Jallong Khongmawloh has never worn shoes in his life. His feet are muscular, the skin on his sole a smooth, thick pad, built up from decades of walking through the forest. I've come to his bamboo hut, in a grove of orange trees in the far north-east corner of India, to ask him about the bridge that crosses the nearby Risam river. Jallong is an elder of the Khasi tribe, one of three tribes from the state of Meghalaya. He unfolds a dried leaf of Areca palm and reveals his lunch: some kind of large, bitter orange, fried in oil with turmeric, served on a bed of white rice. He eats with his hands.
    "Back when there was a village in the forest here, people were afraid to walk on the bridge. They were afraid because when they did, a voice would call out, shouting 'Hey! Don't step on me!' The Risam bridge is a Jingkieng jri, a bridge made from the living roots of a rubber fig tree. Its growth was guided across the river decades ago, using traditional methods perfected over the centuries by members of the Khasi and Jaintia tribes. At some point, the bridge became home to a ryngkew, a shapeshifting and occasionally malevolent forest spirit that local people are careful not to disturb. Jallong finishes his meal and begins packing his homemade wooden pipe with dark, stringy tobacco. I ask if the ryngkew can still be heard.
    "No, he doesn't speak anymore. Disappeared. When the villagers left, he also left." He exhales a cloud of smoke from his nostrils and looks in the direction of the river. "But I think he's still there. With a giant, ancient tree like that, why would he leave? That kind of creature would stick around."
    Aside from a few outliers, living root bridges can only be found in the Riwar, the rugged region where the highlands of Meghalaya fall away suddenly to the plains of northern Bangladesh. It's a landscape of extremes, with densely forested valleys so steep you can barely find a place to lie down. There are almost no roads, so locals like Jallong rely on a network of foot paths to access their plantations and bring their goods to market. It also happens to be one of the rainiest places on Earth - the weather station in the nearby town of Sohra once measured 9.3 metres of rain in a single month, sixteen times what London receives in a year. When this volume of water enters the valleys of the Riwar, trickling streams become raging, dangerous torrents. Where these rivers need to be crossed, locals plant ficus elastica, a species of rubber fig related to the banyan tree that produces prodigious amounts of flexible aerial roots from its upper branches. These roots, fast-growing and aggressively attaching wherever they're tied, are the perfect material for building living bridges. A root no thicker than a shoelace can grow strong enough to carry a person's weight after five years. It could take thirty to fifty years for a bridge to become mature, with local oral history placing the oldest bridges in Meghalaya at around five-hundred years old.  
    Jallong uses his pocket knife to remove the dense orange husk from a betel nut and offers me a piece. I politely decline - last time I tried one my whole body flushed red and I became too dizzy to walk. He instead passes it to my interpreter, Morningstar Khongthaw.
    Morningstar is a twenty-three year old guide and environmental activist from Rangthylliang village. He was a teenager when an American explorer, Patrick Rogers, came through his village looking for root bridges. Patrick was traversing the Riwar on foot, documenting root bridges and researching for a travel book that he would self-publish as The Green Unknown. Morningstar joined the guiding party and accompanied Patrick through the forest, showing him many of the bridges his family had been using for generations. With Patrick's encouragement, Morningstar decided that instead of attending college, he would build a tourism business in his home village, a place that happened to have a high concentration of root bridges. He and some local villagers established a tourism society, and after receiving a land grant from the village council, they pooled their money together and established a roadside viewpoint. Nobody came, and after a few monsoon seasons the bamboo buildings rotted and collapsed.
    It would be two years before Morningstar would have his first client, but in the meantime, he explored. He travelled throughout the Riwar, to places that had never seen a tourist, and built relationships with local farmers, village headmen, distant relatives, and anyone who might host a tour group should any finally come. With his new friends' help, Morningstar located dozens of bridges previously unknown to the outside world. But he was also disturbed by the prevailing indifference on the part of his fellow Khasi when it came to their living root bridge heritage. New roads were being built, and the old foot trails were being abandoned. Ancient bridges were being neglected, their once carefully maintained forms overgrowing into chaotic woody messes. When living root bridges died, Morningstar observed that villagers were eschewing the years-long process of establishing new ones, opting instead for steel suspension bridges. These can be built faster, last a reasonably long time, and the cost of labour and materials are often paid for by the Indian government through village development schemes. When asked, Morningstar explains why this troubled him: "No root bridge can be built by one person alone; when we tie a fresh root onto an old bridge, we're collaborating with our ancestors as well as our descendants. When we lose one, a connection to our culture is severed."
    Concerned that the root bridge tradition was in decline, Morningstar became an activist. With the help of his friends, he established the Living Bridge Foundation, the first organization dedicated to root bridge conservation. Its members are a group of dedicated root bridge exponents from throughout Meghalaya who come together to share knowledge and encourage villages to maintain and multiply their local bridges.
It's late afternoon, and time to go home. Morningstar and I wait while Jallong packs his conical basket full with a harvest of lakor, the waxy leaf chewed along with betel nut. He slings it onto his back, carrying its weight with a woven plastic strap that rests on his forehead, and we begin our hike. We leave Jallong's clearing and enter the forest, where we immediately find ourselves beneath the awesome canopy of the Risam ficus. Dim shafts of crepuscular light find their way through the upper branches and illuminate the tree's massive trunk. Recently, Jallong and other elders from Rangthylliang planned to chop this tree down, including the bridge, and turn it all into charcoal. Jallong's concern was that this tree, showing no sign of slowing growth in spite of its advanced age, was starting to shade his clearing, stealing sunlight from his orange trees. As soon as he heard of this plan, Morningstar approached the owner of the tree (in the Khasi hills you can own a tree without owning the land it sits on) convinced him to sell it to him for the price of the charcoal they would earn from it.
    The question of the Risam tree put Morningstar and Jallong at odds with one another, but the two are good friends, and I observe nothing but mutual respect between them. As we step onto the interwoven roots of the bridge, Jallong turns to Morningstar, "You'll be remembered for saving this tree. It will live on for the next generation. When people take care of the tree, the Ryngkew lives here happily. He won't get angry; he won't attack you."
    We continue across the bridge, hearing nothing but the sound of birds.

THE RAINIEST PLACE ON EARTH

Every spring, as the earth tilts back towards the sun, solar radiation evaporates the sea over the bay of Bengal. The warm wet air rushes across the plains of Northern Bangladesh until it collides with the cold air mountain air of Meghalaya, forming clouds that unleash violent rainstorms through the region’s vertiginous river valleys.