We were supposed to interview her daughter.
That was the plan. We’d driven out to Madankynsaw, a village in the West Jaintia Hills of Meghalaya, in the far northeast of India. It’s the kind of place where the monsoon clouds hang low enough to graze the treetops, where the roads turn to mud between October and March. Edwina Lamare’s daughter was going to tell us about the family’s turmeric farm. She was the next generation. She was the story.
But she was nervous. You could see it in the way she held herself in front of the camera—careful, contained, searching for the right words in a language that wasn’t entirely hers. And there in the corner of the room was Edwina, doing something I still think about. She was somehow holding the entire space and her presence unmistakable, the gravity of the room plainly hers while also staying completely out of her daughter’s way. She wanted her daughter to have this moment. She also clearly had things to say.
It felt wrong to interrupt. It also felt wrong not to ask.
When Edwina finally spoke, the room changed. Her voice was unhurried, her hands occasionally moving as if shaping something in the air, and what came out was not an interview answer but a lineage. Her mother taught her to farm this land. Not in lessons but in presence. By doing the work in front of her, year after year, until the knowledge moved from her mother’s hands into hers the way water moves downhill: not because anyone directed it, but because that was the path.
Lakadong turmeric is not the turmeric most of the world knows. The jars on American and European grocery shelves, the dusty yellow powder, the bright, catchy labels are typically blended from hundreds of anonymous farms, routed through a chain of wholesalers, and warehoused for a year or two before anyone twists the cap. By then the curcumin content, the compound that gives turmeric whatever medicinal reputation it still holds, has usually dwindled to two or three percent. Enough to stain your fingers. Not much more.
The turmeric Edwina grows tests between seven and nine percent curcumin. You know the difference the moment you open a bag. It is sharp and resinous, almost peppery, closer to fresh ginger root than to anything from a supermarket spice aisle. The Khasi people of these hills, thousands of farmers across dozens of villages in the Lakadong area, have grown this variety for generations, long before anyone measured curcumin in a lab. They call it Shynrai Lakadong in Khasi. They grew it because the volcanic soil at this altitude and the particular pattern of rain and fog in these hills produced something they knew was singular. They knew it by taste, by color, by the way it stained.
Edwina took over her family’s fields around the turn of this century. What had been small patches, her mother growing enough for the household, maybe a bit to sell, became more deliberate. But the rhythm hasn’t changed. She prepares the fields in March, then selects and soaks the healthiest rhizomes by hand. Spends the monsoon months clearing weeds, tending the plants, reading the weather. Harvest begins in September. Then washing, slicing, sun-drying on bamboo mats through the winter until January, when the turmeric is finally ready.
It is slow, physical, and entirely seasonal work. There are no shortcuts and no way to speed it up.
When I asked Edwina what she enjoys most about farming, she didn’t talk about the money or the market or even the turmeric itself. She said she likes watching the plants grow. Day by day, from nothing to something. She described it the way you might describe watching a child, not with impatience, but with a kind of quiet attention that finds movement inside what looks, from the outside, like stillness.
I grew up in Shillong, less than a hundred kilometers from Edwina’s village. Different town, same hills, the same fog rolling through in the afternoon. My Aaita, my grandmother, didn’t farm turmeric, but she moved through the spice markets of Shillong with the same unhurried certainty I recognized in Edwina’s hands. She knew the merchants by name. She could tell good turmeric from mediocre turmeric by rubbing it between her fingers. She and my Ma spent hours in those markets, and I trailed behind them, bored and restless the way children always are when they don’t yet understand they’re being taught something.
I didn’t understand it then. I thought buying spices was just buying spices. I didn’t know that what my Aaita was really doing was maintaining a web of trust between herself and the merchant, between the merchant and the farmer, between the farmer and the soil. Every purchase was a small act of faith renewed. She never would have bought turmeric from a stranger.
That web is mostly gone now. The global spice trade runs on volume and anonymity. Farmers like Edwina grow turmeric of extraordinary quality on fewer than five acres, handle the entire process themselves, planting, harvesting, washing, slicing, drying and still struggle to find buyers willing to pay what the work is worth. The commodity price doesn’t distinguish between something grown with three generations of knowledge in the volcanic hills of Meghalaya and something produced at industrial scale on flatland a thousand miles south. A number on a board is still just a number.
Her plans are modest and specific. Continue growing. Expand the fields if she can. Bring more awareness to what her village produces. Get more women and young people into farming.
That last one is the one that hangs in the air. In Madankynsaw, farming is not what young people aspire to. It is hard work for uncertain pay in a world that tells you to leave the village and find something better. Edwina’s mother didn’t hand her a business plan. She handed her a way of being in relation to a piece of land – attentive, patient, proud. Whether that way of being survives another generation is not a settled question. It is the question.
Which brings me back to the daughter.
She was nervous that day, standing in front of the camera, and Edwina gave her the room. That small act, stepping back so her daughter could step forward, is the same gesture her own mother made, in a different register, decades ago. Not a formal transfer of knowledge. Just presence. Being there. Doing the work in front of your daughter until the work becomes hers.
My Aaita did the same thing in those Shillong markets. She never sat me down and explained how to choose turmeric. She just let me watch. She trusted that the watching would be enough.
I think about the two of them sometimes, my grandmother selecting, Edwina’s mother cultivating, standing at opposite ends of a thread neither one knew existed. The thread held because both of them showed up, season after season, and did the quiet work of paying attention.
Edwina is still showing up. Her daughter, that nervous day in Madankynsaw, was learning how.
