Nohkalikai Falls tragedy
At a Glance
- Central figures: Ka Likai, a young Khasi woman widowed early and remarried to a man who resented her daughter from her first marriage; the unnamed second husband; and the small girl he killed.
- Setting: The village of Rangjyrteh, near the edge of what is now called Nohkalikai Falls in the East Khasi Hills, Meghalaya, in the matrilineal Khasi tradition.
- The turn: The second husband, jealous of the attention Ka Likai gave her daughter, murdered the child while Ka Likai was away and cooked the flesh into a meal he served her.
- The outcome: Ka Likai discovered what she had eaten when she found her daughter’s severed fingers in a betel-nut basket, and she ran from the house and threw herself off the cliff edge into the gorge below.
- The legacy: The waterfall where she leapt is called Nohkalikai - “the leap of Ka Likai” - and it remains the tallest plunge waterfall in India, carrying her name in the Khasi language to this day.
Ka Likai was carrying iron-smelted da blades to the market at Sohra when her first husband died. She was young, not yet twenty by some tellings, and she had a daughter small enough to carry on her hip. In the Khasi way, the child belonged to her mother’s clan, and the house was Ka Likai’s house, and the land was her mother’s land. A woman alone with a child was not unusual in the hills. But Ka Likai worked the betel-nut groves and the iron trade both, and the days were long, and eventually she married again.
The second husband moved into her house. That was how it went. The man came to the woman’s home, slept under her roof, ate at her fire. He had no claim on the house or the child. The child was not his.
The Second Husband
He was not named in the telling, or if he was, the name did not survive. What survived was what he did. He watched Ka Likai carry the girl everywhere - to the groves, to the stream where she washed the betel leaves, to the market when the weather held. When Ka Likai came home, she went to the child first. She fed the child first. She slept with the child between them.
The man said nothing. Or he said things that Ka Likai did not hear, or heard and set aside. She had work. The girl needed feeding. The betel-nut harvest would not wait.
He began to drink rice beer alone in the house while Ka Likai was at the groves. The child was left with him on some days when the work was far. She was perhaps three or four. She could walk but not far. She played on the floor of the house with stones and pieces of cane.
The Day Ka Likai Went to the Groves
Ka Likai left before the light was full. The betel palms were a walk of some distance from Rangjyrteh, and she would not be back until the afternoon. She told the man to watch the girl. She said this the way she always said it - quickly, already moving, her knup basket on her back.
The house was quiet after she left.
What happened next was told in different ways by different families in the village, but the bones of it did not change. The man killed the child. He cut the body. He cooked the flesh with turmeric and the spices that were in the house. He set it out in a dish as though it were goat or pork. He cleaned the floor. He put the small fingers and knuckles - the parts he could not disguise - into the kwai basket where Ka Likai kept her betel nut and lime.
When Ka Likai came home, the food was ready. The man told her the child was sleeping at a neighbor’s house. She was tired and hungry. She sat down and ate.
The Kwai Basket
After eating, Ka Likai reached for her kwai basket. This was ordinary - betel nut after a meal was as common as breathing in the Khasi hills. She opened the basket, took out a nut, and found among the leaves and lime a small finger. Then another.
She knew the size of her daughter’s hands.
The telling does not describe what Ka Likai said or whether she said anything at all. Some versions say she screamed. Some say she went silent and her face changed and she simply stood up from the floor. What every version agrees on is that she did not stay in the house. She did not kill the man, or if she tried, the story does not remember it. She ran.
She ran out of the house, past the village edge, past the trees, past the point where the ground gave way to the cliff. She did not stop. The gorge below was deeper than any in the hills - the water fell more than a thousand feet straight down, crashing into the rocks and the pool at the bottom where the spray rose back up like smoke.
Ka Likai went over the edge.
The Water That Falls
The stream that feeds the waterfall was there before Ka Likai and has been there since. It comes off the Cherrapunji plateau, where the monsoon drops more rain than almost anywhere else on earth, and it gathers in a channel and pours over the cliff lip in a single unbroken column. In the dry months the fall thins to a white thread. In the rains it roars and the mist soaks everything within a hundred yards.
The Khasi people named it Nohkalikai. Noh - the fall, the leap. Ka Likai - her name. The leap of Ka Likai. It is the tallest plunge waterfall in India, and visitors come to Sohra - the place the British called Cherrapunji - to stand at the viewpoint and look down into the gorge. Some of them know whose name they are saying. Some do not.
What Remained at Rangjyrteh
The second husband’s fate is not consistently remembered. Some say the village drove him out. Some say he fled before anyone understood what had happened. Some say he was found dead, though by whose hand varies. The story does not keep him. He has no name in it because the story chose not to preserve it.
What it preserved was Ka Likai. Her name is in the water. It is said by Khasi children who have never been to the falls and by tourists reading signs in English. The sound of the falls carries a long way in the wet season - you can hear it from the road before you see the gorge open up.
No shrine stands at the cliff edge. No festival marks the day. The Khasi do not celebrate what happened to Ka Likai. They remember it. The falls remember it. The water goes over the edge and does not come back, and that is the shape of the story - a woman running, the ground ending, the long fall, and the sound of water hitting stone far below.