Shillong opens my mind to writing
Recently in Shillong at Moinee’s Bakes, well-known for its eclairs, I met two other former journalists who are now full-time writers. “It’s an impromptu LitFest,” Samrat X said jokingly as he and Ankush S and I chatted about, among other things, how freelancing was such a distraction from our real writing. Samrat is writing a travelogue about the Brahmaputra, the mighty Northeastern river in which an adult male elephant was washed away from Assam to Bangladesh this season. Ankush is currently on his fourth crime novel, which he hopes will be out later this year. I am writing a memoir about my late friend Richard B and our time at lower Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School in the late 1970s.
Shillong is ideal for sitting away from the world to think and write. It’s around 5,000 feet above sea level. During the British Raj it was the capital of undivided Assam and called the “Scotland of the East”. Now it is the capital of tiny Meghalaya, which means “home of the clouds”: it is forever cloudy. The weather is a necessary respite from the heat and humidity of the Assam plains. This visit I made a day trip to Laitlum, whose cliffs suddenly drop steeply; it is locally known as “Meghalaya’s Grand Canyon”, but I couldn’t see more than 10 to 15 feet ahead of me, due to the opaque mist. Meghalaya is also home to the worlds’s wettest places including Cherrapunji, known locally as Sohra, and Mawsynram (which outdoes Sohra on an annual basis). Down the hill from Sohra is Bangladesh.
The only drawback to living and writing in Shillong is unavailability of quality housing. The local tribe, the Khasis, are militantly against outsiders. Samrat grew up here, his grandfather having been originally from what is now Bangladesh, and he says that as a boy he used to avoid the main road from St Edmonds school to avoid any violent attacks. Things have changed so much that he recently went to a stadium to watch a football match, and no one gave him a second look (much less threatened him). Still, when Meghalaya became a separate state in 1972, it enacted laws prohibiting non-tribal ownership of land. As a result, non-tribal residents are ghettoised — there’s only one apartment complex in all of Shillong — and are resigned to dilapidated dwellings while Khasis
Though writers have thrived in cities like Mumbai, London and New York, the city is now not for the life of the mind build bright new houses on the town’s outskirts. As a result, Samrat has to live with his elderly parents in a cramped quarter.
Samrat is thinking of moving to Guwahati, which is now Northeast India’s hub. Ankush, on the other hand, is well set-up — pre-1972 non-tribal property was not confiscated (though many chose to sell and move out) — and Moinee’s Bakes, set up by his mom, is an iconic bakery of Shillong. Plus his spouse is Khasi. His routine is to write in the mornings and run the bakery in the afternoon/evenings. It seems an idyllic balance, for no one makes money from publishing.
During my visit to Shillong, not only did I find the weather wonderful but I also marvelled at how distant the noise of the world seemed. No shouting TV channels, no crinkly newspapers — indeed life in Shillong came to a halt early in the night. Ankush is in bed at 10 and wakes up at 5.30 to begin writing. The early life is also the result of India not having more than one time zone. Here in the northeast, winter evenings begin around 4.30pm and summer mornings around 4.30 am. Many scientists and agriculturists and bureaucrats have written about creating a second time zone in India, more suited to daylight in the Northeast, but to no avail.
It does not mean an absence of life: as Samrat pointed out, in Shillong you can always find someone with whom to have a meaningful chat. The number of eateries and bars have gone up and Laitumkhrah has become a hopping hep hub of town, though rampant haphazard construction means that it may one day become as claustrophobic as “Police Bazaar”, Ankush says. Still, it is magnet enough for the young and the artistic.
When I returned to Guwahati, the city seemed as large as Delhi in comparison to Shillong — loud, impersonal, crowded. This is why Samrat’s parents did not like living in Kolkata, despite owning a flat there. I turned on the TV and listened to the madness around the world and wondered if I should just drive back to Shillong. Though talented writers have thrived in cities like Mumbai, London, Paris and New York, the city is now not for the life of the mind. Instead, it is for the super-rich and for super-commerce, filled with what Don DeLillo called “White Noise”.
Aditya Sinha is a senior journalist based in India