Honeymoon hit job in serene Sohra

Rare event in Hima Sohra, Meghalaya, where a visitor was killed, sparking a murder mystery and tourist safety concerns.

It is rare for the chieftain of a Hima, a Khasi tribal ‘kingdom’, to organise an event for a stranger. But then, it is rarer for a visitor to be killed in Hima Sohra, a part of Meghalaya’s 351.99 square kilometre Sohra Civil Subdivision in the East Khasi Hills district. Sohra is the indigenous name for the British-corrupted Cherrapunji, often called the rain capital of the world and one of north-east India’s most popular tourist destinations. It offers trekking trails, cascades, canyons, and caves.

Before sundown on June 10, Freeman Sing Syiem, the chief of Hima Sohra, organised a candlelight vigil and a 5-km peace rally for Indore businessman Raja Raghuvanshi, 29, who none in the area would have remembered had he not gone missing on May 23, only to be found dead in a deep gorge on June 2. On June 9, the Meghalaya police had arrested his wife and four others for his death.

At the centre of Sohra town, hundreds of Khasi men and women took turns to light candles in front of a poster of a smiling Raja, mourning his death and condemning the misinformation spread by a section of the media about the peaceful place being crime-prone. The turnout mattered in a town visitors throng during the peak, rain-drenched tourist season.

“Our people were dragged into a crime that could have happened anywhere. Our concern for tourists was evident when men from almost all villages in the Sohra area braved torrential rains and slippery conditions to search for the Indore honeymoon couple who went missing. The prayer service was a clear message from Sohra that they want justice for Raja, respect for Meghalaya, and accountability for those who jump to conclusions,” local MLA Gavin Miguel Mylliem, who attended the rally for Raja, says.

Almost at the same time as the candle flames flickered in the Meghalaya hill station, there was fire of a different kind in Indore, a city on Madhya Pradesh’s Malwa plateau. Posters bearing the photos of Raja and his 24-year-old wife, Sonam Raghuvanshi, believed missing until she surrendered before the police in Uttar Pradesh, demanded a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation into her disappearance and her husband’s death. Raja’s relatives ripped out Sonam’s pictures from some of these posters and set them on fire in an outburst of anger at a murder plotted at home and executed about 2,250 km away.

In Meghalaya, Anthony Thabah of Sohra’s Mawsmai, known for a labyrinthine limestone cave and the Seven Sisters Waterfalls, was one of many who scouted the area for the missing couple. “This incident happened more than two months after a foreigner (Hungarian Puskas Zsolt) died in a trekking accident,” he says.

“The news that Raja was a victim of a murderous conspiracy hatched by his wife and not one of our own came as a huge relief, but with a tinge of sadness. No mother should lose a son this way,” says his mother, Hehbok Thabah, who runs a snacks store at the Seven Sisters falls viewpoint.