#02 - Remembering Lal Ded at Nongriat

When one sees images of the living root bridges in travel magazines or blogs, one does not imagine the contextual landscape of Nongriat. This lapse weighed heavy when Jigar and I arrived at the end of the motorable road that wound down from Shillong to the village of Tyrna. But as the shuttle jeep hurtled through the narrow valley roads, we craned our necks, searching for the root bridges, or the possibilities of the bridges. I had to write about unique destinations in India for a work assignment at a travel-tech startup, and I had managed to etch out a week’s itinerary that took me to Nongriat for a couple of days in February 2019.

The mystery revealed itself when we reached Tyrna, got down from the jeep and unloaded our backpacks. There were a couple of tea stalls, and when we mentioned Nongriat, the young lanky boys sitting on the bamboo benches pointed down a steep valley. That’s when we realized the lapse in my research.

Nongriat was a trek down 7,000 stone-hewn steps, deep into the East Khasi hills. Our backpacks were stuffed for a trip starting from Manipur to Kaziranga, via Meghalaya. I had trekked in Sahyadris and Himalayas often, but packing for a trek is a different trick altogether. One carries less, discards unessentials, and definitely packs in lesser books. My bag for this trip carried reading material for an unforeseen delay, hoping that public transport would breakdown somewhere, and I would get to read to tide over the unplanned misery.

First, we calmed our nerves by making light about the surprise trek, and then were able to heave the weight with the promise of the primeval landscape surrounding our trek. Forests as dense as rain clouds in legends, green lush like documentaries on natural history, and the sounds crisp that broke through the heavy forest air; we soaked in the beauty along with the humidity. We took the route off the left from the first living root bridge, and the sparse crowd of travellers thinned further. We halted often, sipped fresh lemon water from the bamboo stalls en route, and finally reached our guest house.

It was a simple concoction like others, so far from modern comforts. The kitchen and amenities were what we city dwellers term “rudimentary”, but the lemon ginger tea was perfect to relieve the fatigue from the long trek.

The living root bridges, locally known as Jingkieng Jri, are ficus-based bridges built by the Khasi tribes to traverse across the moist subtropical forests of East Khasi hills. They are lauded as a perfect icon of human-nature interaction, where the roots are molded into bridges by the tribes, and survive across centuries, passing down generations as a living heritage practice. There are more than hundred such small and large bridges in these hills, although only a couple of them have become popular.

The microcosm surrounding a single bridge is evocative of the large ethno-botanical history encased in the community. Just witnessing a brook or a lagoon under the bridge, pebble studded, with roots that erupt and twist from earth, cling to thick trunks and claw towards each other across the little piece of water, was like watching a drama unfold. This was not a story with a rigid three-act structure. It felt like an eternal epic, repeating across time. The fixity of the bridges, and the constancy of the heritage, evoked a sense of rootedness and a solace, the kind that travellers seek, especially those who step out of home to travel within, more than to mark a checklist.

The images of the living root bridges that popped up in my research had embalmed a sense of resilience, a resistance to the passage of time. That had prompted me to select Ranjit Hoskote’s translations of Lal Ded, I Lalla, as my primary read through this journey. Like the Kashmiri mystic from the 14th century, the root bridges of Nongriat dripped with a synthesis of timeless ritualism and athleticism. Like bursts of epiphany among wanderers, they exuded a glimpse of life time-capsuled in this valley. A heritage that meandered through history, a way of living that embraced the wild and made a syncretism of human in nature.

She wrote,

From what direction did I come, and by what road?

In what direction am I going, how shall I find the road?

I hope they’ll send me a map before it’s too late

or it’s too late for me, my breath all gone to waste.

The roots clawed towards each other across the valley, and time stilled the movement of their direction. This made insignificant any traveller walking these bridges. Humility was the optimum response, when traversing the routes across these bridges, connecting past and present.

Jigar and I climbed a boulder across the root bridge, and planted ourselves there for the evening. We saw a couple climb the bridge, click pictures and selfies. We saw a group of friends frolic across the pebbles in the pond, broken from the river, and a few of the group who tried to still themselves, to break from the noise of their group. We also saw a solo traveller coming out of a hidden trail across the bridge. He waved to us, and we saw him again during dinner at the guest house. We saw the light from the sky fade into dusk, jigsawed into a horizon, peeking through the dense forest. We heard the group leave, and the sound of the brook reclaiming the forest.

We finally climbed down from the boulder when Majaw, the guest house owner came to get us, warning us to remain cautious, as these parts still belonged to the wild after dark. His sturdy bowed legs carried his short frame with ease over the rocky paths, and his friendly countenance did not ease for a second. Wearing a woollen sweater vest over a faded red T-shirt and tracks, his fluorescent green shoes were the most striking part of his personality.

If you feel I am romanticising the forest, let me apply that Nongriat retains the romanticism of the moist tropical forest. You can still order a Maggi or even a Cheese Maggi at the guest house, and request Majaw’s wife to make it soupy, but she also offers Ja Shulia (sticky rice) and Sobok (banana fruit chutneys). Let me also accept that a lot of Khasi cuisine relies on pork and fresh fish, and so, we could not really flavour the authentic cuisine beyond a couple of dishes. I had to remain content with the ginger lemon tea that I kept requesting on repeat from Majaw’s wife.

At dawn, Majaw accompanied us on a four kilometre hike from the double decker living root bridge to the Rainbow Waterfall. We took the trail from which the solo traveller had emerged the previous evening, and crossed a patch of flatland crested on a cliff, cleared into a football field. Jigar was excited to see this, and warned me that his evening just got busier.

The narrow trail, with the forest on one side and the valley on the other, crossed across the hills. It was important to maintain our balance and watch each step, even if I kept getting distracted by every bird call. Most often, it was too difficult to spot any birds in the thick canopy, but I managed to spot a yellow bird with a sharp red tail. After coming back to the room, and checking my Grimmett and Inskipp, I realized that it could have been a fire-tailed sunbird. I made peace with the fact that I could not spot more birds or ascertain what I had spotted, and that the dense canopy made birding difficult on this quick trip.

Majaw gave us a disclaimer that the Rainbow Waterfall would not rise to its name if the sky remained cloudy. He saw us nod into submission, our heads bowed to keep up with his pace. After the first few times, Jigar stopped asking how long before we reached the destination, and we were taken by surprise when Majaw finally stopped in his tracks, turned and smiled, two hours after we began walking. The sky had cleared, and a tiny rainbow flickered on the waterfall. The fall itself was majestic and steep, thumping down with force, and forming foams of white in the pool below. I headed to resume my perch on a large boulder in the middle of the small pool, and Jigar peeled off his sweaty T-shirt to jump into the water.

There were only two other people who had reached the location before us, and it remained quiet. Nongriat was not as popular a destination then, and perhaps that could also be a factor adding to its quotient of romanticism. After that, more recent blogs have warned readers of commercialisation around the living root bridges. This echoes a tragedy that I have seen played out around me in Goa, even before I left home for my graduation. I can see Majaw and his wife, smirking when alone, and smiling at every traveller, conflicted between their urge to earn, and the primal desire to save home. If this was a conflict easy to resolve, I would have attempted an insight here. Often locals are left with emotions that anthem through Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. Already, the banes of popularity had begun making inroads here, with Majaw suggesting that we skip Dawki lake. He told us it was no longer like the pictures on Instagram.

Around noon, with the sun bright, and the rainbow strongly clutching the waterfall, we started our hike back. Midway, we crawled our way down to the Blue Lagoon. Echoing the fiction in its name, this pond jumped out like a scene from Thoreau’s Walden. Steely blue waters, fenced in by large white boulders and a loneliness that resounded loudly even if one of us whispered. Majaw left us there, ensuring we knew the way back. Jigar and I sat down on a flat stone, dipped our feet in the lagoon, and again waited for dusk to fall more vividly this time.

It is always exciting to me when words from a page find a resonance in the life around you. Even if spare and barren, the mundane is embroidered with some purpose when it reminds you of a verse. I had begun the day with Lal Ded’s vakh.

As the moonlight faded, I called out to the madwoman,

erased her pain with the love of God.

‘It’s Lalla, It’s Lalla,’ I cried, waking up the Loved One.

I mixed with Him and drowned in a crystal lake.

Sitting by the pond, hidden from the well worn trail, Jigar and I embraced the quiet. All routine thoughts about our work, family and social life exited the scene. One could touch the passing seconds, textured thick with realisation that all this existed before us, would continue to do so. Suddenly, also the realisation that every traveller is a trespasser.

Rumbling stomachs broke the stupor, and we headed back. The guest house had emptied further. The group and the solo traveller were gone. The night reclaimed louder. Majaw, his wife, the other couple and we accepted the night, and retired to its sounds.

Next morning, we started our trek back. Leaving Nongriat behind was overwrought with discussions about the onward journey to Kaziranga via Shillong and Guwahati, too many pit stops to slide onto rocks and enjoy the landscape as we climbed higher up the valley, and staring into the horizon of waving hues of green. We took longer to climb back, not only fighting gravity, but also trying to imprint the landscape in our minds at each spot of halt.

The result was we missed our scheduled jeep, Majaw arranged for another to pick us up, and our delay left us stranded in Shillong. The evening had turned night quicker here, and we both ate sandwiches from a basement shop near the bus stand. Romanticism had been sucked out; the basement of the bus stop was dark, dingy and littered with empty chips packets, crushed water bottles, cigarette butts and paper bits, and smelled damp. I was hit by the hustle of a female traveller spending a night at a bus stop on a budget trip across North East India. I dreamt of Lal Ded wandering across Kashmir without any baggage or itinerary.