‘There is a neuroscience meeting in Shillong’, when I saw Beena’s message I immediately jumped at the chance. Great combination of business and pleasure, I thought. Meeting registered for, tickets booked, hotels booked, but we had not bargained for the sudden flare up between Assam and Meghalaya. Suddenly the whole trip was hanging in uncertainty, the border was closed, taxis were not plying between the two states. If it was just me, I would have cancelled. But Beena was braver and the organizers sounded unfazed, so here I am with a travelogue to write. It has been two weeks since we came back and memories are rapidly moving into the archives of long-term memory centres with daily concerns and work and worry taking their place.
This was my third trip to the North-East part of our vast country, all as an adult. Mountains are not new to me, I have travelled to a few mountain ranges, and the enduring picture in my mind and perhaps of many a kid who has painted the mountains are the pines, various kinds, spiny, skinny and dotting the mountain sides. What strikes you first as you start driving up the mountains of the North-East are the incongruity of the flora and the terrain. I am from Kerala and to me banana trees and areca palms are the markers of the rain-fed tropical south of India. But the mountains of North-East are lush with these monocots!
The first leg of our journey was littered with signboards that said Umtrew, Umbang, Umsaw, Umsan, Umsamlem, Umran on and on. It seems Um in Khasi language means water. No wonder, after wall we were driving up the mountains of Meghalaya, the ‘Abode of clouds’. Our first stop, Lake Umiam, offered a view of beautiful blue waters ringed with a beautiful wild variety of yellow sunflowers. The roads were dotted with small bamboo shacks selling hot chillie pickles, cinnamon rolls and fresh produce. All shops and restaurants we passed were run by women young and old. Vishal, our driver explained that in the matriarchal system of Meghalaya, the property passes on to girls and they are the ones who run the businesses and the households.
Southward we went, with a brief stop in the freezing cold of Shillong to lower altitudes to the river Umgnot. At Dawki, just before it enters Bangladesh and widens to become Goyain river, Umgnot is slow and sleepy, meandering between rock cliffs on both sides. We peered down onto the river bed through the crystal-clear water looking for small fish darting below the surface. Fishermen in paddle boats seemed suspended in air as they sat quiet and contemplative, waiting for the fish to bite the bait. We came back to the banks and an old man selling jhalmuri approached us. I stepped forward to pay him for the paper cones and suddenly all hell broke loose, the photographers, pickle sellers and random people were shouting for me to step back. Apparently, I had just crossed the international borders and entered a foreign country. We looked around confused, what border. Ah, there it was, a line of white rounded river stones, sitting on a carpet of other white rounded river stones! I returned to my country and we savored the Bangladeshi jhalmuri with even more enthusiasm.
On the way to Cherrapunji we stopped to walk on the living root bridge of Nohwet village. The local Khasi tribals have worked over years weaving the roots of the rubber trees on either side of the Thyllong river to form a bridge, a perfect illustration of man bending nature to his will, literally.
Cherrapunji, the wettest place on earth was having a dry spell! The monsoons were over and the waterfalls were not in their full force, we were told. But we will remember Cherrapunji for something very different. The morning after we arrived, we stood sipping tea on the terrace of our hotel and admired the table mountains of Meghalaya. But as we turned eastwards to seek out the rising sun, we found ourselves staring at the wide flat wet plains of Bangladesh below, as far as the eye could see. Here was another section of the border between India and Bangladesh. When nature draws the line, it is not that hard to see!
As we headed back to Shillong, we stopped at the Arwah-Lumshynna limestone caves carved into the East Khasi hills by nature. These walls of these caves were supposed to have fossils of gastropods from oceans of the paleocene period. We began our fossil-hunt pretending to be paleontologists venturing into dark dank caves with only our mobile phone torchlights to guide us, only to find a traffic jam of people babbling in all Indian languages, trying to squeeze through tiny cavities in the rocks. In the end we were rewarded with a 10 inch by 10 inch window to peer into a world of 60 million years ago; all that remained of creatures that ruled the oceans in their heyday were faint imprints on the rocks being rapidly eroded by time and human hands.
It was now time to drive back to Shillong and join our fellow neuroscientists busy peering into the mysteries we carry around on top of our shoulders. I wonder if someone were to look at faint imprints on rocks millions of years later would they be able to tell what these bipeds spend their time doing?
Chetana Sachidanandan is a scientist-writer with a fascination for a striped fish that’s too small to eat and just too beautiful to describe.