We became Brothers:
It was one of those cold, endless rainy days in Sohra—the kind of day when everything feels soaked, including your thoughts.
We sat inside a small bamboo hut, rain hammering down on the tin roof above, sipping tea that had gone lukewarm. The smoke from the fire was curling around us like it too wanted to join the conversation.
“You know”, I said, gazing out at the mist, “some people call it fate when two people from completely different worlds become friends.”
He chuckled, pushing a log deeper into the fire. “Fate? Hmm. I prefer coincidence. Fate sounds too… final. Like someone already wrote the story for us.”
“I agree,” I said. “Life’s messier than that. We make choices—small ones, big ones—and each one nudges us a little off track or on track. It’s circumstance, really. One tiny decision, and our lives might’ve never crossed.”
“And yet here we are,” he said, smiling.

Brothers

The co-author of this work was born on the southern slopes of the East Khasi Hills, in the village of Sohkhmi—a small settlement of just over fifty households nestled near the border with Bangladesh. His mother came from Kongthong, a village renowned for its strong traditional roots. Between 1919 and the 1980s, even as some in Kongthong converted to Christianity, the community’s way of life remained largely unchanged. The village was self-sustaining, with millet as the staple grain and rice considered an imported luxury.

By contrast, the father’s village—where the co-author was born and raised—had a different rhythm and diet, with rice as the main staple and a distinct cultural atmosphere. His father and grandmother were early settlers in that area, building a life with very little in a time when education was still a distant aspiration. As the eldest son, his father became the family’s pillar, ensuring that his sisters and their daughters could harvest oranges, betel nuts, and betel leaves during the various seasons. The fruit of his labor was shared without question, sustaining the family through lean times.

To support the household further, his father also brewed traditional liquor, which helped supplement the modest income. His mother brought few material possessions into the marriage, but together, they created a life rich in experience, if not in wealth. The co-author’s early years were marked by a closeness to nature, a deep sense of belonging, and the unspoken poetry of rural life—elements that continue to shape his worldview and contributions to this work.

Excerpt: A Home in the Slopes

by Iasaid Khongjee

I was born in 1967, though no one could ever tell me the day or the month—only that it was a time of ripe millet and whispering breezes in the southern slopes of the East Khasi Hills. Our village, Sohkhmi, lay perched on a narrow ridge above the plains of Bangladesh, a cluster of no more than fifty households, even now.

My mother came from Kongthong, a place of ancient whistled names and deep forests. Before the 1980s, it was untouched in many ways. Though Christianity had made its way there by the 1920s, people continued to live as they had always lived. Food was grown, gathered, and shared. Millet was our strength; rice was the only foreigner allowed into the pot.

But my father’s village—my own by birth and upbringing—was different. Rice had long become the staple. The songs were different, the rhythm of life tuned to another set of customs. My father and his mother were settlers, strangers at first, but strong in will. In a time when education was a distant dream, they had only enough to live by. Yet, my father, the eldest son, was the spine of his family.

Because of him, his two sisters and their daughters were able to harvest oranges, betel leaves, and betel nuts season after season. No one questioned when he used the fruits of that labour to feed us. He had earned it. He made liquor, too—quietly, steadily, and it brought in what little income we had. My mother, by contrast, had nothing—no wealth, no inheritance to speak of in those years. But her life was full of grit, and her past held secrets of strength I would only come to understand much later.

Everything in those days was poetry. I lived among the trees and streams like a barefoot verse, a child of nature, free yet tethered to the land. I had my father, his sisters, and their daughters. They all belonged to me—but I, somehow, belonged to no one. Not even my mother.

She came from the Khongjee clan. I never knew her mother—my grandmother. Her lineage was nearly lost to me, like a song half-remembered. But when her uncle died, and the twenty-one fields of her clan came up for inheritance, she stood alone as the rightful custodian. Custom dictated that she, the last woman of her line, should receive them. But her uncle’s children fought to claim it all. That battle dragged on for twenty-one years, nearly bleeding us dry—were it not for my father, his sisters, and his aging mother who stood behind her like a wall.

We were seven children, though one sister died young. I was the third-born but remember being raised by my father’s nieces more than by my mother. As a crawler, I was bathed and gathered from the village footpaths by their strong, calloused hands. My eldest sister played mother in every way that mattered—cooking, feeding, washing, caring. I saw home only in the mornings before school and at dusk when the fire was lit and it was time to eat.

My father’s grandmother came from Mawshuit, a remote traditional village made up of seven hamlets. Stricken by poverty, she and her husband wandered in search of work, eventually settling in Sohkhmi. They had no land at first, but someone offered them a plot to be paid in instalments. That land, in time, became ours.

My father knew every boundary—every tree and stream and stone that marked our family’s claim. He was a statesman in the ways that mattered to us: respected, discerning, the one who laid the groundwork for legal battles and resolved them with the clarity of a shaman. He wrote slowly, one alphabet at a time, but with precision. People came to him for counsel when land was in dispute or families needed justice.

One day, as a boy, I was up in a betel vine tree with an old man when we heard a strange thunder. Jets, from some military exercise, roared overhead. “Get down, Harai! It’s the devil!” the old man cried. We laughed about that story for years.

Sometimes, my father would take me with him to pluck nuts from the groves that belonged to his sisters or their daughters. He didn’t ask permission, and I used to worry about what they’d say. But none ever scolded him. Only later did I understand: a brother who had built the land with his bare hands had earned more than just fruit—he had earned trust.

Before leaving for the fields, he would stop by his youngest sister’s house for a cup of tea or a bowl of rice. His old mother, when still alive, would do anything for him—just to see us fed.

In 1977, I was sent to Cherrapunjee for school, and that was when I first heard the word God. I became a Christian in 1981. I wasn’t the kind who sat in pews obediently. I often sneaked out of church services, preferring the hills and clouds. Still, something from those early days of faith stayed with me—a belief that “my church is second to none.”

I held on to that like a badge, sometimes blindly. Until 1991, I was a fanatic. That same year, I nearly drowned in the shallow, man-made pool. Afterward, the world seemed different—my eyes, too. I began to ask questions. Not just about church, but about everything. About fate, tradition, family, and truth.

And the question that still echoes in my thoughts: Was I not destined for this?