I sat and watched a funeral procession snaking its way down the hill, through the rising mist and the languid, unceasing rain. Watching me watch the neat file of sombrely dressed men, women and a solitary child carrying a large, wooden cross was the driver of our vehicle, a Khasi who now lives in Guwahati. “Lucky man”, he said, wiping a drop of rain from his brow, “dying where he was born, his home.” I asked him whether he knew who had died, to which he nodded and turned the ignition key. Turning around, I saw that the gathering mist had swallowed the noiseless procession. It was as if it had not been there in the first place.

In a way, this journey — to Shillong, more than 20 years after I had first set eyes on this place of unreal beauty— was about my continuing engagement with the idea of ‘home’. All that has remained with me of that earlier trip are little pools of memory: a green, gloomy pine forest, the warmth of a creaky wooden hotel with a piano that had shining white keys, the hoarse voice of ravens at dawn, a terrifying trip to a remarkably rainless Cherrapunji. But above all, what has endured is the feeling of discovering a place like no other, a sleepy town, made enchanting by mist and rain, which, on being loved, had loved me back unquestioningly. Home, I had read somewhere much later, tastes a bit like that love.

The car jolted, the sudden movement breaking my reverie and filling my mind with a passage in Pakdondi in which Lila Majumdar describes her joy of returning to Shillong: to a house on a hill, its twinkling lights welcoming the weary souls. As we climbed closer to Shillong, its lights glowing in the failing light, I knew what she must have felt.

Trudging past Police Bazar, Ward’s Lake, the Polo Ground, the next morning, I discovered a Shillong that is vastly different. I could not find the bakery that had made delicious sweet buns . The tall, proud pine trees near Pinewood Hotel had all but disappeared and the piano lay locked in the hall. Plastic packets floated on the dull waters of Ward’s Lake, while the fish nibbled at soggy potato wedges that drifted by. Teenagers lay sprawled, smoking joints and watching tourists on the meadow near the Polo Ground. The hills, some of them bare, had sprouted ugly buildings, there were too many cars and too many people in a hurry. I felt hopeful only once, during a brief spell of rain, when the light faded and the mist returned to hide the warts, and I heard, once again, that lost bird-call, each element bringing back the Shillong that I remember and love the most.

Late in the evening, as I sat listening to the sweet voices of a local church choir, I kept thinking about the dead man and his home that I could no longer recognize. He won’t return, neither will the Shillong that I knew once. Perhaps home is no more than a fabric of favourite memories. It may also be a place, unreal yet alluring, that recedes further with every passing day, no matter how far one travels to find it.