The Iei tree

At a Glance

• Central figures: Ka Iei, the great tree that once connected earth and heaven; U Blei, the Creator; the first Hynniewtrep (the seven huts, the original Khasi clans who remained on earth).
• Setting: The Khasi Hills of present-day Meghalaya, in the oral tradition of the Khasi people; the story takes place when heaven and earth were still joined and the sixteen clans moved freely between them.
• The turn: Humans cut down the Iei tree - the only bridge between the two worlds - severing the link between the seven clans on earth and the nine clans in heaven.
• The outcome: The seven earthbound clans - the Hynniewtrep - were permanently separated from their kin above; they could no longer visit U Blei or return to heaven at will.
• The legacy: The Khasi identify themselves as Ki Hynniewtrep - the seven huts, the seven families - and the memory of the lost tree marks the origin of their separation from the divine and of mortal life as it now is.

Sixteen families lived between two places. They had houses in heaven, near U Blei, and they had houses on the Khasi Hills, where the rivers ran cold and the forests were thick with orchid and fern. They went back and forth as people go between one village and another, because a tree grew on the hilltop and its crown touched the floor of heaven. The tree was called Ka Iei. Its trunk was broader than any banyan. Its roots gripped the rock of the hills, and its highest branches disappeared into cloud and then past cloud into the place where U Blei sat.

No one climbed it. You did not need to climb it. You walked its roots and the roots became a path and the path rose through the bark and the bark opened and you were there - standing in heaven, looking back down at the green hills below. The sixteen families did this whenever they wished. Seven of the families preferred earth. Nine preferred heaven. But the tree was open to all.

The Seven and the Nine

The seven who stayed mostly on earth were the ones who had planted rice in the valleys and raised goats on the slopes. Earth was good to them. The soil was red and deep. The rains came when the rains should come. The rivers gave fish. The hills gave shelter. They built their huts - one hut per clan, seven huts in all - and they lived well, and when they wanted to see their kin or speak to U Blei they walked up to the Iei tree and went through it.

The nine who stayed mostly in heaven had their own reasons. Heaven was steady. There was no hunger there, no sickness, no rain that came too hard or not at all. U Blei was near enough to ask questions of. The nine clans were content.

But the seven on earth grew used to earth. They liked the weight of it - the feel of mud between the toes, the noise of insects at night, the taste of rice beer after a day of work. They went up the tree less often. Seasons passed when none of the seven made the journey. The tree stood on the hilltop, patient, its crown still touching heaven, but no one walked its roots.

The Cutting

What happened next the Khasi elders tell differently depending on the clan and the village. In some tellings, the seven clans grew proud. They said: we do not need heaven. We have everything here. In other tellings, it was not pride but forgetfulness - they simply stopped thinking about the tree the way you stop thinking about a door you never open. In still other tellings, it was greed. The tree was vast, its wood was strong, and someone wanted the timber.

What is agreed is this: the seven clans cut the Iei tree down.

The sound it made when it fell was heard across the hills and into the valleys and down to the plains. Some say the sound reached heaven itself, and the nine clans standing up there felt the ground shake under their feet. The trunk split. The crown crashed through the cloud layer and broke apart on the rocks below. Bark and leaf and branch scattered across the hillside. Where the roots had gripped the stone, there was raw rock, pale and exposed, like a wound.

The path was gone. The bridge was gone. The seven clans stood on earth and looked up and saw cloud and sky and nothing beyond it.

Ka Iei Falls Silent

U Blei did not punish them. That is worth saying. The Creator did not send a flood or a plague or a curse. He did not need to. The consequence was in the act itself. The tree was the connection, and now the tree was wood on the ground, already beginning to rot.

The nine clans in heaven could not come down. The seven clans on earth could not go up. Families were split. The dead could no longer walk easily into the presence of U Blei. The living could no longer ask the Creator their questions face to face, standing before him as a child stands before a parent. Whatever they needed to know, they would have to figure out on their own, or send prayers upward and hope the prayers were heard.

The seven clans wept. They tried to plant another tree, but no tree grew that tall. They tried to build a ladder, but no ladder reached. They piled stones, and the stones fell. The hilltop where the Iei tree had stood was bare. Rain washed the sawdust away. Moss covered the stump. After a while even the stump was gone.

Ki Hynniewtrep

The seven clans remained. They called themselves Ki Hynniewtrep - the seven huts - because that is what they were: seven families on the earth, with no way back.

They buried their dead in stone and bone, knowing the dead would not walk the tree road to heaven. They appointed the Lyngdoh, the priests, to speak to U Blei on behalf of the living, since the living could no longer speak to him directly. They kept the matrilineal line - the mother’s house, the mother’s name, the youngest daughter inheriting the iing - because the mothers had been the ones who remembered. The mothers had been the ones who wept longest when the tree fell. The mothers would hold the clans together now that the clans were alone.

The nine clans in heaven are still there. The Khasi know this. They are kin. They are family. But the road is closed.

The Bare Hilltop

On certain hills in the East Khasi range, there are clearings where no tree grows tall. The rock is bare. The soil is thin. Elders point to these places and say: here. Or perhaps here. The Iei tree stood somewhere in these hills, and the place where it stood has not healed. The earth remembers what was taken from it, even when the people have learned to live without it.

The Khasi do not tell this story as tragedy exactly. They tell it the way you tell someone how you moved away from home - matter-of-factly, with a weight underneath the words. The tree was there. They cut it. Now it is not there. That is how they came to be who they are: people of the hills, the seven huts, standing on the earth with heaven out of reach and the stump long gone under the moss.