(I am giving you another small excerpt from a book I am writing, I give you only sections (probably the last for some time) as the actual story is much deeper and will be there for you to see when you actually buy the book - 🤣😆😏)
The room held the weight of memory. Steam curled from teacups, curling around the past like smoke rising from a cooking fire. We were older now — lines around our eyes, silvers in our hair — but something in the way we sat, elbow to elbow, brought it all back. We didn’t have to reach for the stories; they arrived, uninvited and welcome, like old friends returning through the rain.
Roger was the first to break the spell.
“You know what still blows my mind?” he said, leaning back with a slow shake of his head. “Mom and Dad didn’t even flinch. Eight kids — well, seven and one stowed away — and they just packed up and left Canada for a place most people couldn’t even pronounce.”
Sally nodded, stirring her tea thoughtfully. “Dad got the job with the mission school, sure. But it was Mom who pushed for it. Said she wanted the kids to grow up somewhere less paved and more human. I didn’t get it then. I do now.”
Across the table, Grayce reached for a biscuit but didn’t eat it. “She told me that phrase,” she said. “I still remember. We were flying into Calcutta, holding her belly like a promise — and she just kept whispering it: ‘We’re going to find something new. Something real.’ She wasn’t scared. Just ready.”
I could picture it. My mother, a silhouette against the scratched airplane window, scribbling in her little green notebook — Some Khasi words, practice phrases, phonetic guesses and of course bible verses. She was building a life in syllables before we even saw the place. But also building on her believe that she and dad were doing Gods will.
Barbara’s voice softened. “She never stopped writing in that notebook. Even when we were sitting on the platform waiting for the train to Gauhati. She practiced like she was learning music. And in a way, she was — the rhythm of a new life.”
Joan laughed softly; eyes glazed with memory. “Landing in Calcutta was… shocking. The heat hit us like a slap. The air was thick with smoke, diesel, something sweet and rotting. And the noise — constant, unrelenting. But Mom? She just adjusted her bag, held everyone’s passports, and kept walking. Like she’d rehearsed it.”
Shirley sat up a little straighter, her voice low but clear. “It was terrifying. I remember being so small in that station — the crowds, the shouting, that feeling of being utterly foreign. But Mom? She was ahead of us. Always ahead. And always calm. As if she’d seen this in a dream.”
The train to Gauhati came up next — it always did. That long, rattling ride through the flatlands, with coal smoke streaming past open windows, and a rhythm that stitched itself into our bones.
“The clank of the wheels,” Barbara said, smiling, “was like a lullaby. The smell of coal and hot metal. The fields passed in slow motion. I remember thinking we were heading into a storybook.”
“But the story hadn’t even started yet,” said Joan. “Not really. Not until those Ambassador cars picked us up. Jammed full of kids and luggage, climbing roads that weren’t meant for vehicles. The cliffs dropped away, and you couldn’t see past the next bend. But Mom? She was craning her neck to see further, like she could already imagine home.”
Shirley looked out the rain-streaked window now, the present overlapping the past. “I thought we were going to die on those mountain roads,” she said plainly. “I didn’t understand how we could live in a place with no sidewalks, no snow, no cereal boxes. But I think… maybe that’s what made it stick. We weren’t there for comfort. We were there for something else.”
It was then I realized: they weren’t just telling stories. They were handing me pieces. Like heirlooms. Worn but essential. Bits of the road, coal dust, sweat and smoke — the real inheritance.
Maybe this is what Mom meant when she said I was a bridge.
The road narrowed as it rose, coiling through pine forests and scattered villages. The rain that had followed us from the plains turned to mist, curling low over the hills like it was part of the land’s breath. That was when we saw it — Mawlai. A place we couldn’t find on a map back then. Just a scattering of roofs, clotheslines, dogs, smoke. And for us, home.
Joan squinted into her cup like it held the memory. “It looked like the end of the road. I mean that literally. The car just stopped in the red mud, and beyond it was the house. Bare cement walls. Wooden window frames with no glass. Chickens wandering through the yard like they owned the place.”
Grayce let out a soft chuckle. “The floor was red oxide, not quite dry, and we had to avoid stepping in certain spots or we’d leave footprints. There were wires hanging like spaghetti. I remember the men’ hauling buckets of water up from the outside tap for us.”
Roger nodded. “I still have the scar on my shin from years later. Tripped on a loose stone trying to carry two buckets like the local kids. They laughed at me. I deserved it.”
Shirley’s voice was quieter. “The nights were the hardest at first. That sound of crickets so loud, and the mosquito nets that didn’t quite reach the floor. We’d lie in bed under those heavy wool blankets from Canada, sweating, watching the lizard crawl to the ceiling, listening to the dogs’ bark, and wondering where exactly we’d landed.”
Barbara smiled. “But even then, it wasn’t lonely. Not really. We were packed in — seven kids, a tired mother, and a father who somehow found the energy to hang blackboard paint on a wall and teach math by lantern light. There was always something happening.”
I could see it then — the unfinished house, teeming with life. A mattress on the floor. A pot bubbling with rice another with some beef stew. Our mother, hauling wet clothes onto a line strung between two bamboo poles. Our father marking exercise books with a ruler edge. We didn’t own much, but we carried a world with us.
Joan’s face softened. “There was one night — maybe the third or fourth — when the hydro power had failed again, and the rain was coming in sideways. We were all huddled in the big bedroom, candles lit, listening to Dad tell some story about wolves in the Canadian woods. Barb commented about her memory, thinking, ‘This is it. This is what matters.’”
Roger stirred. “Mom used to hum that old tune when she swept the floors. You remember it? A hymn maybe. Or something she made up. But she’d do it without thinking. Like the house would become calm just from her walking through it.”
Sally leaned her head on her hand, eyes far away. “She made it home. Even when it wasn’t ready. Even when we weren’t ready. She always moved like she could see what it would become. Like she believed in the shape of things before they existed.”
There was a silence after that. Not heavy. Just full.
Rain whispered down the glass. The kettle hissed softly in the corner. I looked around the table at my siblings — older now, weathered like the hills we once called home — and felt the strange fullness of returning. We hadn’t just come back together. We’d returned to something we left unfinished.
And maybe, finally, we were ready to tell it right.
Chapter Two: The Ones Who Carried Us
Before Mawlai, before the red mud and rice fields, before the Ambassador cars and the dizzying train ride from Calcutta, there were just two people: a man who measured life in quiet decisions, and a woman who dreamed in motion.
They met, we were told, on a college campus thick with books and purpose. He was a thinker — deliberate, disciplined, the kind of man who could spend an hour on a single math problem and enjoy every second of it. Or study a bible verse and make a whole sermon from it. She was different. Light on her feet, soft with her words, the kind of woman who made plans over breakfast and finished them by lunch.
And yet they fit.
Their love wasn’t flashy. It was steady. One of those mid-century partnerships built on shared prayer time, notes from the bible, and the belief that the world could be better — and they had work to do in it.
Bob once said, “I think Mom fell in love with Dad’s drive. And Dad, with her stillness.”
Barbara added, “And neither of them believed in half-measures.”
When the offer came — a post at a mission school in Northeast India — it wasn’t just a job. It was a calling. A leap into the unknown. And somehow, between a small house in Canada and a half-finished home in Mawlai, they made the decision that would shape our lives.
“I remember Mom saying it wasn’t about sacrifice,” Joan said one evening. “She said, ‘We’re not giving something up. We’re gaining something bigger than ourselves.’”
Dad didn’t talk much, but when he did, his words stayed with you. On a long walk once, he told Roger: “I wanted you kids to grow up in a place where the world wasn’t arranged for your comfort. I wanted you to know what mattered.”
And Mom — well, she had a hard time learning Khasi, ending up with a mix of Khasi and English. She went to the market with a baby on her hip, jotted notes in her green book, stitched mosquito nets by hand, and burned more rice than she’d admit. But she kept going.
She prepared us to go to the local school, dad was the headmaster. Made friends with the vegetable lady. Made here helpers feel like family. Talked with the neighbors even when they laughed at her accent. She refused to be just a visitor. And because of that, neither were we.
Shirley once said softly, “I used to watch her — early mornings, when the house was quiet. She’d sit with a cup of tea, staring out at the hills. I think she missed Canada… but she never let it show. She carried both homes inside her along with many burdens we only knew of later in life”
And Dad — every morning, in that same navy cardigan, he’d set off with a briefcase and a piece of chalk. He taught boys and girls who arrived barefoot, boys who would later become teachers, government workers, officers, nurses and fathers themselves. He never made a fuss. But he built a future with every lesson.
We didn’t understand it then. We were just kids, complaining about rice again, itching mosquito bites, brushing our teeth at an outdoor tap. But now, sitting around this table, the kettle hissing behind us and our stories unfolding like maps, we see it.
They were the ones who carried us across oceans and into a life we didn’t choose — and then quietly, gently, let us make it our own.
Chapter Two: The Ones Who Carried Us (continued)
In the beginning, everything felt unfamiliar — the light sharper, the sounds more insistent. Crows called out early in the morning, their voices carrying far across the hills. Roosters crowed at odd hours, as if time had its own rhythm here. The language drifted around me like music — graceful, melodic, but just out of reach. And then there were the neighbors.
They came in slow waves at first — curious glances, cautious smiles. The strange family with too many children and not enough rice we ate more potatoes. But Mom met every eye, waved first, and when that didn’t work, she laughed. Her Khasi was clumsy, but she used it anyway. “Phi long kumno?” she’d say, every morning, to anyone who passed. “How are you?” not really expecting an answer, but somehow felt it had to be asked.
People noticed.
The market woman started giving her the better tomatoes. The church ladies began to call her sister. Soon, village children poked their heads through our kitchen window just to watch us eat cereal.
The food away from home was its own battle. Sticky rice, dried fish, fiery chutneys. Joan cried the first time she bit into a raw green chili by mistake. Roger declared “this rice tastes like glue,” and spent two days hungry in protest. But slowly, our forks gave way to fingers. Our noses adjusted. Our tongues grew braver.
Mom tried to cook Khasi food, or at least her own version of it. Her Ja Shulia (sticky rice) was never quite right, too dry, but no one cared. It was hers. And she made it every Sunday, no matter what.
Dad, too, found his rhythm. He wore his old shoes until they wore through, never once complaining. He taught in the mornings, corrected papers by candlelight in the evening, and carried quiet authority like a second skin. Some evenings, the local boys would sit on our veranda just to ask him math questions. He always made time.
But it wasn’t all easy.
We were different. We spoke English at home. We didn’t quite look like anyone else. The girls, when they first arrived, wore shorts in a places where jainkyrshah and jainsem floated like flower petals. Boys stared. Aunts whispered. Sometimes it hurt. But slowly they adapted, getting comfortable in the Khasi jainkyrsha and even dressing up in the jainsem.
Shirley remembers one afternoon when she came home in tears. “They said I didn’t belong,” she whispered. “They said I was neither here nor there.”
Mom had crouched down, wiped her cheeks with the edge of her own jainkyrsha (apron), and said, “That’s right. We’re between. And that’s where bridges are built.”
We learned. We bent. We tried.
Some days, we played marbles with the local boys — and more often than not, we lost. Days we walked to school in the rain, our socks squelching in our shoes, and came home laughing anyway. There were festivals — noisy, colorful, full of dancing and songs we didn’t know the words to.
We watched, we listened, we blended — but we didn’t disappear.
Joan said it best: “We weren’t trying to be Khasi. We were learning how to live beside Khasi. With respect. With gratitude.”
At night, when the kerosene lamps flickered and the frogs began their singing, we’d huddle in our mosquito nets and tell stories. Sometimes about Canada, sometimes about the hills around us, sometimes about nothing at all. But in those whispered moments, in the hush between homesickness and hope, we became who we were.
And always, there was Mom. At the market, at the school gate, stirring pots on a smoky stove, stitching our names into borrowed sweaters. Rooting us.
And Dad — steady as ever — drawing chalk lines on a board, planting logic in young minds, never needing applause.
They made Mawlai more than a place we lived.
They made it home.
