iii.                Calcutta to Shillong

In the autumn of 1946 I went up to Shillong in the Khasi Hills, of what was then Assam. The route to Shillong from Calcutta was from Sealdah Station on the Eastern Bengal Railway (E.B.R) to Parbatipur, where the change was made from broad gauge to metre gauge, on to Gauhati, and then by bus to Shillong. The trip proved to be one of surprises for me.

Going on the same journey, as I discovered at Sealdah Station in Calcutta, was a chap who had been in Victoria School with me. We naturally decided to share a compartment. Dougie, whose parents lived in Shillong, had made the trip often and at Parbatipur was quick off the mark to secure accommodation for us on the metre gauge train. Dougie had been considered a bit of a duffer at school and had been held back in the same standard (class) a couple of times. Part of his problem, ignored at the school, was that he was hard of hearing. He had inherited that from his mum. The other thing for which he was noted was his running. Though he was a small fellow, with short legs, he was always a serious contender, and sometimes a winner, in the long distance events. He had an unusually slow heart rate and could keep those little legs going while average legs and hearts laboured and petered out.

The change at Parbatipur came late at night. Dougie and I were not long in getting into our bunks in the compartment the two of us had to ourselves. I was asleep when the light in the compartment was switched on and I heard Dougie jump up and scoot across the floor. There he collared a boy who was going through the pockets of the clothes we had hung on pegs. The thief had entered through the window of the washroom, an entrance not large enough for a grown person. Dougie, the one with impaired hearing, had been a lot sharper than me. We held the boy until the next stop and threatened him with the police. More to save ourselves the fuss and bother than to hearken to his pleadings, we let him go, and he was gone with the quickness of a fish released in water. The encounter with the thief was the first surprise.

The second surprise was much more pleasant. The metre gauge train arrived at Pandu in the morning and there I had to take a ferry across the Brahmaputra. And what a river:  immense, powerful and serene. I had seen the Ganges at Hardwar and the Jumna at Agra, and the confluence of these two rivers at Allahbad, and they had been splendid, but the Brahmaputra was awe-inspiring. It prompted reverence for the god Brahma, from whom it got its name.

The final surprise was an eye-popper in quite a different way. I was waiting for a taxi on the street outside the bus terminus in Shillong and watched Khasi women in their body length covering of tatmokleih (head scarf) and jainkup (shawl from shoulder to feet) pass me. The women were demurely dressed, and in that they were like the Indian women I had known all my life; but their deportment was altogether different. They walked three and four abreast, talking and laughing in careless cheerfulness, looking squarely at everything and everyone, completely at ease. I had never been scrutinized in that open fashion by women. None commented, none stopped; they looked me up and down and walked on, neither modest nor immodest, but definitely not main stream Indian. Tribal minorities, such as the Khasis, are found in many parts of India. They are not stereotypical Indians, as Anglo-Indians are not, and it is likely their presence in Indian society has contributed to the tolerance of Indians for racial and ethnic differences.

After staying a while in Shillong I discovered the reason for the behaviour of the Khasi women. They acted as though they owned the earth because they literally did own the earth. The Khasi tribe is matrilineal; women, not men, are the legal inheritors and possessors of land and property. The independence and social status of the women was prevalent on the streets.