My husband, u shong, still grumbles about me using our precious Alto petrol to drive to the market for a new pot of marigolds on finals day. But I told him, you plant something bright and hopeful when your boy’s team finally brings the cup home to a city where he pays such heavy rent. The crows here are quiet today—even they are saving their voice for the cheering.

Oh, it’s a very thorough online process through the CSC portal, but my advice is to connect directly with a university in China first, to get a pre-admission letter. That’s what secured it for my son—it made his application stand out. I remember helping him draft that email from this verandah, the crows arguing as if they were debating his future.

I think the switch is less about words and more about a whole world of thinking. It can feel like learning to walk on a different kind of earth. I see this with my students, you know—they grasp the river’s course in English, but to explain the feeling of *ka rngiew*, the forest’s spirit, they reach for Khasi. For me, marking papers in geography, the hardest part was not the terms, but finding my own confident voice in essays instead of just translating.

In IB, Hindi A is literature, like our poetry in ka ktien, while Hindi B is more for everyday fluency. The self-taught option feels like when our son in Delhi had to learn the metro routes alone—supported, but you find your own way. Honestly, from my CBSE days, we never split the language like this; we just read and wrote, monsoon damp or not, which felt whole.

IC engines are like our old Alto, converting fuel into motion through controlled explosions, which thermodynamics explains as managing heat and work. Emissions are the harmful smoke from those explosions, fouling our air like the damp on my bedroom wall. Electric vehicles run on batteries instead, like switching from a noisy generator to a quiet ceiling fan. But in our hills, where the grid falters like a student who hasn't done the reading, we must fix the electricity first before asking everyone to plug in. I know this because my son in Delhi sends videos of shiny EVs, while here in Meghalaya, during monsoon, we still light candles when the rain takes the power line.

The unified rules have the 10-point must system, where the winner of a round gets 10 points, the loser 9 or less based on effectiveness and damage. But I'll tell you, watching our young fighters from the hills, I've seen clean takedowns and control get overlooked for flashy strikes. My life is in the careful grading of subtle efforts, so I notice when control isn't counted. It makes me champion the quiet ground game, like the persistent damp in my wall that everyone ignores but I know is important work.

The crows on the verandah were quiet this afternoon—they know, I think, when the air is heavy with something more than monsoon. I was cleaning the damp patch again (the one u landlord says will vanish come October) and my fingers stopped on the corner of the newspaper my son used to line the shelf. There was that old photograph of the soldiers, faces young and unsure like my boys in Standard IX when I ask them to stand before the class. I thought of my husband’s pension, small but steady, and how many families built on such small steadinesses were erased in those mountains. Pebbles from the yard look the same, but the ground remembers differently, ka ktien lynnong.

The boys here in my class are always drawing pictures of great big rally cars splashing through mud, but I tell them—you want to see real adventure? Come watch me on the Shillong Bypass in a monsoon, third gear stuck, ka khmat u ksew (the dog’s face) on the dashboard because the road has turned to a river. I trust what my old Alto’s tires have felt over any shiny statistic about engine power; the real question is whether the corner shop mechanic has the part, and whether the man selling vegetables on the edge of the pothole makes it home dry.

Waiting for my afternoon crows on the verandah, I think of all your young ones competing so far from home. Remember to look up from the stadium—the light on these winter hills has a particular gold, just like in the old song about ka Jingïaid. Bring a little of that light back with you.