THE MAN WHO
GROWS BRIDGES
FROM ROOTS

“I was six when I crossed this bridge for the first time,” he said. “Back then, it was just one root and two bamboo poles. My father carried me on his back.”

Now, he’s the one guiding new roots across. And with them, perhaps, a new generation.

Morningstar Khongthaw has staked his life on protecting them. What does it take to keep a bridge alive in a world that prefers speed over seasons?

And why has he staked his life on protecting something that takes 25 years to grow strong enough to hold a human?

That’s the story this walk would begin to answer.

The Tree Named Morningstar

He was born just before dawn. “Four a.m.,” Morningstar said, smiling. “Still dark.”

His mother gave him the name.

She was the only educated woman in their village then—Rangthylliang, tucked deep in the East Khasi Hills. “She decided to give her name Morningstar,” he said. “So that’s how I got mine.” On paper, in school, everywhere: Morningstar.

There’s a certain inevitability to the name now—but it didn’t always fit.

As a child, he was restless. He went to school like the others, stood in the prayer assembly in the mornings, looked at the walls, the rules, the textbooks. “I ran away,” he said with a laugh. “When I saw my father outside, I just left. I walked out of school.”

He wasn’t reprimanded. “He never scolded me,” Morningstar said. “He always made the decision positive, whatever I chose.”

That freedom stayed with him. It took shape in books—but not in the way school prescribed. “I wasn’t good at writing,” he said. “Or learning, you know, the formal way.” But when he liked something, he read it cover to cover. “That’s how I passed,” he said. “Just read the whole book.”

He made it to eleventh standard in Shillong. “But I left after three months,” he said. “The books were too much. I told my mother: "I don't want to be unemployed at the end of this road.”

She didn’t speak to him for six months.

He left anyway.

DESIGN.
BUILD.
GROW.

“You don’t touch the roots too early,” he said. “They’ll snap. Three or four months old, they’re too fragile. One or two years—that’s when they become candidates.”

Guiding the root is not a one-time action but a sustained relationship. The team returns each monsoon to weave, check growth, replace bamboo, and feed the roots — not with fertilizer, but with forest compost. “Rotten leaves, branches, old wood,” Morningstar said. “We place it under the root like you’d place money for something precious. That’s how we feed it.”

There are no blueprints. No manuals. “One uncle to another,” he said. “You grow up near a bridge, you start helping.”

He pointed to a pale root tied to a guide. “Five or six years,” he said. “Then it will touch.”

Even once complete, a bridge is never finished. It may take ten years before it holds weight. Twenty-five to be strong. Fifty to endure.

“We don’t stop weaving,” Morningstar said. “Even after you walk on it. Even after it holds.”

Every bridge is a collaboration—not just between roots, but between people. One person starts. Another finishes. “It’s inheritance,” he said.

In Khasi myth, there’s a golden bridge of roots—jingkieng ksiar—that once linked earth to heaven. Morningstar doesn’t elaborate. He only gestures toward the trees.

“It’s in the stories,” he said. “But mostly, it’s in the roots.”

Some bridges don’t fall. They fade. “When a bridge grows weak, we plant a young Ficus on top of the mother tree,” Morningstar said. “So when she dies, the child is already growing.” Even endings, here, are designed to carry on.

The old stories weren’t instruction manuals, but they seeded something just as enduring—an intuition passed down not through diagrams, but through doing.

The Promoter Who Became a Guardian

When Morningstar first returned to Rangthylliang from Shillong, he saw the bridges differently.

Shillong exposed him to new ideas—unfamiliar people, different rhythms, what he called “great minds.” It was brief, but it stayed with him.

In 2013, a Doordarshan crew arrived in Rangthylliang to film the elders and their stories. Morningstar was asked to help. “I was just a student,” he said. “But that’s how it started.” For the first time, he saw the bridges through a different lens. They weren’t just crossings. They could be destinations.

Other places were already being promoted—the double-decker in Nongriat, the one in Molnau. “I thought maybe we could do the same here,” he said. “Bring people. Show them.” He thought he could be a promoter. But the more he explored those tourist sites, the more unsettled he became. The noise. The footfall.

He saw bridges roped off, rotting under crowds who came for photos, not stories.

“It became a turning point,” he said. “Before we promote, we need to learn how to protect.”

He began asking different questions. What happens when a root is stepped on a thousand times? When a bridge that took 50 years to grow snaps in a single monsoon?

He started visiting elders again—not for folklore, but for instruction. How did they guide the roots? How did they feed them? “I learned the Ficus is a keystone tree,” he said. “One tree supports many others. Even animals.”

Slowly, the bridges stopped being landmarks in his mind. They became archives. Living structures. “We grow them with our hands,” he said. “It’s not construction. It’s conservation.”

So he turned around.

From a boy chasing a tourism dream to a fierce conservationist. “I wanted to protect what we still had,” he said. “And protect it the way it was meant to grow—slowly, patiently, from the roots.”

Then one night, a bridge fell.

The Night the Bridge Fell

Morningstar remembers exactly where he was when the news reached him. It was late evening, sometime in August or September 2018—he isn’t entirely certain of the exact day, but he clearly remembers the elder who brought him the news emerging from the forest path, weary and heavy with concern. They met quietly, standing at the edge of the village, as shadows lengthened across the hills.

“I couldn't sleep the whole night,” Morningstar recalled, the emotion still fresh, years later. “I kept thinking about the tree. I woke up with a heavy heart and went to find the old man who brought me the news.”

In the early morning, he walked to the elder’s modest home in the village. Together they sat, sharing tea and sadness, reflecting on the sudden loss. They talked about the bridge—the roots carefully guided for years, now severed overnight. The elder explained gently: the tree belonged to an old man named Ba-Bli Khongthani, who lived bedridden and frail in Pynursla, nearly 90 years old. Ba-Bli had purchased the tree around thirty years earlier, sometime in the late 1980s, for just sixty rupees from an old village woman—a small, almost symbolic sum against the significance of what had been lost.

Morningstar knew what he had to do. Returning home that day, he began meticulously drafting a handwritten agreement—his very first—to formally transfer ownership of the tree. “I personally wrote that agreement,” he said later. “I got it typed immediately because I didn't want to waste his time. He was old; he was sick. It felt urgent.”

Later that evening, as the sun dipped behind the dense forest hills, Morningstar gathered two companions: the village elder who brought him the news, and Willem Betts, his tall Canadian friend who had been staying with his family for the past fifteen days. Together, carrying lanterns, they walked slowly along the path toward Ba-Bli’s small home in Pynursla.

Inside the humble dwelling, Ba-Bli lay on his bed, weak but alert, his wife and daughter seated close by, uncertain about their late-night visitors. Morningstar knelt near Ba-Bli and spoke gently. He described his vision for the tree—not just protecting it but nurturing it as a symbol and inheritance for future generations. Ba-Bli listened, nodding softly, his eyes thoughtful.

After a pause, Ba-Bli broke the silence. “In fact,” he said softly, “I would be very happy to hand it over to someone who could take care of my tree.” He remembered aloud the modest transaction decades earlier: “I bought it thirty years ago, from an old lady, for sixty rupees.” He paused again, smiling faintly. “If you really want to take care of the tree, then it's yours.”

Without ceremony, Morningstar presented the agreement. Ba-Bli motioned, indicating Morningstar should sign. Morningstar quickly signed the document, his Canadian friend Willem Betts adding his name as a witness, alongside Ba-Bli’s relative from the village. The paper—typed hastily earlier that day on a simple A4 sheet—carried the date clearly marked in Morningstar’s own handwriting: August or September 2018 (later, he would laminate this precious document, carefully preserved like a sacred heirloom).

When Morningstar left Ba-Bli’s home that night, stepping back into the darkness of the forest, he felt a profound sense of relief. Yes, a bridge had fallen—but ownership had passed from one generation to another.

“It’s a living book for me,” Morningstar later said of that laminated page. “Something I can hold, something I can protect.”

And something he could grow again.

This time, the roots won’t be guided down into a bridge. They’ll be shaped inward—into a circle.

“Not for people to look at,” he said. “For us to stay. Sleep. Live in.”

Mystics in the village believe the tree is more than shelter. They say it carries messages. When someone is about to die, a whisper comes. Or the sound of a baby crying—heard through the roots.

Morningstar doesn’t dismiss the stories. He just listens. “If you grow up here,” he said, “you learn not to separate spirit from soil.”

The Avatar Tree became a monument not to ownership, but to care—and to choice. Where others saw timber, he saw time.

“I wasn’t gifted land, or money,” he said. “I was gifted a tree.”

So far, Morningstar has mapped 133 bridges across Meghalaya. “Still more to discover,” he said. Many remain unnamed, tucked inside forests only elders still remember.

The Mentor Who Climbed Barefoot

Jalong Khomola rarely wore shoes. Even into his seventies, he moved barefoot through the Khasi forests, scaling tall ficus trees to gather saplings, each destined to become a bridge. “He dedicated his whole life to root bridges,” Morningstar recalled. “Barefoot, always climbing trees, always guiding roots.”

Their relationship began in 2015, at village meetings or near Khomola’s orange orchard close to Morningstar’s newly acquired tree. Morningstar often found himself interpreting for foreign visitors who came to see the bridges. Khomola, patient and gentle, would explain the slow art of weaving roots into bridges—stories passed from elder to younger, like whispers through generations.

In 2018, Morningstar received his first public award for root bridge conservation. He invited Khomola as a guest of honor. Khomola stood on stage barefoot, accepting recognition humbly—almost reluctantly. A photo of that day still remains with Morningstar, a cherished keepsake.

But in October 2022, tragedy struck. Khomola, then nearly eighty, fell from a tree while picking jackfruit. The impact shattered his thigh. Doctors at the hospital warned the injury was severe enough to require amputation. Morningstar resisted fiercely: “I told him we have to trust traditional healers instead. The doctors would just cut; our healers would save him.” He rallied friends, raised funds, and helped arrange for traditional treatment. Slowly, Khomola healed. But the injury weighed heavily on him. Restless without his forest, he dragged himself daily through the village, struggling but determined to keep moving.

When Khomola passed away shortly afterward, Morningstar stood at his funeral, heart heavy and voice strained. “I couldn’t speak much,” he said, remembering the moment months later. “It hurt too much to talk about him.”

Yet Khomola’s legacy endured, alive in every root bridge Morningstar touched. Especially in one innovation that Morningstar learned from his mentor: using plastic irrigation pipes instead of open bamboo scaffolds. Khomola had discovered the pipes, dark and enclosed, encouraged roots to grow faster. Tradition had silently embraced innovation.

Today, Morningstar continues that practice, blending old knowledge and new tools, feeling the presence of his barefoot mentor with every root he guides.

Battles in the Forest

Not every bridge is lost to time. Some are undone by belief.

Morningstar still remembers the morning after they built the bamboo scaffold—twenty villagers working shoulder to shoulder through the day, coaxing young roots into position, tying, tucking, guiding. By dawn, it was gone. Cut down at night.

“The uncle didn’t want it near his farmland,” Morningstar said. “He thought it would curse his crops.” No warning. Just an undoing.

In another clearing, a half-grown bridge collapsed after a feud between neighbors—two families, one bridge, and an argument no one could resolve. One night, one of them ended it by ending the bridge.

The reasons vary—belief, boundaries, old resentments—but the outcome is the same. Roots once tended by hand, left severed in the soil.

His original team of thirty has thinned to five. “Many left,” he said. “Some needed jobs. Others wanted faster change. This work doesn’t offer either.”

Those who stayed, stayed with their hands. They gather roots, replace scaffolds, count seasons. No shortcuts. No promises. Just care.

In 2022, the monsoon came early. Rivers swelled. Paths vanished. Five bridges were lost—washed away, roots torn from their anchorings.

Morningstar didn’t mourn. “When a bridge falls,” he said, “you don’t ask why. You start weaving again.”

Defending the Roots

In 2019, the government came with paperwork and plans.

A proposal to include Meghalaya’s living root bridges on UNESCO’s tentative list had begun moving through bureaucratic channels. On the surface, it looked like recognition. To Morningstar, it sounded like a warning.

“They were calling it a top-down approach,” he said. “But these bridges are not top-down. They are root-up.”

The blueprint barely involved the people who raised the bridges—who still guided roots each season, replaced scaffolds each year, remembered which ancestor planted which tree. No elders were consulted. No weavers invited. “How can you write policy,” he asked, “if you don’t even know what inosculation is?”

What troubled him wasn’t heritage recognition—it was how it was imposed. A template from elsewhere, dropped onto a landscape with its own rhythm, its own sacred groves, its own rules.

“We already had rules,” he said. “Our clans made them in 1939. You cut a tree, you paid a fine. We didn’t wait for UNESCO to tell us what was sacred.”

He refused to endorse the plan. Instead, he gathered elders, youth, and landowners from eight clans. Some were hesitant. Others feared missing out.

“This isn’t tourism,” he said. “It's a memory. It’s instruction. It’s ours.”

Officials called him difficult. Some said he was politicizing trees. But Morningstar wasn’t against recognition. He was against erasure.

“We don’t want fences,” he said. “We want responsibility. That’s what makes a bridge last.”

The Hundred-Year Vision

“It takes 25, maybe 30 years,” Morningstar said, brushing dirt from the young Ficus stem. “So we start now. When India turns 100, these bridges will stand.”

The idea began as a way to preserve root bridges in a time when both memory and patience were running out. Over time, it hardened into a blueprint: thirty bridges, planted and raised with the help of village elders, students, and barefoot engineers. No cement. No contracts. Just a living vision of what infrastructure could mean. By the time most government projects break ground, these roots will already be growing.

Each season brings its own rhythm. Monsoon is for weaving—when aerial roots soften and can be gently bent into place. Winter is for replacing bamboo, checking growth, and keeping the forest healthy. It’s not just planting trees. It’s building bridges without blueprints—relying on time, touch, and trust.

Morningstar calls it design, build, grow. A phrase he repeats often, sometimes to schoolchildren with wide eyes, sometimes to funders skeptical of a project whose return lies decades ahead.

“The bridge doesn’t belong to me,” he said. “It belongs to the child who will cross it when I’m gone.”

Project 2047 is not just about bridges. It’s about reviving Law Kyntang—sacred groves protected by community law and oral memory. In these forests, Morningstar says, “we don’t walk in with shoes. We don’t speak loudly. Even the trees listen.”

Morningstar calls it design, build, grow. A phrase he repeats often, sometimes to schoolchildren with wide eyes, sometimes to funders skeptical of a project whose return lies decades ahead.

“The bridge doesn’t belong to me,” he said. “It belongs to the child who will cross it when I’m gone.”

A Promise Beneath the Feet

In the soft light of late afternoon this May, Morningstar stepped once more onto the living bridge. The roots held him—not just as structure, but as memory and belief. “I’ve been walking here more than twenty-two years now,” he said. “But I started caring for it later.”

He pointed to a young root guided along a bamboo scaffold. “This one, I weaved in 2021. Still learning.”

Each root on the bridge had passed through someone’s hands. And those hands, like his, belonged to people who never trained as engineers—but who carried an inheritance. “You don’t build a root bridge,” he said. “You raise it like a child.” Now the child was growing up.

He has already planted 25 saplings—ignoring customs that said only old, unmarried men should do so. “Belief is important,” he said. “But belief in yourself is more important.”

There were setbacks. Bridges cut down in feuds. Volunteers who left. A landscape filled with fault lines. But he stayed. “We should learn from the bridges,” he said. “So many hands, so many knives, all making one thing.”

At the edge of the bridge, he paused.

“In 2047,” he said, “our country will be 100. I want our root bridges to still be here. Stronger. With more roots. More hands.”

A single root dangled nearby, just beginning its descent. Morningstar watched it for a moment.

“This is not just a bridge,” he said. “It’s a promise.”

“My legacy,” he added, “is not just the bridges I build. It’s the belief that young people can shape tradition. That we don’t have to wait until we’re 50 and alone to start planting trees. We can begin now—and someone else will finish.”

When I Close My Eyes

Every night before sleep, Morningstar sees bridges—not just as structures, but as ideas, patiently nurtured and handed from one generation to the next. He sees roots inching forward, guided and measured. Elders weaving alongside restless youths. Schoolchildren with notebooks, documenting traditions once kept only in memory.

“People called me mad,” he said with a faint smile. “They asked why I teach students to weave roots. But every night when I close my eyes, I still see them there.”

There is frustration too—borne from years of hollow reports and fleeting academic curiosity. “I’m fed up with verbal reports from elders becoming someone’s PhD thesis,” he told me. “I want real research. One-foot roots, measured, timed, documented.”