13/09/2021
The Legend of Nohkalikai Falls in a poetry!!!
While you are at home, you can catch up on one of Meghalaya's most tragic tales. The Legend of Nohkalikai Falls - beautifully presented in poetry by Bah Wandell Passah. We hope you love this.
Ka Nohkalikai
A Rangjyrteh hut did see a new dawn
When unto the couple, a lovely daughter was born,
Pain of labour gone, worry no more
When this most precious gift knocked at their door.
Ka Likai had to go to work sooner
Her husband persistent with cough, she a sole bread earner,
And the loving husband didn’t get to suffer long
For God called him back to where he does belong.
At this juncture, my heart is heavy to say
Medical science was not advanced as of today,
So iron smelting industry couldn’t escape a long list
Of its poor faithful workers suffering from tuberculosis.
To manipulate life and death no one can
After a year Ka Likai found another man,
With hope and vision, on her lap, she caressed her baby
“My past miserable days may you not see”.
But cunning and wicked as this new man was
He married her not for love but for lust,
That thin ray of hope soon began to grow dark
On terrifying future, she and the baby would embark.
One day she returned home as fast as she could
Breastfeeding mother she was, she got to have food,
“What meat he cooked”, “so nice” murmured his wife
For Likai seldom could taste meat in her life.
Drawing near her torn “Shangkwai’
She began to ponder, this meat he cooked why,
Is he beginning to love me as I prayed for
Then to God shall I shower praise more than before.
A tall flame from the hearth lit the finger tip,
What she saw, she could never believe,
A sharp cruel pain, cold her heart did break
She collapsed unconscious, with none her to wake.
My friend, no matter how severe may be the blow
You would come to your senses, medicos tell us so,
And the night full of sorrow, trapped ruptured to a cry
That affected the assembly of neighbours to know the reason why.
She then slid the wooden hook, the door wide opened,
Just to face the huge crowd assembling they had been;
She went back in, picked a kitchen knife up
“Leave me alone” none dared her to stop.
She ran and ran and never to return
She began to curse, why to earth was she ever born,
Then she took the deadliest and most terrifying step of all
She jumped herself to death on the waterfall.
Those dazzling ripples, white foams and soothing sound
Her daily lifelong companion now she had eternally found,
Embraced together in death with this majestic river
To tell us of the treachery, the most foul ever.
United thus they marched towards the Surma plain
Troubles no more dominion over her nor is pain,
Bay of Bengal scorched by the sun with monsoon as transport
Likai yearly visits her birthplace, the abode of gods.
Dear friends and tourists alike don’t jump to conclusion
For “facts are sometimes stranger than fiction”;
And as long as these three Sohra waters continue to flow
Loud and unmistakably clear this greatest tragedy will echo.
(“Ka Rangjyrteh”- The village where Ka Likai lived)
(“Ka Nohkalikai”- Name of a waterfall in memory of Ka Likai)
(“Shangkwai”- A round-brimmed cane basket where Khasi people keep items like kwai (betelnut), tympew (betel leaf) and lime.
