Hill homes in Shillong, Meghalaya

Shillong sits at about fifteen hundred metres on the Khasi hills, and its houses are a direct consequence of an earthquake. In 1897 a very large quake on this plateau flattened the station, and what went up afterwards became the Assam-type house: a braced timber frame on posts, walls of ikra reed set in mud plaster between the studs, a corrugated iron roof pitched hard for the rain, and almost nothing heavy above head height. It is light, cheap, repairable, and it moves. More than a century later it is still the default across the north east, and Shillong holds the deepest stock of it, alongside the pitched-roof bungalows of the hill station and the Presbyterian churches that arrived with them.

Rain is the defining fact. Sohra and Mawsynram, an hour or two south on the lip of the plateau, are among the wettest inhabited places on earth, and the escarpment there drops away towards Bangladesh with waterfalls coming off it. The living root bridges in the villages below Sohra are grown rather than built, ficus roots trained across streams over decades.