Name Place Animal Thing

Author: Lyndem, Daribha

• I don’t remember enjoying any meal as much as I did the ones I had was sitting on the floor of that one room house, where I did not have to worry about spilling on the carpet or talking too loudly. I could just sit and joke with Bahadur’s children, as we took turns biting into the fleshy large onion we all shared.

• ‘Surprising to see a Jaiaw boy help out a dkhar,’ my mother remarked, almost chuckling as she mentioned a part of Shillong that was only inhabited by Khasis,

• ‘Dkhar’ was a word I learnt when I was young. I did not understand it’s full meaning until I was much older. It refers to people like Bahadur and Yuva, people who were not like me, who were not tribal. I understood it to mean people who were not from this land. It was a strange, loaded word meaning different things to different people. Words like dkhar can be innocuous or they can be weaponized. It made me think of people in terms of them and us. Although I was not taught it as an insult,

• ‘Dkhar’ was a word I learnt when I was young. I did not understand it’s full meaning until I was much older. It refers to people like Bahadur and Yuva, people who were not like me, who were not tribal. I understood it to mean people who were not from this land. It was a strange, loaded word meaning different things to different people. Words like dkhar can be innocuous or they can be weaponized. It made me think of people in terms of them and us. Although I was not taught it as an insult, I always saw it used as one.

• I had seen him, his head bowed as if weighed down by his thoughts, his eyes transfixed on his feet.

• It was hard to tell how old he was, but I would call him ‘Uncle’ when I would see him go down to his store on my way back home from school. He was not Khasi but a dhkar so I never called him Bah.

• Their neighbours were curious about them but mostly left them alone. The only grouse they had against the couple was that no one from that house would come out during the monthly jingpynkhuid shnong, when the people of the entire neighbourhood would come out into the streets to clean and tidy up the neighbourhood and surrounding area. This was a practice that everyone living in the community was expected to follow as a good neighbour and Khasi.

• In school we always got excited when we saw goods with a bar code on them. That made us feel like the thing in question was from abroad, and hence much better in quality than what we got here.

• My father always occupied the front seat as he needed all the leg space he could get. He was six feet three to my mother’s five foot nothing.

• A tiny bell at the top of the door always tinkled when someone opened it, and in the time the slow door closer took to get to its original place, the smell of ammonium and shampoo escaped the warm room and tempted the women walking past the shop to take a peek inside.

• Chinese migrants in Shillong, unlike some of the other communities, were spread across the city. Some stayed in Mawkhar, some in Dhanketi and others in Laitumkhrah, Khasi/Jaiñtia neighbourhoods that would have rarely allowed outsiders like Bengalis, Biharis, Nepalis and other migrants

• Although welcomed too, Chinese migrants were often still seen as outsiders in Shillong. They worked the typical kind of immigrant jobs: in the food industry, selling apparel and shoes, primping patrons at beauty salons.

• At that time, insurgent groups, such as the ‘Saw Dak’, saw these thriving, prosperous outsiders as someone they could exploit. They were known to collect a ‘tax’ from outsiders, and the Chinese were not exempt.

• They would speak then of the Saw Dak, the powerful group in Shillong who claimed to be fighting for the freedom of the state, for the good of the tribal people.

• They would speak then of the Saw Dak, the powerful group in Shillong who claimed to be fighting for the freedom of the state, for the good of the tribal people. They hoped to secede from India.

• From what I was told and what I remember, shootings were very common in the late 80s and early 90s. Everyone was scared, and no one dared speak up. Those who could afford to pay did so. Many packed up and left. On days like Independence Day and Republic Day there would be curfews and bandhs. Cars were set on fire when the group was unhappy with a policy decision the government took. If a minister visited from New Delhi there would be a bandh to protest his coming. In my young mind, I only understood the Saw Dak by the graffiti I saw scrawled across the walls in the city: ‘Khasi by blood, Indian by accident.’

• Across Shillong, families stockpiled provisions even if the bandh had been announced only for one day.

• Next to me, Bi and the other workers were grinding kwai and tympew on a wooden mortar and pestle for my grandmother. They mixed in shun, and this lime made the paste turn red. My grandmother could not chew the kwai on her own so they had to grind it for her. She kept the paste in a shiny metal box and sometimes I would eat a little bit. The shun made me feel dizzy and warm, and after I had swallowed up all the kwai, I drank water to loosen up the bits of leaf and nut lodged between my teeth.

• As the years passed it did get better in Shillong. Mawlai, a neighbourhood which we joked was the den of dkhar-haters, would soften up when dealing with dkhars. But the prejudice was also based on class. The more well to do the dkhar was, the safer he was. The worker immigrant had a much harder time. The narrative many Khasis liked to draw was the one of the immigrant Bangladeshis or Nepalis taking their jobs. ‘They don’t want to do those jobs!’ My grandmother said, exasperated when I repeated what I had heard in school about the migrant ‘infiltration’.

• Half these Khasi workers are always on a chai break or bidi break. Why should I pay them more when they work less?’

• Luckily some people came over and sorted the matter before it got heated. ‘Piet bha next time,’ they warned the driver, who nodded vigorously and apologized repeatedly, ‘Map Bah’.

• Not all dkhars were painted with the same brush. When Amit Paul, the Indian Idol contestant from Shillong, arrived at Police Bazaar for his grand homecoming after being crowned the second runner up, large crowds gathered to receive him—including those brash boys from Mawlai who enjoyed scaring a dkhar that happened to cross their path. They probably saw him as representing the state in a nationwide competition, and for that he was given a free pass.

• He had stacks of interior design books in his cupboard. I sat and went through these on Sunday afternoons when I was bored: volumes of hardbound books, glossy pages filled with pictures and designs.

• We had a tin roof because, as my father explained to me, ‘Meghalaya is an earthquake prone area so a tin roof is the safest bet.’

• My parents always smoked when they were anxious. At the end of every night most ashtrays in the house were filled with ash. Mom made ashtrays of things that weren’t meant to be ashtrays.

• One time there was a wedding function that was taking place in their home. It went on for seven days. It would start early in the morning and would go on late into the night. They caused such a din that on the sixth day, my father decided he had had enough. He started to throw stones from our house. ‘Papa what are you doing?!’ I asked, half surprised and half amused. ‘These people just don’t know when to stop,’ he said; the way he said ‘these people’ sounding pejorative. Did he mean Hindus who blew on their conches, or dkhars who didn’t worry about how much they might be disturbing their neighbours?

• He threw rock after rock just like how we would throw cold water at the stray cats when they would not stop howling in our yard when they were in heat. Just like it worked on the cats, the neighbours too eventually stopped.

• I made it a point to always go to the gate to say hello to him when I walked home from school. His wet nose poked through the grill, and he always grew excited when he saw me. He always came out to the gate to greet me, until he stopped. He was not immortal like Bear.

• In the Hindi classroom one could hear Mrs Trivedi, ‘Badi e ki matra not chotti.’ The class answered ‘Yes, Miss’ in unison, like clockwork. No one understood nor bothered to ask why.

• She possessed something rare that very few of us had in 2000: a working dial-up internet connection. The first thing she did when entering her room was turn the router on, a screeching sound filling the air, and the room glowed a cool blue. She sat on her swivel chair and typed in, ‘shaadi.com’; we waited a few minutes and when faces sprang on the monitor, we scrolled through the profiles one by one and laughed while drinking tea with bourbon biscuits.

• ‘Why can’t you be silent. You cluck like hens. Can you not see the others have not finished? You should learn to be quiet and ladylike like D,’ he said every so often. I would get very embarrassed each time. I did not understand why being quiet was a good thing. I heard this from Mrs Trivedi, and it would be reiterated by Mr Sarkar.

• As time went on, I began to notice that on Saturdays when we had tuitions there were some girls who were asked to come earlier than the rest of us. While the Khasi girls were called for tuitions at 11.00am, the others were asked to come at 10.30am.

• When the girls kept going to Mr Sarkar’s house earlier than some of us, my curiosity grew, and I felt the need to investigate. If I was being honest with myself, I knew that I had begun to feel left out.

• It also struck me that it was only the dkhar girls who were being called early.

• I sat in the corner, hoping I would go unnoticed. Mrs Sarkar entered with the maid and laid out some tea, cakes and a copy of the Bible on the coffee table in front of us. As she turned, Mrs Sarkar saw me and asked, ‘Oh D, why have you come? ‘Oh aunty, I came early so I thought I’d just tag along,’ I said nervously. ‘That’s good. Even for believers it is a good thing to attend,’ she said, giving me a smile.

• What he played for us on the television was something that I would never have guessed. A series of videos, each bleaker and more tragic than the last one. They were on the perils of hell, and how non-believers or ‘heathens’ were damning themselves to an eternity of fire and brimstone. ‘Repent!’ A man in one of the videos barked at us, the veins on his forehead throbbing. He exhorted the watchers of the video to turn away from evil ways and to accept Christianity as the one true religion.

• When this entire bizarre exercise was over, we all walked out of the house quietly,

• ‘We go because he’s a nice man, and we don’t want to offend him. We also go because this is a ten-minute session, and the cake is really nice. The

• ‘We go because he’s a nice man, and we don’t want to offend him. We also go because this is a ten-minute session, and the cake is really nice.

• began to see everything in a new light. The way Mr Sarkar spoke to us. How his daughter came to the tuition room and prayed with us sometimes.

• I thought that Mr Sarkar, like other converts who I had seen in my church, eventually became more devout than those who started off Christian.

• As a Presbyterian Christian, I did not know what a Pentecostal was. I asked a friend of mine, who told me, ‘The Pentecostals think the Pope is the devil. Don’t believe me, but those Pentecostals are weird. They believe all sorts of strange things.’

• There were also graves that were not marked. They were not paved with cement, had no paint on them, no flowers; they lay there undistinguished, like they were a part of the earth. There were no monoliths or crosses on these, no metal gates or wreaths. In them lay forgotten people from a forgotten time. People could have stepped on these graves not knowing that they were disturbing the remains of someone who could have been loved.

• In this matrilineal society, where the youngest daughter inherits the property, and the children take their mother’s surname, the man is the head of the household.

• My grandmother, who enjoyed a certain amount of freedom living on her own as she did now, would not have been able to do so under the watch of my grandfather.

• Years after he died, my grandmother cut her hair short and had it permed and dyed. She started wearing sparkly jaiñsems with matching shoes and earrings. She started living a life dictated by her own terms. Perhaps my grandfather would have grown to become malleable and changed with the times. I will never know.

• It allowed us to remember those who have passed on, not in a reverential way with stiff sombre faces bowed over a cold stone structure, but in a mellow mood where we retold funny anecdotes. We became comfortable with the dead and more comfortable with our own dying.

• Bi and her husband were not ‘married’ in the modern sense, although he was the father of her children. A lot of people in the villages, and many in the city, never performed any ceremonies to formalize a relationship between a man and a woman. There was never a need.

• The car was never able to go up the steep dirt road to my great grandmother’s house, and we always had to get out and walk the rest of the way.

• In the summer months the water rose high, bubbling loudly against the big rocks where women laid out their clothes to dry on huge rocks. They placed them flat against the boulders as they washed the remaining dirty clothes. Blue paste from the Rin bars stuck to the rocks.

• At my great grandmother’s we sat near the crude, stone stove on one side of the kitchen. Here she hung pieces of meat that had been dried and smoked. Bi helped her cut them into pieces and fry them. The fat sizzled in the pan, and the air was filled with the smell of charred pork and smoke. We ate this with rice and some boiled vegetables, biting our tongues as we chewed.

• The fat sizzled in the pan, and the air was filled with the smell of charred pork and smoke. We ate this with rice and some boiled vegetables, biting our tongues as we chewed.

• My mother never allowed us to get on the dinghy paddle boats because she was afraid, and because she was afraid I also grew afraid and never sat on one.

• ‘It was the Welsh that founded the Presbyterian church in Meghalaya more than a hundred years ago,’ my father told me one evening when I asked him.

• This made it easy to find because everyone knew Motphran, a brick structure erected by the British to commemorate the Khasi men who died serving the English in France during the First World War.

• This made it easy to find because everyone knew Motphran, a brick structure erected by the British to commemorate the Khasi men who died serving the English in France during the First World War. My mother told me it was meant to be Mot France but the locals could not pronounce it, and it became known as Motphran

• This made it easy to find because everyone knew Motphran, a brick structure erected by the British to commemorate the Khasi men who died serving the English in France during the First World War. My mother told me it was meant to be Mot France but the locals could not pronounce it, and it became known as Motphran.

• My mother told me it was meant to be Mot France but the locals could not pronounce it, and it became known as Motphran

• ‘My late grandfather, your great great grandfather, was one of the Lyngdohs of Mawphlang. That meant he was a priest, and he performed rituals as per the customs of the Niam Tynrai, the monotheistic religion of the Khasis. He used to perfom sacrifices, kniah, by cutting up a chicken or goat. He did this in order to help people dispel curses, and overcome fear of the evil eye’, my grandmother told me.

• When I peeked at Daniel, I saw that he had stood up too. Today I was alone in my doubt, and I felt limited. I did not want to stand for something I was confused about, nor did I want to stand because the others were doing it. But I was frightened of being outed as a person who was not repentant or godly enough. I stayed put on my chair as if an invisible force was weighing me down. The metal seat felt cold yet familiar against my thighs. I was one of three people who had not stood up.

• Throughout the duration of the camp other kids tried to explain to me what that whole exercise meant. They told me what being a ‘born again Christian’ was. I pretended to understand and left the camp more confused than when I had stepped in.

• Children did this to get out of class, shouting gibberish, enjoying the confusion it created. It allowed them to escape tests and stay home from school. Machiavellian adults did this to get out of marriages, or get into them.

• In time, the number of people seeing visions and fainting reduced. The first waves of the Revival began to recede and eventually it stopped altogether.

• On rainy days there were fewer people in the church, and on days closer to the board exams they had to put in extra plastic chairs to accommodate the expanded numbers.

• In these familiar surroundings I felt a calm that drew me closer to God. I knew this God, the God that enabled me to find solace in these things, the God that shone through the familiar coloured triangles onto the floor and filled me with joy as I belted out a hymn.

• Her socks only reached up to her ankles revealing reed like legs that were scaly from not being moisturized.

• Yuva was my best friend and was nice to everyone else in our class too, but I had to admit that she always had a problem with stealing and with telling the truth.

• That evening, the eraser felt heavy in my pocket. I was so busy thinking of where and how to hide that stolen piece of property that I never used

• That evening, the eraser felt heavy in my pocket. I was so busy thinking of where and how to hide that stolen piece of property that I never used it.

• Sometimes even the teachers joined in, intent on separating Yuva and me, and I felt helpless. I never understood the reason completely. Maybe they were being malicious for the sake of it, and they enjoyed bullying us. When I grew older I thought perhaps it was because she was a non-tribal Nepali girl, and I was Khasi.

• For my part, I did not want to ask because asking her if she was scared made her illness more tangible. Then we would have to address it, and I preferred talking to her instead about how she would come back for holidays and the fun we would have together.

• Everyone had tried to overturn the jar, her father, her siblings, and even me. We all tried to save her, but it was too late.

• Everyone had tried to overturn the jar, her father, her siblings, and even me. We all tried to save her, but it was too late. She was gone, but she left pieces of herself in those diaries, pieces of herself in those pigeons she fed on her terrace, and I am but one of those many pieces she left behind.

• She was gone, but she left pieces of herself in those diaries, pieces of herself in those pigeons she fed on her terrace, and I am but one of those many pieces she left behind.