The heavenly ladder

At a Glance

• Central figures: Ka Diengiei, the great tree that joined earth to heaven; the sixteen families (ki hynniew trep) who descended from heaven to live on earth; and the seven families who remained above.
• Setting: The Khasi Hills of present-day Meghalaya, in the oral tradition of the Khasi people; the story accounts for the original connection between ka ri (the earth) and ka bneng (the heavenly kingdom of U Blei, the Creator).
• The turn: Humanity grew careless and then corrupt, and the seven families in heaven cut the tree that served as the bridge between the two realms.
• The outcome: The sixteen families on earth were stranded permanently below, separated from the divine homeland and from their seven kin above.
• The legacy: The Khasi identify themselves as ki hynniew trep ki hynniew skum - the seven huts and seven families - and the severed tree remains the explanation for why communication with the divine requires a Lyngdoh (priest) as intermediary rather than direct passage.

The tree stood on the summit of the Shillong Peak, and its highest branches touched the floor of heaven. It was not like other trees. It had no fruit and no flowers. Its bark was the color of iron, and its trunk was so broad that seven men linking arms could not circle it. The Khasi called it Ka Diengiei.

No one remembers who climbed it first. What the elders say is this: there were originally sixteen families living on the earth below, and seven families living in the kingdom of U Blei above, and the tree was the road between them. The sixteen could climb up to visit. The seven could climb down. The passage was open. Earth and heaven were two floors of the same house, and Ka Diengiei was the ladder.

The Sixteen on the Earth

The sixteen families had been sent down by U Blei to tend the earth. They cleared the forests and planted rice on the hillsides. They kept bees. They drank from the rivers that ran off the plateau into the plains below. The earth was younger then and the soil gave freely.

Each morning the people could look up and see the crown of Ka Diengiei disappearing into cloud, and they knew the road was still there. Some of them climbed it regularly - to attend festivals in U Blei’s court, to consult the seven families on questions of planting and marriage, to bring offerings. The Lyngdoh of each clan would go up at the turning of the seasons and come back down with instructions. The tree’s roots drank from a spring near the summit, and the spring never went dry.

The seven families above watched over the sixteen below. They were not gods - they were kin. But they lived closer to U Blei and had agreed to stay in the heavenly country as caretakers of the upper world. The arrangement was a family arrangement, as most Khasi arrangements are. The youngest daughter’s household held the ladder’s roots. The obligations moved through the mother’s line.

The Forgetting

What went wrong happened slowly. The sixteen families multiplied. The hillsides filled with villages. The new generations climbed the tree less often. Some of them stopped climbing altogether. They forgot the names of the seven families. They forgot the correct offerings. They began to quarrel among themselves over land and water and the boundaries of their fields.

Worse than the quarreling was the cutting. The forests on the hills began to thin. People took wood for houses, for fuel, for the fires they needed to clear new fields for rice. The animals retreated deeper into the valleys. The springs on the lower slopes dried up, one by one.

The seven families watched from above. They sent messages down through the Lyngdoh: Stop cutting. The land cannot bear it. Remember what you were sent to do.

The sixteen families heard the messages. Some listened. Most did not. The cutting continued. The quarreling worsened. People began to cheat one another at market, to steal cattle, to lie in the clan councils. A few of them - the elders say this quietly - began to worship things other than U Blei.

The Axe at the Root

The seven families met in council. They had warned enough. The earth-dwellers had broken faith - not in one dramatic act but in the accumulation of small betrayals, season after season, until the weight of them was heavier than the tree could carry.

They took an axe to Ka Diengiei.

The cutting took a long time. The trunk was enormous and the wood was dense as stone. The sound carried down through the roots and the people on earth heard it - a rhythmic striking, faint but steady, coming from inside the clouds. Some of them looked up. A few understood what was happening and wept. Most went on with their work.

When the tree finally fell, it fell away from the earth, toppling back into the heavenly country. The stump remained on the peak, and the roots remained in the ground around the spring, but the trunk and the crown were gone. The road was closed.

The Stump on the Peak

The sixteen families stood on the earth and looked up at empty sky. The cloud closed over the place where the crown had been. No ladder, no road, no passage. The seven families were gone from them - not dead, not enemies, simply unreachable.

The Lyngdoh of each clan went to the summit and stood around the stump. The spring still flowed from among the roots. The stump was still warm. They poured rice beer on it and spoke the names of the seven families, one by one, as many as they could remember. Some of the names were already lost.

They could not rebuild the tree. No axe could shape a trunk that tall, and no seed could grow that fast. The passage between earth and heaven was finished. From that day the Khasi would have to speak to U Blei through prayer and through the Lyngdoh’s intercession - indirectly, at a distance, with no guarantee of being heard.

What Remained

The stump is said to be still there, somewhere on the high ground near the Shillong Peak, buried under moss and fern and the root systems of younger trees. Some Khasi elders say you can find it if you know where to look. Others say the forest has swallowed it entirely and only the spring remains, flowing from between roots that once held heaven to the earth.

The sixteen families became the Khasi people. They call themselves ki hynniew trep ki hynniew skum - the seven huts and seven families - because they count their kin above as well as their kin below, even though they cannot reach them. The number seven appears in Khasi ritual again and again: seven clans, seven offerings, seven steps in certain prayers. It is the number of what was lost.

The Khasi do not tell this story as tragedy exactly. They tell it as explanation. Why is the earth separate from heaven. Why must the Lyngdoh stand between the people and U Blei. Why the forests on the hills matter, and what happens when you cut without remembering what holds the world together. The tree is gone. The roots remain. The spring still runs.