Lessons in Fog and Firewood

First Position- English, Writing Contest 2025

By Rishika Kakoty

City: Shillong, Meghalaya

Description: This heartfelt letter to Shillong, reflectively places the city as an educator- where rhythms, landscapes and communities impart enduring lessons. Through intimate recollections of family histories, everyday life and resistance, the author gives emphasis to the local voices and challenges the notions of progress in a city. In weaving personal experience with insight, the author writes about how the city became a site of knowledge and belonging through its rituals, cultures and landscapes.

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Image source: Author

Dear Shillong,

I have started this letter more times than I would like to admit, only to abandon it halfway each time, as though my words were not good enough for you. Probably because the kind of lessons you gave me were not immediate nor instant, they did not flash like lightning but arrived like the famed Shillong fog, curling through the pine trees, silent but certain, and all encompassing. Yet today, far from your hills and haunted by the poignant memory of the smell of your rain, I feel a gnawing pull. An urgent need to speak. An attempt to try and at the least, acknowledge what you have given me, lessons wrapped not in PowerPoint presentations but in the clouds that arrive unannounced and yet unapologetically embraces you so tenderly.

You have never been just a city. You were my first educator; stern in silence, rich in metaphor. You did not instruct, you nudged, you whispered. And if one listened long enough, you told stories that no encyclopedia could match.

My first classrooms were not in any school halls but around the bonfire. We lived in a joint family, an idea that feels antique in today’s milieu which seems to be getting frayed and unstuck in the relentless pace of urban life. But back then, we were whole. My siblings and I would lean in close as firelight flickered on the faces of our father and uncle. Their stories came in quiet tones, not declarations, and were measured not in grandeur, but in grit. Of waking at dawn to milk cows, their fingers numb with cold, delivering in aluminium jars before school had even opened its gates. My grandmother, a schoolteacher, somehow balancing an earning almost too thin with a home too full. My grandfather, a freedom fighter, often hiding from the British in the day and returning home for a moment in the dark to catch a slight glimpse of his loved ones, his courage stitched into the fabric of risk and resilience. These were not just family tales which sounded adventurous and grand, they were life histories. Carried forward not in ink, but in breath.

You turned ordinary days into something unforgettable. Power cuts that irked did not just test patience, they taught intimacy. Lighting candles together, pausing routines. Sudden rain was not just a nuisance; it was an unplanned lesson in surrender. I remember the sound of it drumming on tin roofs for hours, sometimes days, an unending chorus that soaked clothes on the line and plans on paper. There were monsoon stretches when nothing would dry, when everything smelt of damp earth and persistence. Once, I waited at the bus stop, shivering in my sweater, slightly too thin, watching the clouds gather like secrets overhead. I had planned the day down to its last minute, assignments, errands, down even to the exact time I would reach home. And then, without warning, the sky opened. Rain that felt less like water and more like surrender.

I darted under a shop’s overhang, drenched and defeated, the list dissolving in my mind like ink in the rain. That day, I realised, control is comforting, but it is not always real. The weather, like life here, teaches you to let go. To find grace in soaked socks and ruined plans.

I remember my route to school through Dhankheti, past the Naamghar, where the day began in prayer. The Cathedral stood nearby, its blue stillness brushing against the edge of my school, Loreto Convent. There was something about that walk that taught me about coexistence even before I had ever read the word.

You offered lessons through strangers too. One winter evening, I ducked into a small roadside momo stall in Beathouse, famous for the way its charcoal smoke curls into the cold air and how the smell of chula-cooked momo clings to your clothes long after you leave. The woman tending the stall handed me a plate with hands dusted in ash, her fingers steady from repetition. She referred to me as Khun, my child. A word soft with familiarity, not ownership. Nearby, a group of women sat on bamboo muras, woven tight with the craftsmanship of the hills. Their laughter was low, their conversation private yet welcoming. They passed around kwai, betel nut tucked into folded leaf and with each exchange wordless, yet binding. No one had to say “come in,” but I felt it anyway. That is how bonds are formed here, not through introductions or ceremony, but through offerings passed hand to hand, red-stained smiles, and warmth. I did not take the kwai, because children rarely do, but I understood at that moment that I was not a stranger. I was held in place, quietly, gently. Later in college,

I read about the “everyday” as a site of cultural production. But I had already lived it. You have taught me. In the pauses, in the rituals, in the daily repetition of gestures that held people together.

Your market, Iewduh, was another kind of university. Run by women, ruled by rhythm. Here, the economy wore a woman’s face. Negotiations, decisions, leadership, all handled not by anomaly, but by norm. In a country that writes patriarchy into its street maps, you stood apart.

The Khun Khatduh, the youngest daughter, inherits. While the husband shifts into her home. It unsettles the idea of power as something masculine. It shows it as something inherited through care.

And then came the contradiction, like a door that had been forced ajar without the courtesy of a knock. It was called development! The sleepy village of Domiasiat felt violated. Maybe rightly so. They came wanting Uranium. Said it was for the nation. But you knew better. Your people did not shout. They resisted, calm, informed, and rooted. One matriarch who was in her eighties, Spility Lyngdoh Langrin stood tall, like the timeless monoliths, defiant and strong. When offered an enormous sum of money to relent, she answered “Money cannot buy me freedom.” The entire community rallied around her and they ultimately won. I would not need another lesson in courage, conviction, integrity, and resilience. I saw the same wisdom years later while speaking to traditional healers for a research report in the nearby Mylliem and Laitkroh areas. Their knowledge, rooted in herbs, spirit, memory could not be captured in prescriptions or policy briefs. It was ancestral, ethical, and ecological. They did not reject science. They questioned development that uprooted. One elderly told me, “We are not against hospitals. But the forest taught us first.”

Because memory is a kind of protest.

Because the winter sun had once warmed their backs in school yards. Because cherry blossoms had bloomed each November against grey skies. Because we had grown up knowing nature not as a resource but as a companion, lessons echoed in the sacred groves of Mawphlang, where the forest is not just protected but revered. Even today, visitors are warned not to take anything, not even a leaf from the grove, with the belief that doing so invites misfortune. It is a belief, yes, but also a powerful mechanism of preservation. In a world where 'development' is measured by five-lane highways and in the speed of five-minute deliveries, where convenience means screens instead of voices, and contactless replaces connection, this quiet refusal to exploit, even a leaf is a form of resistance. With a question that lingers, can convenience without conscience really be

considered “growth”?

Shillong, you have taught us that nature is not just a backdrop, it is breath. So, when they came with numbers and metrics, you responded with stories. With soil. With skin. And you won.

Real development listens. Yours was never measured in height or steel. It looked like Sohbah, a pomelo being peeled slowly, shared with fingers stained from laughter and salt. It looked like waiting for the rain to pass under a stranger’s tin roof.

And it looked like this, a driver pausing, not slowing, pausing so I could cross the road. Not once, not rarely, but almost always. That is what surprised me. It was not an exception. It was culture, unspoken. A rhythm that made space for gentleness. After I moved out to Kolkata for college, I noticed the difference.

In Shillong, it felt different. It was different. Even the traffic carried a kind of ethic: not dominance, but deference. And in that small gesture, being allowed to pass, I felt seen. Not just as a body in the road, but as someone who belonged to a place that remembered how to wait.

Even when I left you, you stayed. In Mumbai, I searched for your stillness amidst the sprawl. In Guwahati, I tried to find your rhythm but the pulse was different. Someone once asked what Shillong was like. I said, “She smells like firewood and old stories.” They laughed. But I did not. Because I meant it.

Perhaps now I see more clearly, what you taught me was not how to succeed in the way the world defines success. You taught me how to live. How to carry memory like rainwater in cupped hands. How to honour a place without owning it.

And these stories, of bonfires and rain, protests, and pomelos, they are life histories. Not recorded in census sheets or policy papers, but passed on like sacred breath. In academic language, they would be called subaltern voices or counter-narratives. But to me, they were just home. They mattered because they refused to be silenced by dominant frameworks. They did not fit into flyover dreams or GDP graphs. And maybe that is why they matter more.

You fractured the dominant discourse. While the world chased visibility, you taught me to listen. While the nation pushed for vertical progress, you asked me to walk slow, to look down, to remember. Your knowledge did not shout. It steeped, like kwai in the mouth. Like moss on stone.

You did not offer me certainty; you offered me questions. And maybe, just maybe that is the most radical education of all.

Yours truly,

Not your visitor but your Khun.

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About the Author:

Rishika Kakoty

Born and brought up in Shillong, Rishika is pursuing her Bachelor’s in Sociology at St. Xavier’s College (Autonomous), Kolkata. She is deeply curious about people, culture, and the everyday moments that often go unnoticed. With a passion for connecting ideas and experiences, she hopes to translate her learning into meaningful contributions within and beyond academia. Guided by the philosophy of lahe lahe, she believes that real change begins when one notices and values the ordinary.