So long, & thank you for all the fish!

By Ateesh Kropha

My brother was born in Shillong in 1986. It’s been 31 years now, and even though we’ve been in and out of Meghalaya over the years, it’s finally time to say goodbye. The next time we come here it won’t be a homecoming anymore. Dad would have retired. How appropriate that it happens amidst the bright Christmas lights and the melancholic cheerfulness of the approaching New Year.
I have such fond memories of growing up in Bishnupur, where we spent most of our childhood. Playing cricket for hours under the sun. Swinging on the backyard guava tree like monkeys from one branch to another. Chasing each other tirelessly with toy guns, which one of the many would get as birthday gifts. Forming secretive and exclusive gangs of friends that would go on Sunday ‘adventures’ to the nearby rolling hills of Lawsohtun, solve mysterious happenings in the neighbourhood, fail at attempts to make homemade chemicals like perfumes, fertilisers and liquid starch stiffeners, though they all surprisingly always worked perfectly well as insecticides. It was a wonderful time. And when I reflect on it now, it really does feel like we lived in Vishnu’s abode, a realm higher than Indra’s swarg.
We moved out of Shillong in 1997 and came back only 15 years later in 2012. By then all our friends had moved away. We all had grown up but Shillong seemed to have gone the other way and shrunk. The lanes seemed thinner, the grounds we played on smaller, places didn’t seem as far away as they once used to, the backyard guava tree now drooped from old age and the walls of the rooms of our old house seemed to have moved closer to each other. It’s hard to imagine now how 10 kids could play hide and seek inside that house and still not be able to find them all.
Meanwhile, the hills of Lawsohtun had been peppered with many newly constructed houses. Sometimes it’s best to leave sweet memories from the distant past untouched, I guess. Things will never be the same as you remember them. Even Abba, our favourite Chinese restaurant, had shut down! It was all bittersweet. But there were other things that hadn’t changed. Police Bazaar was still a beautiful, brightly lit and decorated mad rush during Christmas. The Centre Point hotel still rested there at the roundabout towering above the others. Kongs were still laid back, busy chewing kwai, disinterested to make a sale at their rickety wooden stalls. They still smiled back at you sheepishly with red-tinted teeth whenever you tried to speak to them your miserably broken Khasi.
You could still find stalls selling jhalmuri, packets of sweetened imli, Phantom candy sticks that looked like lit cigarettes, sunflower seeds and sohphlang outside St Peter’s school. Delhi Mishtaan Bhandaar was still selling rasmalais. SK Tailors still operated from the same shop in Laban and continued making oversized school dresses every year. And Dreamland, where we saw Baazigar, our first movie in a theatre, was still around but in a new multiplex avatar. The chicken curry with local sticky rice, along with some potatoes, still tasted magical with its unique flavour that we have never been able to replicate at home.
I did come back to Shillong a couple more times, but we got together as a family again in Shillong only this December in 2017, this time along with our better halves. By now, Dad had moved into a sprawling new house near Ward’s Lake with a beautifully maintained compound around it.
The house was so big that one Wi-Fi router was not enough to cover the whole house. With so many rooms, and even more doors, it took us sometime to get our way around the house. We felt small again. I guess this is how the world looked when we were kids. Huge but not intimidating. Interesting and never mundane.
New possibilities awaiting discovery at every corner. Boundless energy, but not enough time to expend it. It was good to feel that way again. But despite the many rooms, we spent most of our time in the smallest and coziest room in the house. Such are the ironies of life.
We took time to take our wives in and around Shillong in the limited time we had. A day at Kaziranga, a day at Cherrapunji and the nearby caves, a day at Mawlynnong and Nohwet, a day at Laitlum and a nearby waterfall, and the rest of the days within Shillong. It was great to experience these moments with them and share a part of our older selves with them amidst recollections, musings and laughter.
A couple of days before we left, we all attended Dad’s retirement function. Despite being in the thick of preparations for the upcoming state elections, other officers turned up in good numbers along with their families. They took turns to speak a few words about Dad. It was heartwarming to see the genuineness with which each spoke. Dad is very serious when it comes to work and has given more than half of his life working for the interests of the State and its people in whichever capacity he could.
Despite coming to alien surroundings from a land far away, he embraced its culture and its people as his own. So it was great to see the affection being reciprocated. He is never cynical and always has a positive outlook on things.
I remember I questioned him about how difficult it was working with the political class in general and he would always say that they had a wider outlook on things, and that they were accountable to the people who voted for them. They were closer to the problems faced by their people and thus in the larger scheme of things, were always in a better position to take better decisions that affected them. The discussion completely changed my outlook on the subject.
I don’t know when we will be back in Shillong again. I hope sooner rather than later. Probably we’ll have kids by then, and they’d join us. Life would have come a full circle then. Meghalaya will always have a special place in my heart.
I will always remember it as that magical place, as described by the band U2 in a song as a place where the sunlight is always on my face, where the clouds appear and disappear without a trace, where I can take shelter from the poison rain, where the streets have no name.
As Douglas Adams would say — So long, and thank you for all the fish!
Hoi Kiw!

(The author is son of former chief secretary KS Kropha. He grew up in Shillong and now works in
Gurgaon. He can be reached at
[email protected])