I did not realise, until I left, what Shillong had given me.
Growing up in the Scotland of the East, as it is sometimes called — a city of pine hills and perpetual rain and music that seems to come from everywhere — you absorb a particular way of seeing. You learn to live with paradox: the beauty and the difficulty of being from a place that the rest of India has decided it will exoticise rather than understand.
It was this paradox that made me a writer.
The Rain Teaches You Patience — and Persistence
Shillong rain is not polite. It doesn't announce itself and it doesn't apologise. It arrives in the middle of something you cared about and rearranges your plans without consultation. Growing up under it teaches you, eventually, that things proceed on their own schedule — and the best you can do is be ready.
I think of my first novel the same way. Stop. No! arrived on a schedule I did not choose. The stories it contains were not stories I went looking for — they found me, in conversations and silences and the quiet urgency of things people told me in confidence. The rain taught me to receive rather than impose, and that is one of the most important things a writer can learn.
A City That Has Always Been Multilingual
One of the great underappreciated gifts of growing up in Shillong is growing up in a city that normalises linguistic multiplicity. Khasi, Hindi, English, Bengali, Nepali — the languages of a single neighbourhood coexist in a way that most of India never experiences. You learn early that there is no single correct language for experience, that translation is always happening, that the version of a thing you know is never the only version.
This became the foundation of my journalism. When I covered stories — from community disputes to political events to social crises — I always heard multiple languages inside them. I was always aware that the version I could write was partial. That instinct toward multiplicity, toward holding more than one truth at once, came from the hills.
The Literary Culture No One Talks About
What the national literary establishment does not know — or knows and ignores — is that Northeast India has a thriving literary culture that predates most of what Delhi calls "Indian literature in English." The oral traditions of the Khasi, Mizo, Meitei, and Naga peoples are ancient. The written literatures emerging from the region in the last two decades are some of the most urgent and interesting in the country.
Being from this culture means that I never thought of "Indian literature" as a monolith I needed to aspire to. I thought of it as a conversation I was already in, from a position the conversation had simply not turned to face yet.
What I Carry From the Hills into Every Sentence
There is a Khasi concept — ka jingshyrkon, loosely translated as solidarity or belonging — that I think about often when I write. It is the sense that the individual exists within a web of relation, that your stories are not only yours, that you carry your community in every word you use.
I carry the hills in every sentence I write. The specific texture of light through clouds. The particular quality of silence after rain. The way people in Shillong manage to be both fiercely local and effortlessly global. The stubborn insistence on dignity in a region that India has not always treated with it.
Writing, for me, has always been a form of return. To the hills. To the stories. To the city that taught me that even the things that are difficult are worth naming.
"Shillong didn't just give me a home. It gave me a lens — and a responsibility to use it clearly." — Smita D. Talukdar