By Ellerine Diengdoh
Nongrah. I live here.
That’s a strange sentence to write. It used to be a simple statement of fact, a word on a form. Now it feels like a confession. My address is a headline. The air in my own lane feels like it has guilt in it, like I’m breathing in powdered bone.
We have a Khasi word for a depraved demon who commits unspeakable acts on behalf of the Thlen. “Menshohnoh”. A sterile word for an ugly horror, a shape-shifter, a child-stealer, a bind-torture-killer, a creature from Hell’s deepest pit. There, we were told, inside the belly of the dark, dark woods, it waits… patient, obscene, hungry.
I now recall the gruesome stories my father would tell me. They were his way of explaining the unexplainable. He spoke of the creature not as a legend, but as a warning. His words crawled into our dreams, for it was meant to scare us into obedience. “Don’t wander after dusk”, “Don’t speak to strangers”, “Don’t eat food from people you don’t know”….
But that was a lie, wasn’t it…a comforting horror story to distract from the real one, because the thing that took the four-year-old girl to a construction site and drowned her is not a shape-shifter. It did not have bat wings or glowing red eyes. The thing that snatched the seven-year-old boy and painstakingly tortured and killed him had no supernatural powers.
They were just people like you and me! But underneath the skin, behind the innocent smile, they were something else entirely. Sick, savage, soulless, predatory, vile, murderous perverts and sadistic paedophiles! This truth is infinitely more terrifying than any myth because it is so boringly real. There is no dark magic to blame, only a profound brokenness hiding inside someone who otherwise looks, and lives, just like us.
That’s the real dread, you see. That’s the thing that gets to you. A folklore monster is a thing you can run from. It lives in the forest, so you stay out of the forest. Simple. But another human, a person, where do you run from that? He buys bread at the same shop I do. We probably share the same taxi. He walks on the same broken pavement, and he breathes this same air!
I keep thinking about the rock placed on the little girl’s back. It was not an act of rage. It was an act of….composition, of arrangement, like a gardener placing a stone in a rockery……..a final, aesthetic touch. That is the horror that keeps me awake. The clinical, meticulous artistry of it all. This isn’t about rage or hate or violence; it is about an appetite, about a perverted need being quietly, calmly, and completely fulfilled.
I had almost convinced myself this sickness belonged only to us, a curse laid upon Nongrah. Then, the news reported another death: a thirteen-year-old girl, far away in a place I don’t remember. In that moment, I understood the forest was never the point. The Thlen was never the point. Nongrah was never the point.
So what is wrong with us as a society? Did we prefer the myth because it was easier? The “menshohnoh” was convenient. It let us off the hook. It meant the evil was an outsider, a supernatural ‘other’. It meant we didn’t have to look at the man or woman or even a child sitting next to us on the bus. We didn’t have to ask what was going on behind our neighbours’ closed doors. We outsourced the horror to a myth.
Now the myth is dead. It has been replaced by the nauseating, putrid reality of human potential. I look at the faces of the people I pass on the street and I feel a cold dread seep into me. Which one is the murderer? Which relative of mine has the sickness inside? This paranoia is a poison….it makes you feel like you’re the mad one.
So I sit in my house, I lock my door, but it feels like a useless gesture. The monster isn’t in the forest anymore. He’s got a house key.
He is here. And so am I. And he is everywhere else, too…
