By Ellerine Diengdoh
Have you ever really listened to the silence in our hills…..it is not empty. It is the deep groan of bamboo, the calming hush of the pines, the soft whisper of a footfall on moss and the insistent whirr of the cicada. This silence is a feeling, that settles deep in your soul, and asks you to just….be still.
We come from that silence.
Here, in our Hills, life was never meant to be a race. Our pace was something gentler, it was the rhythm of walking, always walking, for running was considered a kind of madness. We were taught to wait, for it was understood that all things required their own time to ripen. We had a name for this pact with time, a sacred incantation, “suki suki” or ” slowly, slowly.” It was not an excuse, it is how we once lived.
A long long time ago, everything we made was born from this rhythm. We didn’t just weave a basket, we grew with it, chose the right stalk and gently coaxed a shape from its being. We didn’t just fabricate a pot, we spoke to the clay, until it finally learnt to trust our hands. We didn’t just weave a fabric, we braided our stories into its threads. These were not “objects” or ” products”, they were pieces of our family and our community, carrying the history of everyone who came before.
Then, just as the birds’ sorrowful omens had predicted, the rhythm broke. The old, living silence of our ancestors was smothered, and in its place, a new silence began to fester, carrying with it the stench of pestilence. It is a deafening silence that comes after the bulldozers had devoured the light and gone to sleep for the night. It is the silence of a people watching their world being dismantled and finding no words big enough to describe their grief.
Progress, cloaked in dust and rage, screaming in tongues we don’t understand, has arrived. Some call it “development”, to move us “forward”, but no one is asking, forward to where, whose future are we rushing towards?
What good is a luxury resort, built on the bones of a forest that taught us how to breathe. What good is a tourist attraction, that clawed its way out of sacred groves. What good is a shiny facade, where the foundation is mortared by the blood of our people.
This isn’t a new story, we know this plot by heart, it has been repeated over and over, that we are numb to it now. When they carve up our land for projects that feel alien to this soil. When the rivers we once swam, now run sick with poison from our greed, when our people are pushed from their homes, in the name of a future they never asked for, we know whose vision is being built!
This same bewildered rush has broken into our schools and our places of learning. Our education mirrors the bulldozer….fast, brutally efficient and soulless. It trains our children to pass exams, but never to ponder about life. It rewards compliance, never curiosity. We see our teachers, the ones who still have the fire in their soul, breaking under a mountain of useless paperwork, forced to justify their value on paper, instead of proving it in the minds of their students. There is no time to wander the difficult path to wisdom. There is only a blind race to a finish line, that isn’t even there!
Our ancestors, who could read the future in the entrails of a rooster, knew that understanding takes a lifetime. They knew that speed without purpose is just another word for ignorance. This new world however, does not care about wisdom, it wants profit, and it wants it NOW. In this mad rush, we have woken something up. The Thlen!
Yes, the Thlen. The devouring serpent from lore. It is no longer a story whispered to scare children. It is here. I see it in the insatiable hunger that eats our forests, that swallows our rivers. I see its reflection in the glossy brochures that sell our waterfalls, our hills, our caves, our root bridges, as a weekend getaway.
Here is the part that hurts the most, the serpent did not just crawl in from the outside, Toki Blah asked the question we are all afraid to ask: “Who is the thief?”
The thief like the Thlen is our own, and feeds on its own. It is kept alive by those who speak our language but have forgotten our truth, those who trade our collective soul for a car, a contract and a moment of borrowed power.
So, this is where we find ourselves now….. helplessly watching our children grow up and seeing in their eyes a confusion, that is hardening into a deep, unfamiliar emptiness.
But maybe… maybe it’s not too late to reverse this, to remember what it means to be slow.
To remember the patience it takes to find the right wood for a Duitara, to feel its spirit, before you even begin to carve.
To remember to sit with the earth long enough to know where a seed wants to grow. To remember what it is like to learn something not for a test, but just for the joy of knowing.
To remember to look into the eyes of our elders and ask, not what we can get, but what kind of people we want to become.
This slowness, this inconvenient, unprofitable slowness, is not weakness or a romantic nostalgia, it is the last thing we have that is truly ours. It is not about looking backwards, it’s about seeing clearly. It might be the only real defence we have left, the only thing standing between who we are, and what this frantic world is trying to make of us.
Let us reclaim that slowness, because we were never meant to be fast.
We were meant to be whole.
Inspired by:
“Tread softly because you tread on our dreams’’ by Janet Hujon ( ST August 11, 2025)
“To Catch a Thief”’ by Toki Blah (ST July 24, 2025).
‘‘Is Myntdu Doomed to Become the Next Wah Umkhrah?’’ by Bhogtoram Mawroh (ST July 23, 2025)
“Stunning Silence on the Mawpat Forest Plunder” by Patricia Mukhim (ST July 19, 2025).
‘‘Why Academics Need to Slow Down’’ by Uddipana Goswami ( IHE May 02, 2025)
