even the youngest members of the family claim authority, as the youngest daughter is often the successor. In Khasi family models, small does not equate to feeble. Not only that, the Khasi place equal emphasis on the wisdom of male elders because they play essential roles in the wellbeing of the community.

Forests — Where Mystery, Ancestry, and Nurture Coexist

It is only in how people visualise their relationship with the world that their actions towards it are shaped. A Khasi sees the forest as kin, an abode of gods, a giving mother. So it is only natural that they have a deeper relationship with the shifts of its ecological pulse. The wind speaks to them in the voices of their ancestors. Water is their immediate kin, since the wettest regions of the planet lie within their territorial folds. These elements inform their actions, so they naturally do not violate nature’s warnings against over-consumption.

The sustenance economy of mixed cropping, nurturing of forest gardens, shifting cultivation, and wild fishing — integrated deeply into the Khasi way of life — is a direct result of their reverence for and understanding of their biodiversity, learned through generations of oral lore and knowledge sharing. Their footprint on their ecosystem is non-extractive in nature.

As the structural corruption of the modern world threatens complete collapse, we are out with a candle, looking for ways that do not concentrate power. But the question remains — how do we collaborate and find balance in a system whose centre is so fractured that it does not hold anymore? The answer may not be easy or direct, but it lies in a meaningful intersection between decentralised governance and the ethical mapping of power equity. It is here that we can look to Khasi cosmologies and eco-wisdom for reflection. It is in the decentralised networks of wisdom systems responsible for the equitable distribution of resources, and the absence of power struggle within the feminine Khasi ecology, that makes them one of the most resilient cultures in the world.

The ancient substrate of Khasi forests is rich in both mythical wisdom and networks of interdependence. The Khasi collective consciousness is as alive as the Khasi forests. Knowledge belongs to the commons and flows through the hyphae of mycelial matrilineality. Even if the forest refuses to speak to us as it does to a Khasi, we must still seek it. We must tune our hearts to its mythical spirit. Because my grandmother’s story tells me that the forest remembers and responds. Beneath that mythical foliage, the forest still hides its cure, and appears in visions and dreams, to those who know how to bow in love and surrender.

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Chapter - 1
Chapter - 2
Chapter - 3
Adjacent Essay

Namaste Friends,

So many of you are new here, and I want to warmly welcome you to Berkana as we are now in 2026. If you wish to understand my work more fully, I invite you to spend time with the archive. I am not a writer who fits neatly into a single niche, and my work resists easy categorisation. For this reason, I remain deeply grateful to readers who are willing to listen to a voice that is neither prominent nor mainstream. My work tends to linger within the layered understructures of society, with processes that take time to shift and re-form, like roots working quietly beneath the soil.

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The debauchery of the world as we know it is such that when the façade of performance finally falls away, it is often the most innocent among us who are left to speak, with an urgency that also asks much of its listeners. Those who obstruct the possibility of fairness, rhetorically and materially, will never be the ones to ask the necessary questions of systemic injustice. This essay was originally meant to be the closing paragraph of the second piece in my Meghalaya series. But as I began threading its nuances, it became evident that to confine it to a single paragraph would be an act of erasure in itself. I therefore set out to write this essay as an adjacent, necessary continuation of the series.

As it goes with recorded and popular history, the interest of the masses often resides in the shallow end of the ethnographic map that reads neatly along a chronological line, consumed largely as entertainment or curiosity. I am not suggesting there is something inherently evil about history as entertainment, however chained or reduced it may be in its Enlightenment-era costumes. But for those of us who honour lived experience and ancestral memory, history must be more than a parade of pretentious facts. And for those simply fatigued by the oversaturated literary markets of late-stage capitalism, history must serve a purpose beyond aesthetic consumption.

In its deepest service, history is a tool of forewarning, a means of interrupting futures that threaten to repeat themselves when the past is treated as final. The past is not inert; it is a ghost, a ghoul, held within the edifice of time, carrying as much potential for life as anything in the present. History, therefore, is more than recorded fact. It is a cauldron of living memory, a mirror of what has been, and a mnemonic of desire—all consolidated into a single narrative force. It offers us insight into a repertoire of possible unfoldings when systems meet, even as dominant recordings of fact insist on narrating only one sanctioned path. Contrary to popular belief, history is cyclical. This is precisely the idea that public historians, those who find comfort in linear timelines without risking the ethical consequences of interrogation, remain deeply averse to. This essay stands as a challenge to their “actual facts and statistics” model of history.

Tending the Colonial Wounds

Much of the written history (by the British) of the Khasis has been redacted in order to erase the pre-recorded oral and ancestral folklores. This hardly comes as a surprise knowing there exists a whole field of study dedicated to decolonisation of academia1. But sometimes lived experiences are charged with emotional and cultural wounds that academia is inept to handle with the compassion it demands.

In the margins of these forgotten tales of the Khasi freedom struggle for Independence hides the story of Ka Phan Nonglait. She is a hero unlike any other since she fought the battle both spiritually and socially, ensuing the first Anglo-Khasi war. Her story has been understated in the colonial records, but since Khasi tradition has always relied on oral traditions of storytelling, the epic of her heroism soon caught on like fire on a haystack, and it now occupies a prominent place in Khasi folk memory. The first recorded history of the Nonglait clan is attributed to the Khasi writer T. Daniel Stone Lyngdoh Nonglait in his seminal work Ka Jait Nonglait: Ka Thymmei bad ki Dienjat.

Ka Phan Nonglait was born in 1799 in Nongrmai, into the matrilineal Khasi world as the youngest daughter who carried responsibility for land, lineage, and continuity of her family. When the East India Company started its devious plan of building a passage through Nongkhlaw to control the Meghalaya-Assam plains, the intrusion unsettled more than just the terrain. The reverence, ritual, and the lived relationship between people and nature that the Khasis celebrated were massively disrupted by this colonial activity. British occupation brought everyday humiliations that travelled quickly through villages, and nature’s subjugation directly registered itself in women’s bodies. Abduction and rape of women and girls were of daily occurrence, and most of those cases went unrecorded. Ka Phan Nonglait’s molestation in 1829 crystallised what many already sensed: colonial presence was inseparable from violence. She transmuted the grief of bodily violation into challenging the power structures and status quo of her time. She allied with the local women and mobilised a movement, feeding popular resistance that strengthened the resolve of leaders like Tirot Sing.

Disguised as a forager, she approached resting British soldiers, shared spiked liquor, waited for their vigilance to dissolve, and disarmed them, casting their weapons into the gorge below before signalling nearby Khasi warriors to arrest them. The act reflected a resistance shaped by patience and eco-wisdom rather than mathematical precision or military force. She lived beyond the war’s fiercest years and died in 1850, leaving little trace in colonial records. Khasi memory holds her in transparent reverence near one of the waterfalls that bears her name. Through all these centuries, what endured reflects the relevance of eco-consciousness of the Khasis. Ka Phan Nonglait is bigger than the body that she inhabited. Her courage resonates through the gorges and valleys and is now embodied by the West Khasi Hills’ landscape itself. Her imprint on land and memory reminds us that resistance is a luminous and quiet process moving at the pace of forests rather than empires, and lasts twice as long.

Nature as a Portal to Memory and a Realm of Defiance to Religion

It was by the abruptness of luck on the second day of our one-week stay in Shillong that we discovered the experimental botanical garden in the province of Umiam. It was slightly further from the heart of the city, and we reached there slightly fatigued after wandering through the Don Bosco Museum’s archives that reeked of missionary propaganda. The exhalation of a fern nursery in the garden was indeed a safe place to reflect, away from the church masquerading as a museum. Trees have an inherent relationship with place and its memory, and hence are a better vessel and interpreter of history. I wanted to learn from the Earth, her story.

Although not open to outsiders, the day we arrived two botanists were studying inside the campus nurseries while making meticulous notes of their observations of the shape, texture, and condition of the leaves. The fern nursery sits at the heart of the centre, which aims at reviving some Cyatheaceae species that have been around since the Jurassic Period and have been going extinct due to modernisation. Suspecting that our unannounced arrival must have annoyed them, AK quickly resorted to his industrious explanation of my writing projects and interest in learning about nature. Curiously, they were not the least bit inconvenienced by us. They, rather enthusiastically, agreed to give us a tour.

The scholars went into great detail while walking us through the nurseries, bamboo groves, unkempt overgrowth of gigantic ferns, and narrow ravines with streams seamlessly flowing through them. For some reason unbeknownst to me, I listened to the scholars disembodied. I was, as if, by a stir of presence, pulled into ruminating about the witnesses that nature becomes in suffering of other beings. While learning about the medicinal nature of the flora in the garden, my awareness kept launching itself into bigger orbits of existence. I wondered about the stories, intimate ones, painful ones, and the need for them to belong in the commons, like the medicinal plants, so that they can create a universal access to acceptance and healing.

Exhuming the Graves of Memories

I had known Ophelia for some years before I interviewed her. When I requested to interview her on her Khasi roots, she graciously agreed. She appeared on the video call as she has always been — bright-eyed with her booming uninhibited belly laughter. Ophelia has a powerful voice and a pair of deep-set, fierce black eyes that commanded attention in every room she entered. She is, as Dr. Maya Angelou puts it, a phenomenal woman. She is an artist of tremendous calibre, but she held a day job, like most of us who have bills to pay. She met me halfway in the conversation, reeling in contempt for the extractive nature of the corporate world. She belonged to the legendary Khynriam Kur or clan2, as she announced with an air of unrehearsed elegance. I somehow hid my adoration for her disarming grace and intelligence, lest she get distracted by flattery.

I began by conversing nonchalantly, “Tell me about things that you are proud of in Khasi traditions and others that you are not.” She reflected for two minutes before saying, “Well Swarna, I can tell you a few things I am proud of, and a ton of things I am not. But only if you are ready to hear it.” I knew then the conversation was going in a direction that would challenge both my objective admiration and high regard for the Khasi society. But I was prepared for the truth, so I insisted that she continue.

She began by stating the importance of a strong communal sense of belonging and a safe space to grieve within the Khasi value system. She, with obvious pragmatism, declared the matrilineal system as the only fair system of tracing lineage, given that the mother carries the child in her aching and changing body for nine laboriously long months. As per Ophelia, bodies are the vessel to connect with land and family — two of the most important facets of Khasi life — so bodies are of utmost significance to societal life.

Both birth and death, in all their complexities, are shared equally within the family and the clan. Pregnancy, Ophelia emphasizes, is never treated as an individual burden. The mother-to-be is always well cared for and highly regarded by the community. Birth is a threshold and hence a special occasion. She attested to similar reverence for death in her society. When someone dies, the body is not rushed away to be buried. Since Meghalaya has difficult terrain and in the past people used to arrive on foot, the elders have decidedly made it a tradition to keep the body for three days so that people can arrive at their pace, sit together, and grieve without haste. Death, she said, has a way of reuniting families who have otherwise drifted apart.

When the topic of matrilineality arose, she handled it with boredom that can only be fostered by familiarity. Everything that seems so empowering to us, for Ophelia, was just how things were. The youngest daughter becomes the anchor of the household. Property passes through her. The man who marries the youngest daughter goes to live in his wife’s home, and children carry their mother’s name.

I floated around it slightly before steering the conversation a little towards her personal experiences. Here is where the narrative thickens further. Suddenly her eyes darkened, almost in grief, and the air stiffened within the digital space between us. I told her it is okay not to share if she does not wish to. But she took a deep breath and insisted that she should go on since it was important to her to tell it right. She leaned back slightly in her armchair and smiled that illuminating smile of hers before going into painful details of her past.

Ophelia, like several other Khasis, was born in a Christian household. The shift from animistic to Christian faith happened around the arrival of missionaries during the colonial administration. Her mother, who is a staunch and orthodox Christian, had probably adopted the new faith perhaps because one of their ancestresses was convinced to leap into it to find a sense of belonging within a larger organized religion. This choice would not have been a complete disaster had Ophelia not been a fiercely independent person and had the church not been the sole reason she now is less fond of her hometown.

Although she carries deep admiration for her mother, Ophelia bluntly stated her qualms with her mother’s orthodoxy. Ophelia’s matrilineal Khasi roots, which reveres the feminine, are in direct clash with the controlling ways of the church. At some point, she was sexually violated, which left her with deep psychological abandonment. When she chose to put her faith in the priest by confessing about this, he betrayed her by raking her personal life in public circles. The treachery made her vulnerable within her close-knit community. In time, rumour spread of her pregnancy, and she was eventually met with many painful judgments. The whole experience made her break truce with religion, and she hardened herself in retaliation. Although when I look at Ophelia, I can never imagine the word broken, I knew in my heart that some part of her still wants the story to be told and heard in the right way, so its haunting might cease once and for all.

The consistent lack of kindness for female agency reflected within conservative Christian values is deeply in disagreement with the women-first, mother-first Khasi matrilineality. These two traditions do not agree on the degree of liberation that a woman deserves. It creates psychological schisms in an individual’s memory, one who had to walk the tightrope of weirdly constrained definitions of freedom, where one is powerful enough to consult an entire army of ancestors and carry their legacy, and yet not free to do as they please with their own bodies.

Bodies and Land as Archives of Past

These anecdotes once more justify our conviction that colonial emphasis on wealth, power, and control had been the earliest foundation stone of madness that continues to engulf the world whole in its greedy flames. It is the very reason the world spirals into a perpetual state of brokenness and despair. It is going to take more than just a bunch of wellness programs, yoga retreats, and self-help books to stop the wheel from spinning in the wrong direction. What is required instead is truth, courage, and a willingness to confront systems that continue to thrive on erasure and control.

The stories of these two women, separated by nearly two centuries, speak to the same unbroken thread of feminine resistance. What strikes me most is the way memory itself becomes refusal to degradation. The wounds inflicted by colonialism and its religious offspring are not abstractions. They live in bodies and intergenerational memory like inheritance. But wounds are not the end of the story. Ka Phan Nonglait’s name is now etched into the land she defended. Ophelia continues to create, to laugh that booming laugh, and demand bigger spaces for her incredible spirit. They remind us that healing is possible, that resistance is generative, that memory is a form of power.

Now again, I find myself wandering the memory lanes of the fern nursery at the botanical garden. These stories demand revival like those ancient species fighting extinction. They ask us to tend them, to pass them on, to let them grow wild in the commons of our collective consciousness. They ask us to believe that even after the worst devastations, life returns. That obscurity of margins is often the place where truth and reclamation coexist. That we can learn every seed by its name, only if we can lend our ears to the language of emergence.

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Namaste Friends,

This is the first chapter of a three-part series about my travel through the conscious landscapes of Meghalaya, where the spirit of the forest-world still galvanizes in response to those who seek urgent answers to our contrived world. In this series, I am constantly spindling through the invisible threads that connect Khasi ecotheology, ecopolitical worldview, matrilineal indigenous philosophies, and the wild, ecstatic beauty and truth that I stumbled upon while visiting those terrains. This narrative is intentionally juxtaposed alongside the modern prisms of post-colonial and post-capitalistic ideologies. In this series, I am going to talk about Meghalaya on the premise of the ecological, spiritual, social, historical — all complexities sifted through my deeply personal lens.

I.

The historical and cultural wounds that the Khasis have survived in the past are manifold. Their representation has been ignored in the collective history of India. The Khasi traditional wisdom was hijacked by the colonial advent of Christianity. And while the Khasi chiefs remain to this day, the first rebels who fiercely revolted against colonial occupation1, the stories of their prowess and courage remain massively overshadowed by the rest of mainland’s freedom struggle history. I, who have known and loved people from this region, find myself in a unique position to offer my voice to their story while actively fighting the fear and prejudice that my part of the country carries toward these beautiful people. The ruptured capillaries of trust among us are a reflection of the postcolonial internalization of cultural wounds inflicted by our former colonizers.

The phantoms of their mistrust in indigenous wisdom still haunt our cultural pulse, as their language still shapes our world. The split and tumult are reflective of how colonialism limited nuanced understanding and prevented inter-regional ideologies from harmoniously prevailing among the people of a multicultural region. These patterns are still relevant in most former colonies of the world. They are vividly apparent in the communal unrest that led to the bloodiest partition in the history of this subcontinent. It is sad to observe what such colonial inception of communal and territorial mistrust has done to Palestine and Israel.

So I offer this series of essays as a prayer, a humble attempt to understand, and an eventual surrender to the mystical and intricate wisdom of Khasi ecotheology and worldview. This series is dedicated to my Shillong friends, who have warmly invited me into their worlds and shared with me a thousand fleeting joys and a big portion of their Khasi hearts.

It would be unfair to say that I knew Shillong for the first time when I visited it for the first time. Because sometimes places secretly assume a pair of legs and a thrumming heart and go looking for another home in another part of the world. Places are people en masse of all the footsteps their ancestors once tread. They are all the paths winding down history’s alleyways—further, longer, and darker. All their collective myths and traditions are wrapped into this one single individual we call a person. And then you find them—the people, and they take you to the places within them. So yes, I knew Shillong to some extent before I arrived there, in the form of friends who belonged to the Khasi-Garo community and acquaintances I had the fortune to know.

We could have flew to Shillong directly from Kolkata, but I insisted, due to some veiled ‘superstition’, as my husband likes to call it, that we fly to Guwahati2 instead and then take a cab through its picturesque wetlands into the rolling hills of Shillong. I lament the fast-turning hands of the clock and its refusal to slow down as we zoomed past the gorgeous wetlands.

The day was heavy with dark clouds gathering on the brink of bursting into showers. This is Assam, here when it rains, it pours. This land knows water like its second nature. As we crossed the Borsola Beel3, it stared right back at me. It’s stagnant green shrouded in floating hyacinths, looked almost provoked to climb through the edges of the highway and flow right under our car. It had such character that I was enraptured by its life. Sprawling fishing villages were raised around the beel as it ran through the plains and connected to one of the Brahmaputra’s tributaries. Little waterfront cottages ran across its length. The other side of the plains opened up to acres of farmland where river-fed vegetation, mainly paddy, grew abundantly. Life simbiotically proliferated in these magnificent wetlands—fishes kept the wetland free of waterborne insects, while their waste fed the ecosystem of hydrophytes. While drifting through these beautiful floodplains, I caught glimpses of storks and humans with their respective entrapments, waiting patiently for their next meal to find them.

One of the wonders of observing, even as a passerby, a new ecosystem is that the newfound sense of wonder can awaken a meaningful insight. The ingenious ways in which nature engineers itself within a particular ecosystem, and the human need to establish undulated order in response to nature’s relentless chaos, are a privilege to behold. It is one of the prime motivations for me to travel.

The Guwahati–Shillong highway is a story in itself. It is one of the most ecologically diverse transition corridors of the world. The highway cuts through the floodplains of Assam on the left and the rising escarpments of Meghalaya on the right. It lies on an ecotone (transition zone), almost like a liminal space between two worlds. This transitional horizon is a habitat for migratory birds like hornbills and waterfowls. The highway intersecting forests on both sides acts as a crossing corridor for macaques, hoolock gibbons, and Asian elephants. It is here that the two sects of agrarian communities unite. On the Assam side, wetland and fishing cultivation are the root of life, while on the Meghalaya side, Khasi and Jaintia tribes can be found practicing shifting cultivation, broom grass cultivation, and maintaining sacred groves. At the threshold of this ancient world, I found myself for the first time, gaping and awestruck as my existence intersected with it all.

II.

Meghalaya is one of the most beloved of the Seven Sisters States that make up the proud North-Eastern frontier of India. The name Meghalaya finds its roots in Sanskrit, drawn from megha, meaning “cloud,” and ālaya, meaning “abode.” Together, they evoke the image of a land cradled in mist and sky. Meghalaya, the Abode of Clouds.

Meghalaya is a biogeographic wonderland that forms a unique transitional landscape, where the Indian subcontinent meets the Indo-Malayan and Indo-Chinese realms, and where the Himalayan ranges brush against the edge of Peninsular India. From lush tropical rainforests in the foothills to alpine meadows and cold deserts, the biodiversity here is staggeringly rich. Meghalaya is also part of the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot, one of just four such hotspots in India and among 34 globally recognized for their ecological significance. With its remarkable species diversity and high levels of endemism, the state stands as a crucial sanctuary for conservation efforts and ecological reverence.

It is also home to Mawsynram, a village nestled in the East Khasi Hills, which holds the distinction of being the wettest place on Earth. This highland hamlet receives an astonishing average of nearly 11,900 millimetres (466.9 inches) of rainfall each year, earning it a place of awe on the global climate map.

The name of Meghalaya’s capital city, Shillong, is derived from Lei Shyllong—a revered deity believed to dwell on the Shillong Peak. Within Khasi cosmology4, Lei Shyllong is seen as a divine protector, watching over the land and its people, shielding them from natural disasters and outside harm. The Shillong Peak, considered the deity’s sacred abode, holds deep spiritual significance. Rituals and offerings are made there to honor Lei Shyllong, seeking his favor for the safety and prosperity of the community. This veneration reflects the Khasi people’s profound spiritual bond with their environment, where hills, forests, and peaks are seen as sacred entities imbued with life and presence.

This worldview reflects in both Khasi ecotheology and Meghalaya’s nature-centric politics. Meghalaya is one of the very few states in India with 70% of its land area under thick tropical forest cover. These forested lands are conserved by the indigenous people as they belong to their ancestry as sanctified lands and residences of Gods. There exist more than a hundred sacred groves in Meghalaya.

The creation myth of the Khasi heritage is similar to any other indigenous creation myth that tackles the lingering suspicion of the supernatural while grappling with nature’s beauty and horror. It is the same timeless commune between the interpersonal and the cosmic, the daily and the spiritual. The Khasi are one of the few last surviving matriarchies in the world. And like most matriarchies in the world, Khasi culture heavily relies on the wisdom of oral traditions. For the Khasis, spoken words invoke magic into history, lores, myths, legends, parables, and songs.

The creation myth goes as follows:

“In the beginning, there was the Word. The Word became energy. Energy became being. Time walked across the silence of an empty earth; Ramew, still and bare. Over eons, soil hardened into stone—Basa. From this sacred binary, earth and stone, life stirred.

The lifeless earth, aching for kinship, pleaded with the divine: Ka Meihukum, the Mother Decree, and U Thawkur, the Creator. Their union birthed sound, vibration that quickened the void. From this meeting of Ramew and Basa, five elemental children emerged: the sun (Ka Sngi), moon (U Bnai), air (Ka Lyer), water (Ka Um), and fire (Ka Ding). This great unfolding and the Pur (spread) and Bthei (burst), it formed the Pyrthei, the living world.

In time, the earth clothed herself in green. Plants grew, died, and decayed. From the rot, creatures crawled—worms, insects, and evolving beings, marking the sacred dance of life. All existence sprang from the generative force of duality—male and female, light and dark, matter and spirit.

To regulate this growing complexity, Mother Earth birthed two guardians: Pyrthat (Thunder), ruler of the skies, and Jumai (Earthquake), keeper of the depths. Together with the first five, they became the seven forces of life: five to nourish, two to balance.

Yet chaos lingered. So the divine called forth the Khadhynriew Trep Khadhynriew Skum—Sixteen Huts. From them, seven celestial human families descended through the golden bridge, Jingkieng Ksiar, and arrived at Sohpetbneng, the navel of heaven, to steward life on earth.

Thus began the sacred pact: a world held in balance, where every being was given a gift to survive, a song to sing in harmony with land, sky, and spirit.”

III.

As apparent from the creation myth, Khasi theology is an amalgamation of both polytheistic and animistic worldviews that reveres natural forces as rulers of life and destiny. “The Khasis view nature as something sacred and sublime which has an intrinsic value of its own, and it is also considered the most sanctified creation of God, hence everything that lives on it is also regarded as possessing an inherent value,” explains Khasi philosophy research scholar Banyllashisha Kharbuli. Since the inception of their ecocentric spiritual life, the Khasis have never seen nature as a docile bounty of resources.

For the Khasi people, nature is not an object apart from them but a living presence, the most sacred expression of the divine and the channel through which the divine speaks to humanity. Their worldview rests on this oneness, where God, human beings, and the natural world cannot be separated.

“Mei Ramew,” or Mother Earth, is their affectionate way of referring to nature as a characterized entity. She is seen as both a nurturer and a guide. This reverence shapes their stories, values, and ethics, where every human action is measured against the laws of nature. To the Khasis, nature is a giver of life and a moral witness, with the power to bless harmony or discipline transgression.

The Khasis have been forest-dwellers since time immemorial. The umbilical bond with nature runs strong and deep in the Khasi way of life, where forests are the cradle that protects human sustenance. Humans are then but stewards and guardians of this eternal gift for their future generations. The Khasis do not recognise the Western idea of human supremacy over nature as an ethical worldview.

In folklore, trees like U Diengiei, the giant tree, carry lessons of morality and spirit. Sacred Groves (Law Kyntang) are revered as the dwelling places of deities and ancestral spirits, safeguarded through ritual care and the guidance of priests (Lyngdoh).

The forest also sustains material culture. It provides bamboo and wood for crafting musical instruments, natural dyes for weaving, and resources for traditional weapons such as bows and arrows. In every stage of life, the forest is present: a bamboo splinter to cut the cord at birth, gourds of liquor exchanged at marriage, bamboo mats and biers at death.

Beyond culture and ritual, the forest feeds and heals. Tubers, fruits, mushrooms, and wild edibles, often named with the prefix Ja, are part of everyday sustenance. At the same time, generations have preserved deep knowledge of medicinal plants and herbs, making the forest both a kitchen and an apothecary.

IV.

The interlaced way of life pervades into a unique land revenue system that encourages communal sharing of land as the most efficient way of coexistence. Land in Khasi is called Ri. Hence, Ri Raid refers to land held collectively by a community and managed under its authority. Every member of the community has the right to occupy and use this land without paying revenue, whether the community consists of a single village or a cluster of villages. No individual has full ownership, nor can the land be inherited or transferred as private property. Whatever the land is used for, whether infrastructure or cultivation, the rights to use it are equally distributed among the members of the community.

The Khasi story is important because it interjects us on our path to ‘technological greatness’ and poses a unique question as we look into the face of a post-capitalistic world built on the pillars of extractivism and greed: Will it ever be enough? As we hurtle toward the greatest mass extinction since the Eocene and irreversible climate change, we need to answer back to the Khasi and innumerable other indigenous ways of life, whether we want to or not.

Having said that, Meghalaya has now, for several years, been under the tight grip of the eradication of traditional values and the political confluence of real estate and hospitality giants seeking to privatize their Mei Ramew for commercialized infrastructure. Needless to say, the fight Khasis are putting up to preserve their Ri Raid and Law Kyntang comes at an immense cost. At this crossing point of planetary-spiritual crisis, perhaps we should look at the Khasis, the last surviving vanguards of nature’s agency, to learn the courage to take a stance against the prevalent systems and dominant narratives of our times.

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 relaxed into them. The beginning of the monsoon brought a pair of adolescent starlings to my hearth. At the break of dawn, they perched on my cloth rack and cried with their beaks open, looking at the horizons above as if hoping to be fed by an invisible mother.

We belonged to two different worlds—the birds and I. They, inhabiting an eternal wild—wilful and boundlessly large; I, living inside a carefully curated but ultimately inverted dream of the collective human psyche. They, soaring through the piercing light of presence; I, relegated to the shadows of the mind. They carefully pruned their feathers to dry off the stormwater and side-eyed me—consciousness simultaneously beholding and beheld.

They call at times for my attention, but most often there is a sacred and shared silence between us. Silence — that portal, a rupture through which understanding travels without language.

They started to visit us often, almost regularly—picking a fight or two with Maya through the glass screen, like internet strangers bickering—and then leaving before noon. Our balcony became their perch, a resting place while they scavenged and sang, collected and splattered. Each day, I would find all kinds of unremarkable litter on my balcony—ranging from dry breadcrumbs to half-eaten potatoes, bamboo grass, and sometimes even hay and sticks. I was not sure if they were scouting for a place to build their nest, but they earnestly seemed to be searching for safety.

I mysteriously developed a persistent and prolonged migraine attack during those initial monsoon months. My days were filled with pressure and pain in my cranium, and my nights with vivid nightmares. My brain waves felt all meddled, and I started losing the sense of distinction between waking and dreaming. I lucidly blended into both without much protest. I retreated into silence for most of the day.

It was then that I started sensing a quiet stir, a faint movement of thoughts through my head—a ghostly, unmasked voice that murmured. Astounded, I sat with patience to discern its locus, but to no avail. The gossamer veil lifted so softly that the silence itself became the sound. It was in this dialect of the indiscernible that I found an instruction so clear, it seemed as if someone next to me had whispered it in my ear: Feed me. It rushed through my blood, a soundless message—a trans-species language that I tuned into.

We often deliberately forget that the mysteries of this universe lie in its shared experience with other beings, with life and frequency of all kinds. The magic of interspecies communication is as natural as the magic of trees growing toward the sky while drinking sunlight and minerals.

On receiving my instruction one warm morning, I prepared some soaked rice grains and offered them to the pair of starlings. They lapped it up with enthusiasm and chattered around all day long. One of their distant friend—a big, beautiful, spotless black myna—also visited and shared their spread.

Maya, like the diligent queen that she is, was distressed that her caretaker was probably exhausting the granary for a couple of miniature dinosaurs. She then reluctantly surrendered to their participatory joy, occasionally chirping and trilling to keep the birds from getting unruly. Tremendous emotions flowed seamlessly between the birds, the cat, and me, as we marvelled at our unlikely party.

I fed them for precisely two days, and then they suddenly disappeared. I told Ak that they were probably ancestors, here to settle some unfinished business with us. He zoned out for a while before muttering, “It was Papa and Vinnie.” We both smiled at that thought. The noise they had brought dissolved into silence. I glanced more often out at the balcony—the shadows chased the light along my laundry rack wall—but it no longer announced their arrival. They vanished without a feather’s trace in the wind, and so did my debilitating migraine.

Do I mean to suggest that my migraine was not a physiological condition but rather the psyche tuning into the whispers of the numen—like a radio catching a frequency long alienated by noise, like an ancient knowledge of a lost language? No, and yes. I mean to suggest it is both. Truths are not mutually exclusive. They live in realms beyond our constricted and polarized world of notions. And our brains are as much shadows as they are neurological miracles. Our bodies can respond to the subtle mystical shifts in profoundly physiological ways.

Sometimes malaise and madness are doorways—to a world beyond our fragmented sense of self, waiting to heal the parts of us we have unknowingly abandoned and exiled to the darkness of our inner realms.

Shadows are markers of presence in the kingdom of light. They broker a quiet peace between darkness and light. In darkness, they dissolve but remain ever present—invisible, yet persistently puppeteering our reactions to external triggers. They demand nothing but to be seen. Many versions of us live there—the insecure one, the angry one, the manic one, the depressed one, and all the other complex human parts that society insists we keep shut tightly in a dark box. But they are too heavy to live there without consuming us whole. So the box of shadow also becomes a box of opportunity. Each shadow contains within it a path of redemption from itself.

Meeting them in the dirty labyrinths and bloody alleyways of dreamscapes is nerve-wracking for me. But the strange gift is that, like every fear, they all disappear when I pay total attention without engaging with them. The light of presence is more powerful than a thousand shadows combined. Speaking strictly for myself, this is more than a woke theory.

Whenever I wake up with the remnants of a disturbing and confusing dream, I make it a point to re-enter the dream in my meditation intentionally—and subvert it, every single time. If I am stuck in a dreary place in the dream, I guide myself in meditation toward an exit. If I am confused or crying in the dream, I call upon my inner light to comfort me and guide me toward meaning. If I am running frantically from someone or something in my dream, I visualize myself as a mountain—steady and strong, ready to face all adversities.

My practice helps me process the unnamed weight of living.

The southern wind will soon depart, and the season of sound and light will slowly give way to the season of silence and darkness. From there will emerge beings obscured by the noise and activity of our hotter latitudes—the guardians of quietude. Jackals will return to run through the wild, wet plains, singing their fevered songs, and our dreams will quake to the mournful melodies of the Black-crowned Night Heron once again.1

I want to abide by the religion of forests. It is a wonder how every stone, every mycelial manifestation, speaks without a single syllable, and yet sustains a complex social life. I rely on the axis of power that birds wield as they spiral into the swelling storm and chase thunder with drenched wings. I lean into Maya’s wisdom, as she often retreats into quiet, dark corners to rest unhurried by the pace of the world.

I wait on the quietude of daybreak and nightfall, to whirl in the orbits of shadow and silence. To travel beyond the noise of the human-shaped prison that our society has become. To break truce with the self-importance of human existence. To be assured by the soft intimacy of the non-lingual world.

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 of my life. ‘What about me’, the Earth says, the mother of dirt and life. Yes life, the congenial twin of dirt — its life-long companion. Life — me, I am life. Visions awaken in wide vistas of untrimmed forests standing in front of my window. Gigantic green monsters of curiosity gazing towards infinity. After long meditation, immersed in its crude beauty, I almost always lose a sense of self. Am I looking at the forest, or is the forest looking at me?

Mother Earth invites me into her secret chambers of revelations. ‘Stay here’ she commands. She speaks in limited syllables. I crave these visions of magnificent green vistas and dreams of black dirt. They evoke in me a spiritual deliberation like no other — a primordial angst to yield after being touched by beauty. Yet I know, I am a being of flesh and blood — too corrupt, too exposed to the incredulities of humans, to receive a permanent welcome here in these dreams of dirt.

With such dreams arrive flashes of childhood, memories rooted in wonder of rot and decay invariably mixing with the dirt. I remember the toddler me in my father's garden of roses, marigold, and dahlia — getting stung by overgrown spiked vines and chased away by garden bugs. My wonder at the workings of the earthworm’s segmented body, on how it moves in and through the soil with such a delicate frame. It is only now that I understand, it takes colossal strength to move softly through this world. For a toddler, the broad-trunked 30-foot-tall jackfruit tree was a mammoth-like presence. I lay down on the cemented courtyard and watched it boldly stand against the afternoon sun, pouring in like liquid gold through its canopy. One day I became aware for the first time of its ability to be laden with gigantic fruits hanging from its trunk. The strength it takes to bear a life upended by the weight of ability. In my childlike gaze, the tree was God and so were the bugs — life seamlessly bearing witness to its own manifestations.

I saw my father work through mud and soil — his way to return love to this broken world. I remember dirt adamantly sitting underneath his fingernails, which he was never in a hurry to wash away. There is beauty in accepting the messy bits of life — to let it cling to our bodies — the sweat, the soil, the broken things fitting right into the mosaic of life. Papa gathered jackfruits in a jute bag, so heavy that he had to carry it on his back. Jackfruit cutting is ceremonial in the sense that it took a lot of patience. The jagged shell conceals a gluey and sticky underskin, which then reveals the sweet-fleshed seeds. A jackfruit is a universe of taste, smell, and texture waiting to be experienced. My father would sit on the floor with his hands dipped in coconut oil, to prevent them from the sticky mess of the jackfruit cutting business. He would press the knife halfway through the giant's body, then dig in both hands and split it open from the inside.

There is a certain rawness to the whole process, but it is the kind that helped us evolve, the sheer force of mind and body that kept our ancestors surviving against all odds. However, the ultimate truth of life is far beyond our survivalist brain. The truth is in the malleability of our nature — in the careful surrender to the tides of changes of this animal body — in the impermanence of existence. The brute force, the strength fade as we age, but the softness persists. It remains a compassionate mentor walking us through the rough parts of life. I saw my father fade into softness with humility and grace. I pray to find the same grace, when time comes to prepare for the end of my human days.

Monsoon also evokes a pertinent sense of decomposition. The other day my attention was arrested by a millipede crawling inside the attic room attached to my parents’ terrace garden. I watched the harmless being lift its thousand tiny legs in rhythmic sine-waves. I was awestruck by its determination to move. This little being with its little animated body is significant in this world. It is willed into existence because it is necessary. Millipedes are some of the most active decomposers of our ecosystem. They feed on decaying plant material like dead leaves, wood, and other organic matter, breaking them down into absorbable nutrients promoting soil fertility. If we look long enough into this vitality of decomposition, the necessity of decay in nature, we would realize that these morbid agents of decomposition are actually propellants of life. Millipedes are seen as undesirable pests in farming communities because of their tendency to sometimes encroach on healthier leaves. It makes the farmers furious when millipedes act on their own volition and move beyond the roles desired for their existence.

Isn’t that how our societies respond too? When those believed to belong to the margins—the decomposers — the invisible laborers, the migrants—begin to move beyond the roles assigned to them. This is more evident now than ever with all the outcry against immigration in the western world. Anti-immigration sentiments in Europe are reported to be at an all-time high since the Second World War. Is it merely coincidental, then, that this surge in hostility corresponds with a proportional rise in the non-European middle class across the continent during the same period?

As more immigrants—especially from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East —moved into middle-class professions like tech, medicine, education, public services — their increased visibility challenges the older, often unspoken, racial and cultural hierarchies of Europe. What once could be tolerated as "working-class" immigrants doing "essential but invisible work" now becomes threatening when non-Europeans are seen as peers—or even superiors—in social, professional, and academic spaces. The growth of a confident, upwardly mobile non-European middle class is sometimes framed in populist rhetoric as a cultural threat rather than an economic benefit. The anxiety isn't just about jobs—it's about schools, neighborhoods, languages spoken in public, and the visibility of "other" religious or cultural norms. The fear is about losing control over the narrative of who is allowed to thrive, and who must stay in the soil, quietly breaking things down.

But the soil has a cognisance of its own. It reveals truth as it is, rather than entertaining its various projections. The soil — an accumulation of dust, rock, minerals, water, compost and the decomposers. Everything living, sustaining, interdependent on a continuous cycle of decay and growth. Everything belongs here, in the soil. This truth cannot be dislodged by propaganda. Human society too works alongside the fractal intelligence of nature. We too are growing more integrated into the world — more globally attuned rather than away from it. And if we try too much to interfere, the cycle of nurture will break, and so will our world.

The world is in upheaval, with new wars breaking out every year, but I am concerned about more than just nuclear warfare. It is the slow erosion of genuine goodness in ordinary people that worries me. There is a pervading tiredness in communal life, a kind of quiet exhaustion that creeps into everyday interactions. People’s capacity for compassion is slowly reducing, not with a crash, but with a long, low fade.

I am beginning to wonder if the real terror is not war, but the dulling of tenderness. The breakdown of the soft architecture of hope. Disruption in the linearity of longing — that silent rhythm we rely on to imagine a better world — is far more powerful in degrading the creative faculties of the collective than something as visibly threatening as a nuke. Being forced to live in a world devoid of hope and compassion is, in many ways, as horrifying as facing an obliterating weapon of destruction.

Imagine a world where the soil is no longer a living, breathing witness to life, but reduced to sterile dust. A world where nothing decomposes, nothing nourishes, and nothing begins again. That is the true horror — a future where the earth no longer dreams.

And yet, we still have a choice. We can dig our heels into the dirt — into the mess, the rot, the decomposition — and let it teach us again what it means to belong to one another. The soil reminds us that everything is part of the same cycle — decay, nourishment, growth. It holds the wisdom of interdependence. If we listen closely, it may still show us how to return to the truth of life: that nothing thrives in isolation, and nothing is too broken to begin again.

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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.

It is an unusual summer here in India. The sun feels ominously close—we can feel him, but we can’t often see him. The intense heat, longer days, and blazing sunlight, which are trademark features of nature’s brutality in these parts of the world, have now been subdued by storms brewing over the Bay of Bengal, bringing with them constant showers accompanied by windless, humid inactivity. The atmosphere—half grey with clouds and half blanketed in humidity and smoke—is highly uncharacteristic of an Indian summer. I wouldn’t say it is not hot. It is hot, but in a suffocating, breathless way—as if the very air has been squeezed out by an invisible brute. The grey, stagnant sky hangs low over our homes, and the days spiral into a humid stupor, neither monsoon nor summer in its full truth.

I know all that sounds complicated—because it precisely is. This is not how I remember my childhood summers to be. It worries me deeply. These may be the early signs of the climate crisis tipping into something far more insidious. Just look at these heat maps comparing this year’s summer to the last in my city—what once was manageable heat now feels apocalyptic.

And for those of us who believe that science’s compass is generally weaker than a mother’s instincts—I asked my mother, who was born in the ’60s and has spent more than half of her life in this city, for her thoughts on the changing cycles of monsoon and heat. She said summers were always dreadful, but not as much as they are now. When the swell of summer arrived, they used to beat the heat by swimming in various ponds and lakes surrounding her parents’ home and drank water from porous clay pots. Since they never had a refrigerator, they would dunk whole watermelons and mangoes into large cemented water reservoirs built to store municipality water for household use. Later in the evening, all the brothers and sisters would sit on the floor in a big circle and share their delightful, naturally chilled summer treat.

I find her stories wild—living through an Indian summer without a refrigerator? Unthinkable. But perhaps that’s the root of our modern crisis: the inability to imagine lives shaped by sufficiency rather than scarcity, lives that knew a different kind of plenitude rooted in connection to the immediate world and the abundance it offered freely.

The oversight on my part is not only that of a past unknown to me, but also that of the deeply entrenched architecture of my mother’s world. The truth of my mother’s life is that she is living in a completely different world than the one she was born into. The microclimate of her locality has long been destroyed by the long-term leasing of land to contractors. These often faceless architects of rapacious progress have ravaged the local vegetation, ponds, and lakes with plastic landfills and built monuments of greed on them. The locality that was once lush with ponds, hyacinths, and water lilies, where colocasia grew wild and in surplus, and schools of wild fish kept the ecosystem balanced, where the songs of crickets and frogs welcomed the monsoon—is now a morbid landmark of a metro growling away in its mechanical monstrosity, an island of shopping complexes selling nightmares packaged in plastic. The twinkling lights floating from above a thousand flats look like vertically stacked towers of matchboxes. They cannot effuse the old-world elegance of thatched roofs and hurricane lantern lights that dimly prophesied the arrival of twilight in my grandmother’s verandah.

The sacred left my grandmother’s hearth when they filled in the pond behind her house with construction rubble. My grandmother’s presence lingered there even until a decade ago, when the pond—even when shallow—was home to koi and shrimps, mayflies and damselflies, Java moss and hornwort. She used to sit in front of her back door overlooking the pond as she picked stones out of pulses spread out on a bamboo tray. But when the builders filled the pond to expand construction—her ghost finally left. It was the meanest betrayal to her memory. This quiet violence against a cherished place, a microcosm of the larger disregard that fuels conflicts far and wide, ensured it is not the same place where my mother crawled and learned to walk. It is not the same place where I formed my earliest memories of nursing from my mother, while her tears mixed with milk tasted of the raw grief of being human. It is not the same place where my grandfather died exactly the same way my father did. Even in its cruelty, life has its poetic underpinnings. And it is this small but significant destruction of the local ecosystem that has led to the stroke-inducing mercury rise in urban landscapes—turning them into isolated heat islands.

March and April were wild months. Rains before Baisakh1 are unusual. We, the eastern coast dwellers, are abundant in our knowledge of dealing with torrential rains, ginormous cyclones, and even disproportionate flooding—but we know little about how to deal with them in the wrong season. I was there though—to face all the usual weather with my mother, like I usually am. She wanted to travel to the district of Nadia2 for a pilgrimage to ISKCON3, but before that, we had to face my father’s Barsi.4

While the earth mourned with its unseasonal rains, my mother prepared for a ritual of mourning too—her final rite of widowhood. Although I explored the Brahminical patriarchy in elaborate detail from a historical context in my witches essay series, I guess I was still not ready to explore its ongoing impact on our lives—partly because I wasn’t ready to talk about how deeply and personally it has affected my mother’s experience of widowhood, and how implicitly it has shaped my rage against it all. Whenever I tread these dark territories of the cultural unconscious, it makes me realise the immensity of power the past still commands over the present, and the intense deliberation needed to free the future from its treacherous grip. In the context of oppression, time is but a thread of continuation. If we reduce our past to historical memory—if we refuse to see its impact on the now—we are but collaborators in the witch hunt of our children.

Widowhood is a strange, ostracised land of isolation for Hindu women—especially in the first year after their husband’s demise. The family you grew up with begins to treat you like an outsider, almost an untouchable. Compassion ranks secondary to customs, rituals, and social etiquettes.

Although her side of the family is not half as cruel or regressive as this might make it sound, her conditioning while growing up wasn’t liberal. My mother is an extremely pious, god-fearing individual, so she self-imposed many of the social norms expected of a widow rather than having them enforced by any authoritative figure. I am sure no one would dare to snare her in the definitions of Indian widowhood in my presence, but I am equally sure that she feared judgment and being seen in an inappropriate light for enjoying life as usual.

As if the grief of losing her partner wasn’t burden enough, she also carried the mark of his absence on her physical appearance with equal sincerity. She gave up adornments and makeup—half in mourning, half in deference to the social expectations of austerity. She refrained, for a year, from visiting holy places like temples and monasteries. She even practiced the renunciation of celebratory occasions.

In our tradition, it is believed that a widow is an inauspicious presence at joyous events until she bathes in the holy river Ganga and completes her husband’s barsi. It is like a rite of passage for her to be considered human again by society. Her self-isolation has kept me in constant fear and pain over her declining mental health.

I don’t know which is worse—the ghosts of conditioning that still haunt her subconscious, or the active indifference of today’s so-called progressiveness, which blinds us to the grip of the past.

I was waiting on edge, with anxious anticipation, for the moment of the fated day when we would ritualistically meditate on my father’s passing all over again. I thought an invisible weight would shadow us throughout the day. The Matha5 where the ceremony was organized was nestled in the midst of a populated residential area and didn’t look like much from the outside. Inside, it had the typical architecture of an ancestral home from Bengal—a couple of quarters, a prayer hall, a temple, a courtyard opening up to a pond with garden beds alongside, an outdoor kitchen, and toilets.

Despite its expanse, the architecture seemed insipid at first glance. But as I stepped inside, my mind felt silent and clear, like dawn fog dissipated by sunlight. I sat in the prayer hall for what seemed like a silent eternity before the priest walked in and began setting up the ritual. It was a pleasant spring day, with sporadic showers cooling off the onset of heat. I walked out the back side of the prayer hall toward the old kund6.

Since it was a holy place, I left my footwear at the gate, yet the sensitive guardians of the pond sensed my silent footsteps and came swarming toward the corner of the moss-covered stairway where I stood. Adjacent to the prayer hall stood an old but well-maintained ashram, and right in front of it was the main temple of the deity Radha-Raman7. The barsi ritual at the matha was the true beginning of our pilgrimage—one not just across land, but through the veils of memory and mourning.

From what I learned from my mother, the place had a long, unassuming history — it passed hands a couple of times. Apparently, it was once home to a family who later donated it as a communal safe house to be used in times of crisis. The names and other details of the family have been obscured by time or perhaps intended to be forgotten, maybe because an act of true charity should remain anonymous. When my mother was a little girl, this place served as a community refuge from local flooding. Their neighborhood would seek shelter here whenever the water level rose due to incessant rain or cyclone landfalls. She had vague memories of swimming in the same pond and playing with her siblings in the courtyard.

“It is a cruel twist of fate,” she said, “that I am grieving my husband’s loss in a place where I had some of my coziest and fondest childhood memories.” Eventually, the place was donated to the gurus of the matha, who established their tradition of Vaishnavism8 after installing the temple and seating their deity.

The serenity enveloping the matha’s atmosphere transcended the hustle and noise of the city, as if the gate was a portal to a realm charged with the energies of master meditators and saints. At one point during the ritual, as I sat on the floor offering water to my ancestors, a total dissolution of self — the self entrenched in a carefully crafted identity — washed over me like a bucket of cold water. I withdrew into silence for many hours afterwards. I felt like all my ancestors. And yet, I was no one. A remnant of dreams long gone. A shadow cast by dreams yet to be born. The sense of serenity transcended the physical realm of dukkha9 that dominated the undertone of that day.

I circled the perimeter like a hungry avian watching over its nest, when suddenly I saw my mother break into inconsolable sobs. An invisible umbilical pulled me in her direction. My feet followed the gentle pull as I held her shoulders and reminded her that Papa was a traveler of this realm, like the rest of us. Each of us is destined to walk through the veil onto the other side — into the great unknown. Until then, we are still here.

My grandmother, although a cinephile and pragmatic woman, was born and raised in the Vaishnava sect. Her father was a high priest and mystic of the respected Gosain10 clan from their lost homeland of Mymensingh11. It is said that he experienced multiple dream visitations from his Ishta Devata12, Radha-Raman, during his lifetime. Growing up in her mother’s shadow, my mother held great affinity and devotion toward this particular tradition. With Papa’s death anniversary finally behind us, my mother was free to begin her pilgrimage to the holy sites of her faith. She wanted to visit the district of Nadia — birthplace of the great saint Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, founder of the Gaudiya sect of Vaishnavism — now known as home to West Bengal’s largest ISKCON precinct.

Since I have wandered along the perimeters of death’s territory, I am agnostic about the understanding of God. I know at least this much: there are three facets to life’s existence — the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. In my map of existence, the presence of God resides in the territory of the unknowable. My religion, if any, lies within the bounds of lush nature — forests, birdsongs, mountains, rolling hills, cascading valleys, rivers, seas, dancing storms, and crackling clouds — that sort of thing. However, I agreed to take Maa on a pilgrimage, since religious tourism made her happy.

We left Kolkata to catch our train from the historic Howrah station at the break of dawn, 5:00 a.m. I had almost forgotten how gorgeous and grotesque the old city lanes were. Skeletons of what once were robust offices of the British colonial administration, their red-and-white brick walls stood as a testimony to the passage of time between then and now. Almost all great rebellions and wars for India’s freedom from colonial rule started in this city — the city I call home. It is easy to forget the past when one lives in freedom, autonomy, and peace. The architectural shadow of the empire reminds me of the power of time — of its gigantic waves that render almost everything humans have ever built obsolete, even something as incredibly massive as the British Raj. It humbles me.

Kolkata is a kaleidoscope of human habitation, cramped into busy urban spaces. The urban commute here is wildly awakening and sobering, almost brutal in its sensory overload. The bustling streets, vehicle exhaust, bellowing cacophony of horns, raw dust spiraling wildly in all directions, sparks flying from hammer on steel, vivid artifacts and items of curiosity and necessity gathered in street vendors’ makeshift shops along every pavement, fresh flowers stacked in technicolor pyramids to be offered to our old gods, and an overwhelmed olfactory with the scent of freshly fried fritters, breads, and sweets — it was quite the morning for a sensitive person like me.

I reached Howrah station, half exhausted from the anticipation of being there after 11 years, and half sick from the uncanny memories of this city. I remember it as clearly as day — the last time I was here, my father came to drop me off when I was taking a train to the south of India. I insisted him not to come, but he did anyway. I insisted him not to stay with me and wait for the train, but he did anyway. Now I know what love meant for him and how many miles he’d walk for it. We embarked on several journeys together — across the country — from this same old station. Countless were our shared meals on the move, immeasurable was his exhaustion, but he was there. Always there.

I feel like I have entered a long-term agreement with grief — it is like living inside a perpetual state of anemoia: a nostalgia for a life that was never mine to begin with. The past betrays me; it treats me like a stranger. It puts words in my mouth and leaves me yearning for their taste — a ghost I have never known. There are so many dimensions to grief. When I am tuning in, occasional epiphanies and transpersonal experiences make it a worthwhile journey, but there is a catch. The journey is an unending one. It is a long and winding road that one must tread with all they have because there are no ways to undo the past — with all its joy and regrets. Memories remain episodic in nature — strong is their pull. Grief teaches you to be in the present — to cherish the sacredness of the now. It clears your vision so you can see the fragility of each moment, so you can learn to live here, now, with complete equanimity. But you yearn; your brain foams up memories you want to cling to even when they hurt. Time is a brute — a friend and a bully packaged into one. It promises you an end, but not now. For now, you have to live. You can live in the peace of now and watch it wash away all that is dear to you, or you can wallow in the past — the choice is yours.

Torrential rain welcomed our arrival as we reached Nabadwip station, ready to board the overcrowded ferry crossing the Bhagirathi13 river, which splits the island into two shores — Nabadwip and Mayapur. The city of Mayapur is a gorgeous one. We rented a countryside Airbnb tucked away amid vast farmlands, surrounded by wild groves of tropical trees — guavas, bananas, jackfruits, sapotas, custard apples, and wild white and red hibiscus growing sporadically along the Jalangi14 river flowing right next to the community grounds where we were staying.

The schedule for the next two days involved only temple visits and being swept up in tides of people doused in spiritual fervor — dancing, singing, chanting in rhythms of bhakti bhajans15 across the ISKCON campus. I was a religious pariah in the sanctuary of Hare Krishnas, a fact I kept well hidden in the spirit of my journalistic curiosity. Yet, I encountered something magical, almost otherworldly, within the campus.

Due to its lush and ecocentric spiritual atmosphere, Mayapur is home to many migratory birds, and spring is their mating season. Standing at the entrance of the main temple, I heard a mysterious birdsong from beneath a mature burflower tree. Tired after our long journey and the day-long wait to see the evening aarti16, I took a small break to rest my aching heels after scouting the whole campus. The evening was turning golden, with robin-blue vistas ahead after long hours of rain, while people waded through puddles of grey and brown dirt. And there she was, singing. I couldn’t see her perched on any branch when I looked closely. It was a beautiful but strange song — it almost tasted of longing, of residual memory, loss, remembrance, or something in between. Maybe she was yearning for her home, or maybe she was trying to claim this tree as her own. Right here, a stranger to the land — visiting, remembering, claiming her space for her experiences — she mirrored the turmoil of my inner landscape. She was a pariah — probably solitary and terrified of this new world, but she too refused to leave, with her song still inside of her.

Song of the Greater Coucal, endemic to Vietnam

My mother was radiant and happy after attending the evening aarti and darshan17. I was content that my time there intersected with the mysterious tree dweller. The weather was comforting, and the heat had waned after the day’s showers drenched the spiritual town. Maybe we all meet God in our own ways — some within the premises of organized religious communities, some in birdsongs, and some in surrender to the mysteries of existence.

There is a war looming at the border of my country — but there is also a quiet revolution of reconnection unfolding within the psyche. If we must confront the hostilities of the world, let us do so not with borrowed rage, but with the strength of our inner reconciliation, seeking perhaps a new plenitude found in this quiet revolution of reconnection. Let us bring God along for the conversation — not as a distant savior, but as the part of us that remembers how to love even in the face of rupture.

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