The origin of betel nut

At a Glance

• Central figures: Ka Soh Kyllang, a young Khasi woman; her husband U Mawphor, a lime-maker; and Ka Phreit, the areca palm that grew from their shared grief.
• Setting: The Khasi Hills of Meghalaya, in the matrilineal Khasi tradition; a limestone ridge above a village where betel and lime were first brought together.
• The turn: Ka Soh Kyllang dies in childbirth, and U Mawphor, unable to eat or speak, sits beside her grave until he too dies; from their bodies grow the three plants of the betel quid.
• The outcome: The areca palm, the betel vine, and a deposit of calcium-rich limestone appear on the burial site, and the villagers discover that chewing these three things together produces a red juice that warms the mouth and loosens the tongue.
• The legacy: The Khasi practice of offering kwai - betel nut, leaf, and lime - at every gathering, funeral, negotiation, and greeting, as a sign that what passes between people carries something of the dead who made it possible.

The woman’s name was Ka Soh Kyllang. She lived in a village on the ridge above the Umiam, and she was pregnant through the cold season, and she was not well.

Her husband was U Mawphor. He burned limestone in a pit behind the house, cracking the rock with fire and water until it became powder. His hands were white with it. When he touched her face at night, the powder left a pale mark on her cheek, and in the morning she would wash it off in the stream, and the other women would see the mark before she washed it and would know he had been gentle with her. That was how the village knew the marriage.

Ka Soh Kyllang’s Sickness

The pregnancy was difficult from the start. Ka Soh Kyllang could not keep food down. The rice came back up. The dried fish came back up. Her mother’s mother, who was old and had seen many births, said the child was sitting wrong - turned with its back against the spine, pressing into the stomach. There was not much to do except wait and hope it turned.

U Mawphor brought her things. He brought her wild honey from the cliff nests above the river. He brought her sour fruit from the forest edge. He brought her water from a spring higher up the ridge, because someone had told him the water there was sweeter. None of it helped. She grew thinner even as her belly grew larger.

The old woman said to U Mawphor, bring me lime. Not your burning lime - the paste, mixed with water, the kind you would use for whitewashing. He brought it. She mixed a small amount with a leaf she had picked from a vine growing on the oak behind the house and told Ka Soh Kyllang to chew it. Ka Soh Kyllang chewed it and spat red and said her stomach felt quieter. It was the first thing that had worked in weeks.

But the leaf and lime were not enough. The sickness came back. The child did not turn.

The Night on the Ridge

Ka Soh Kyllang went into labor on a night when the clouds were low and the rain was the fine rain that does not stop. The old woman was there. Two other women from the iing were there. U Mawphor waited outside the door with his hands still white from his work.

The labor lasted through the night and into the morning and into the next night. Ka Soh Kyllang bled. The old woman’s face told the story before anyone spoke. The child came, a girl, breathing, alive, but Ka Soh Kyllang did not stop bleeding and could not be stopped.

She died before the second dawn. The child lived. The women took the child to her mother’s sister, as was proper in the Khasi way - the lineage runs through the mother, and the youngest daughter of the grandmother’s house would raise the girl.

U Mawphor sat outside the door. He did not go in when they called him. He did not eat when they brought him food. He sat with his white hands open on his knees.

U Mawphor at the Grave

They buried Ka Soh Kyllang on the ridge, at the place where the limestone showed through the soil. It was his limestone - the same deposit he had been burning for years. He had walked over her grave-ground every day of their marriage without knowing it.

He went to the grave and sat beside it. The village Lyngdoh came and spoke to him. His wife’s mother came and spoke to him. The old woman who had tried to help came and spoke to him. He did not answer any of them. He sat with his legs crossed and his hands on the ground, and the lime on his fingers mixed with the red earth of the grave.

He was there for three days. On the morning of the fourth day, the women who brought water past the ridge saw that he had fallen to his side and was not breathing. They buried him next to her.

What Grew

Within a season, three things appeared on the burial site.

The first was a palm - tall, slender, with a smooth grey trunk that looked like it had been rubbed with ash. It bore a cluster of hard green nuts at its crown, each one the size of a child’s fist. This was ka phreit, the areca palm. It had not grown on that ridge before. No one had planted it.

The second was a vine. It crept along the ground from where Ka Soh Kyllang lay and climbed the trunk of the areca palm, wrapping around it the way she had held his arm when they walked to the river. Its leaves were broad, dark, heart-shaped, with a sharp taste when bitten. This was the betel vine - ka tympew.

The third was not a plant. The limestone deposit under U Mawphor’s grave-spot pushed closer to the surface, as though the earth were offering up what he had spent his life burning. White calcium paste seeped through the soil.

A woman from the village - her name is not remembered, but she was curious and not afraid - took a nut from the palm, a leaf from the vine, and a smear of the lime from the ground. She wrapped the nut in the leaf with the lime and put it in her mouth and chewed.

The juice ran red. Her mouth went warm. She said later that it was like having something to say after a long silence.

Ka Kwai

The village began to chew. They took the nut and the leaf and the lime and offered them to visitors, and the visitors took the practice home. It spread across the Khasi Hills, from the Ri Bhoi to the Jaintia, from the War country in the south to the Pnar villages in the east.

They called it kwai.

It is offered at funerals. It is offered at births. It is placed on the table when two clans sit down to settle a land dispute or arrange a marriage. It is the first thing given to a guest. To refuse kwai is to refuse the opening of speech between people.

The nut comes from the palm that grew from the wife’s body. The leaf comes from the vine that climbed toward the husband. The lime comes from the ground where the man who burned limestone was buried. When a Khasi elder offers you kwai, they are not offering you a stimulant. They are putting something in your hand that was made by two people who could not bear to be apart, and a woman whose name no one remembers, who was brave enough to chew what the dead had grown.

The red juice, when you spit it, stains the ground the same color as the earth of that ridge above the Umiam.