By Dhruba Hazarika
It goes with you wherever you go, this ‘moveable feast’. It has become a part of your life, this lifelong love for a place that you had left decades ago. True love stays with you, true love in any form, any shape, any dimension. It is not just nostalgia, no, for nostalgia is but a convenient word to hark back to days that are no more, days of splendour and happiness, contentment and innocence.
No, this word is not enough to convey to yourself and to others that a place means so very much to you. At the most, the word is an apology for what we know of simply as a remembrance. For, remembrance comes with memory. But true love remains even when one loses one’s memory; for true love to be just that, it sticks to you, with you, through hell and high water, an inalienable part of your psyche, a part of your being, never failing, never deserting, never deceiving.
Days when you lay tucked in your bed till late into the morning when winter carried a whiplash sting that you do not feel anymore, days when you walked to school and college and felt your hunger build up into a torrent when you reached home, days when friends were everything and games more important than studies, days when you knew you were growing up and the world was still not as bad as the big bad wolf prowling about in the forest.
Shillong — an eight-letter Anglicised word. A word that had first echoed aeons ago in someone’s mouth, echoing a name, a goddess, without probably knowing that it was also a synonym for love. Longitude, this; latitude, that: what do these two words tell you? Nothing. It tells you nothing about the windswept streets, of the calm comfort of the green and red painted rooftops, the walls of the houses as graceful and sober as the pines from which they had been built.
No, it does not tell you about the shyness of cherry trees caught in autumn’s gaze, with the cold and the rains biting your skin and the warm woollens struggling against early morning frost or the wind, soundless and stealthy as it skims down from the hills and into the streets. No, no longitude or latitude will tell you about the bazaars and the horse carts and the crowing of roosters at the break of dawn. Of the everlasting fragrance of chow and momos and jadoh. Of red and white woollen shawls wound around heads and ears. Of umbrellas opening up like butterflies spreading wings and bouncing along on pavements.
Or, of slow steady cars edging forward with the driver chewing kwai as he picks up a passenger or two. No, it tells you nothing about the church bells tolling into your soul, filling the valley, as you kneel and pray. No, nor does it tell you about school children on other days in their spic and span uniforms, bags slung across their chests, walking to school, their steps in synchrony with the chirps of the sparrows from the houses nearby.
I come back after years. I do not see anyone familiar in the streets. There is no hail-fellow-well-met shout. Everybody walks by at a fast pace. The pavements are crowded. You have to edge to a corner to let the young ones pass by, young ones in the prime of their lives, the girls as pretty as ever, the boys eyeing you with macho disapproval. There could be a lurking suspicion, you know not what, but you sense it, a suspicion that you are an outsider. In looks? In your body language? In your thinking that they can see reflected on your face? Maybe you are suspicious yourself. Have you yourself changed? Maybe it is your own imagination at play. After all, it has been a long time.
Times change. So do people. So do houses. So do streets. And so does the climate. There is no earthly entity that has not succumbed to change. It is in the order of Nature in the scheme of things. Not to believe in that is to live in a fool’s paradise. And so, too, Shillong has changed, the Shillong in which I had grown up.
There is far too much money now, and the crass display and smell of money, everywhere: in the clothes and the buildings and the cars and just about everything. It is different, you suddenly realise. It is different because nothing remains unchanged. Yet, despite that, nothing truly has changed.
Despite the choked streets, despite the concrete high rises, despite the growth in population, despite the sporadic violence that haunts some of the localities, nothing has changed.
For, just as age crawls in into a person, often physically disfiguring what one once possessed, so it is with a place. Yet, somehow, it hasn’t changed, somehow it is the same, in much the same way that a man’s soul remains essentially the same. So, too, a place. A place called Shillong.