By H H Mohrmen
Among the Khasi Pnar and in particular the Pnar of Jaintia hills, the fourth month of the year or April is considered an inauspicious month. People avoid all kinds of business transactions in the month of April. Even couples avoid tying the nuptial knot in this month. The Pnar people believe that because the number 4 (four) in Pnar -Soo or Saw in Khasi also rhymes with mynsoo or mynsaw which means anything tragic like an accident or injury and saw or soo is also the colour of blood (red) hence April is considered to be unfavorable for starting a family or a business. Young people are advised by their elders to be extra careful during the month of April.
Not that I believe all this but let us take it as an opportunity; a teaser to look at the month gone by and examine with open minds the many unfortunate incidents which occurred during the month. Let us also see if there is any lesson we can learn from the events that occurred and whether some of those incidents could have been prevented. First it was the unfortunate death of 14 labourers from Assam at a village which falls under the Saipung block in the East Jaintia hills district from eating a poisonous fruit. When I shared a report by RiLuk one of Jaintia’s online visual news which reported about the incident on my facebook page, a friend from Ireland who knows Khasi and Jaintia hills from his study about the monoliths asked and even tagged a name he believed would be able to help provide him with a scientific name of the poisonous fruit ‘soh btah/sohbtat’. The name was never forthcoming. Do we really know the scientific name of the fruit which the local community had known all along as being poisonous and whose skin they used to kill fishes in the rivers?
Then the next incident which again has to do with a food item was the death of three children from eating poisonous mushrooms. Again, did we even try to know what kind of mushroom the family in the remote area of Assam-Meghalaya border consumed? Or for that matter do we have a list of wild edible mushrooms which grow in the area so as to prevent similar unfortunate incidents from recurring? In 1989 when I was invited to a dinner with a family in Edinburgh, Scotland, the lady of the house told me that she cooked mushrooms for dinner that evening and hoped that I like mushrooms. I told her that I loved mushrooms very much. I was expecting the usual wild mushrooms that I used to have at home, to be the delicacy of the evening. It was then that I learned that although wild mushrooms are the favourite food of many people, yet it is endemic to certain areas only and the popular mushroom eaten by people all over the world is the button mushroom that is cultivated.
This also reminds me of a three- hour walk from Puriang to Mawpyrshong village, through rough terrains and crossing the river Umngot. It was spring and the first season of the year for collecting wild mushrooms. While walking, I saw the kids who accompanied me on the trip collecting something and when I looked closer, I realized that they were collecting wild mushrooms.
There were many types of mushrooms in the area and I asked them how they knew which wild mushroom is edible and which one is not. The elderly man who accompanied me replied that kids particularly the cow- herds are experts in identifying edible mushrooms. He said that during the mushroom season while the animals were gazing, the cow- herds would spend the day collecting wild mushrooms to bring home. An idea struck me then and I asked myself why we cannot do a simple documentation of edible wild mushrooms available in the area while we are walking to our destination. I took a piece of paper from my bag and started entering the names of wild edible mushrooms as identified by the kids. By the time we reached Mawpyrshong village we have been able to collect more than thirty varieties of wild edible mushrooms of various shapes and sizes. It is a pity that I didn’t have a camera then, because this happened before the arrival of mobile phones.
Few years later I suggested the idea of documenting the wild edible mushrooms in the area to a student in the North Eastern Hill University, Shillong who was then doing her Masters in Botany. Unfortunately the idea found no takers. It seems like universities are now functioning like industries and their job is merely to issue degrees. Once the students get their degrees, they get employed (most of the time teaching and government jobs) and the learning also stops there. In the entire education system, the students are expected to complete the prescribed syllabus and there is no scope for self-learning in the present education process. Neither is there any scope for new learning at all. This is the curse of the exam-oriented education system where stress is on textbook learning and lectures with very less interaction and no opportunity of learning outside the classroom.
The above two incidents would not have occurred if the scientific community in the state were able to come up with a study of wild edible fruits and vegetables which grow in Meghalaya. We have lost precious lives in the two incidents and yet we seem to still think that documentation or study of the wild edible fruits and vegetables in the area is of no value. What we should be afraid of is that by the time we start documenting wild fruits, vegetable and even medicinal plants in the area, it will be too late. In the meeting of the traditional medicinal practitioners in Jowai a few years ago, it is learnt that they had already complained of the loss of medicinal plants due to rapid deforestation and mining. We have already lost animals and plants. So the question is whether we even know of all the flora and fauna in the state that have become extinct and lost forever.
Last but not the least was the earthquake which struck Nepal on April 25 and I should thank Paramjit Bakhshi for awakening the self in me and helping me do a soul searching. It is during times of crisis like this that we tend to look inwards to the core of our being and ask ourselves questions. But very often when natural calamities like this happen we misdirect our focus and attention and waste our time and energy by asking the wrong questions. We instead ask ourselves why this happened and suggest theories and possible reasons that cause earthquakes. Social media is packed with prophets of dooms, who suggest that this could be the wrath of God because temples were polluted or that the children of God were unduly punished. I find it hard to believe that we still have people among us, who believe that God punishes people, even kids, for no fault of theirs.
The ‘why this happened question’ will not get us anywhere, except when asked with scientific temperament. The right question to ask is ‘what’. What can I do in such a situation? What is there for me to do? And what have I done to mitigate the sufferings of the people.
The Nepal earthquake is yet to touch our hearts. Even the state government is maintaining a stoic silence in this regard and that the Chief Minister of the State is out of the media’s radar screen is not an excuse. I do feel sad about the earthquake in Nepal and its aftermath but had personally done nothing to help the people of Nepal. The little I did was to ask Nepali dajis I met in the market the fate of their families and friends back home and of course I was worried and asked about my childhood friend in Jowai who is now in Nepal and was glad to know he is fine.
Thank goodness the fourth month of the year is over, but jokes apart, hopefully we will be able to learn some lessons from the tragedies that we have evidenced during the month of April .