On a cool rainy May morning in Shillong, I hustle my parents to take a drive to Nartiang.

It’s very wet, they say doubtfully, glancing out the window. The pre-monsoon showers this year have been unusually heavy.

“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “Maybe it’ll stop once we get there.”

It seems I’m being unduly optimistic, but sure enough as we reach the town’s fringes it’s drier. That’s the thing with mountain weather; so localised it could be raining on one hill and not the next. Nartiang is located in the East Jaintia Hills, about two hours’ drive from Shillong. Like other villages sprinkled around rural Meghalaya, it’s a quiet place of pretty terrace farms and small houses spilling down the hillsides. Once, it was the summer retreat of the Jaintia kings, now long gone; the only remnants of their royal presence being ruins, a brick archway, and a living 500-year-old Durga temple, whose priests are 29 generations removed from the original family brought across from Maharashtra.

But our motivation is driven by something else. Nartiang is famed for its Mawbynna Kper or monolith garden. Monoliths can be found across the length and breadth of the Khasi and Jaintia Hills and beyond, peppering the landscape in Cherrapunjee and even pockets of Assam. But here lies the largest collection of megalithic stones in a single area.

We drive through forest-flanked roads that open up into views of fertile valleys, passing villages whose names are new to me — Mawrynkneng, Puriang, Wahajer. We inch through a local weekly market, my father reminding me that the Khasi calendar is made up of market names rather than “day” names. By now, the sun is out, the sky a glorious blue. We get into Nartiang in time for lunch, starving, and stop at a small roadside tea shop that serves ja doh , doh khleh , syrwa , jhur sdieh , and a spicy pudina chutney. The tea is red, hot and sweet. The monolith garden, we’re told, lies just ahead of this market area. And we discover it’s easy to find, sign-marked by a huge arched gate and boards declaring the spot an area of national cultural interest. Despite all that it’s unticketed, and we wander in freely. The “garden” slopes, and the stone paths wind through the monoliths, rooted in spectacular abandon. The tallest stands at a height of eight metres, and two metres in breadth. The rest huddle in secretive clusters. The stone surfaces are smooth, leavened by wind and rain. Some have pointed tops; some are split so neatly that it is difficult to imagine they were done by hand. I’ve read that mantras were spoken to coax these menhirs into place. A board tells us they were erected in between the 1500s and early 1800s, to mark the achievements of the Jaintia kings. This is unusual, for most monoliths in the region served to commemorate the dead. The Khasis and Jaintias cremate, not bury, and being oral communities with no scripts, the mawbynna served as tombstones. The menhirs, or upright stones, called Moo Shynrang, meant the person was male and the dolmens, flat stones placed horizontally and known as Moo Kynthai, were for women.

A person for every stone. Living on through the knowledge the community shared and passed on from generation to generation. Until the coming of the British, and the missionaries, and the introduction of a script (mainly so the Bible could be translated into the local language). Despite the sun, we’re shaded by sprawling ancient trees, and the place is strangely moving. We walk around noticing that many of the menhirs and dolmens are unbalanced, falling, some already having yielded to time and gravity.

“Why don’t they restore them?” my father complains. “Surely there’s something that can be done.” My mother concurs. I stay silent.

I don’t think it’s that simple.

That perhaps this is a matter to be taken up by the Archaeological Survey of India.

In a place with no alphabet, I am reminded more than ever of words. What did these stones mean to a people with no script? What did it mean to commemorate in stone?

Given the ephemerality of the spoken it was perhaps an attempt to immortalise, to build something they hoped would last — at least long outlive their words. This is the accepted — perhaps even most probable — view. But maybe it isn’t so.

Maybe these stones only come alive in the presence of the spoken. Without the words that complement them — that explain, clarify, mark — they are merely what you see. Rows and rows of scattered stone. Impressive, yes, but dead. Unliving. Bereft of meaning.

In their silence, they remind us of language. That power lies in what’s seen as the fleeting, the intangible. That we must be careful of what words we lose, and what we choose to replace them with.

I’m certain they knew this, the kings who raised these monoliths. They say the stones fall because there are no words to hold them up. This is what words do when they are spoken. They hold up worlds.

Janice Pariat is the author of The Nine-Chambered Heart, which will be out in November 2017; @janicepariat

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