The flesh was unusually dark. It was relished with great enthusiasm by the local villagers, even though by the end of the meal their mouths were seething with the collective hotness of the chillies and ginger.

It was called achak be'en locally, with tiny rib bones sticking out in parallel covered by a layer of rubbery skin. It was exceedingly tough, and a minute or two into my first bite, as the masticated flesh refused to go down my gullet, I was gripped by a mortal fear of being unable to swallow it. It smelt delicious, however. It was dog meat.

I was at the village of Rongbang near the picturesque Rongbang Waterfalls in the land of the Garos, the minority group in the state of Meghalaya. The settlement is around 40km from Tura, the district headquarters of West Garo Hills. In Tura meanwhile, as the sun pelts on the nearby lower Brahmaputra valleys, the vegetable stalls are stacked with small bamboo baskets of anke or river crabs.

The Garos have a simple no-fuss method of cooking the delicate flesh of the crustacean. Roast it in fire, break the shell, mix with onions, a little ginger and a little oil, and here is ready the most extraordinary of salads.

An achak be'en meal might sound as little exotic to the Garos as a lobster dinner to India's children of liberalisation (in fact other animals consumed in the villages include menggo be'en or cat meat, mese be'en or rat meat and chipu be'en or snake meat) but the real staple is the humble 'ld inhabitant of the sty.

Two of my greatest Garo meals ever were the greatest of contrasts. One was at a utilitarian Salanti mi hotel (mi is Garo for rice) at Araimile, New Tura and the other at the restaurant of Tura's most high-end Rikman Continental Hotel. At Salanti, my pork was cooked with some tangy wild leaves called galda and served with pre-packed rice in plantain leaves, while at Rikman the lean chunks were revved up by the zesty shards of locally-sourced bamboo shoot.

No discussion of Garo cuisine will be complete without the mention of the legendary dried fish soup Nakham Bitchi, available at many of the mi hotels at Tura. It smells really of the earth of this land, all its cultural vigour poured into the fiery broth. In all its b*tchy piquancy, it is a taste that divides connoisseurs into two warring camps, the first dismissing it as a pungent hogwash and second dismissing the other as a band of culinary virgins incapable of having the heart (or rather the tongue) to take its deathly sharpness.

Painfully sharp, however, was the sting of the bee in a jungle atop the Tura peak. One rammed like an F-16 into my arm, while the other planted a rather unwelcome kiss on the cheek. I was accompanying a local villager who not caring for the million pricks, dove his arm into the blinding fireball of a bee-hive within the trunk of a tree.

As we sat taking stock of the damage caused by the enemy bombardment, next to us lay a few honeycombs extracted out of the fated hole. After all that toil of combat, the honey tasted so gratuitously good, not to mention, also the young little white worms wriggling in the comb. The larvae were a local delicacy called bija and had the supple taste resembling raw almonds. If raw fish on a bed of rice can take the hotel circuits of the world by storm, why not live honeybee larvae on the comb. In any case, if Sushi has Omega-3 the bristly texture of the comb provides adequate dietary fibre.

A marked shift in colours accompanies a move to the eastern part of the state inhabited by the Khasis, the predominant tribe here. First is the syndrome called Khasi teeth, the red smears of kwai (a local version of paan) that is as integral to their identity as a bindi is to a Hindu woman.

The second is the resplendent red of the best beef (called doh masi, doh is Khasi for meat) that can be found anywhere in the country. At Iewduh or the Bara Bazar, one of the largest open-air markets in the world located in Shillong, the betel nut vendors or the beef sellers both, never run out of customers thronging for their favourite cut or a cheap deal.

Though Doh masi is massively popular, as is common to most of Northeast, pork is still overwhelmingly preferred. A quintessential Khasi meal at a sha and ja stall (sha is tea and ja is rice in Khasi) would be jadoh (yellow rice cooked in the pork broth) with some doh khlieh (a delightfully simple salad of pork and onions). Occasionally, it is accompanied by the dark yellow blob of tung rymbai (fermented soya bean paste).

It would not be a sacrilege to say that the nearest resemblance one can find to its vehement smell is that to human excrement, for Khasi legends suggest that dog was castigated forever from the world of animals and condemned to live in the company of man, for once he brought some tung rymbai to the markets of animal world, and soiled the atmosphere with its overpowering aroma.

I had my first Khasi meal at Trattoria Dukan Jadoh, an intimate little hole-in-the-wall at Police Bazar in Shillong. While chomping on some doh sniang (pork curry cooked with black sesame seeds), I found it a little odd that all the wooden benches were placed in parallel and all the patrons dined facing in the same direction.

In this bizarre orderliness, it seemed more of a classroom than a restaurant. However, over the months I have developed a great affinity for the institution of the sha and ja stalls, a robust plebian food culture that can be placed on the same pedestal as the versatile Irani cafes of Mumbai.

It's dark soot-laden wooden interiors, the kettle of water bubbling on the fire in the corner, the porcelain cups of sha sao (red tea), the Khasi women behind the counter with their locally-knit sling bags worn across the shoulders, and of course, the cyclical rhythmic repetition of the menu "doh khlieh, doh sniang, doh shain, doh masi....," every time a new patron walks in, made them the safest of havens, even in remote villages.

If doh here is excellent, soh is exemplary. Soh stands for fruits in Khasi, and numerous vendors on the streets of the towns and the villages sell many exotic varieties of fruits and berries, hardly found anywhere else. In March, I arrived to see the sun of the early spring shimmering on the red smooth oblongs of soh shang, and while leaving in early June, just with the advent of rains the first plums (soh plums) hit the market. More than anything else, I gorged on local mulberries to the extent my fingers would be stained violet making me look like a messy kwai eater.

The dog rejected the world of animals for man, but that did not save it from being consumed. The toad, in Khasi legends the descendent of Hynroh, the toad with the magical powers who once tried to gobble up the sun and having failed in his outrageous attempt, still tries to leap at it in vain, cannot escape a similar fate. On the streets of Nongstoin, the district headquarters of West Khasi Hills, I encountered these slithery, slimy creatures hung from a wire and jostling for space against each others' limbs. A local delicacy toad meat is prized as an aphrodisiac.

The Jaintias, further east, share many similarities with the cuisine of the Khasis, except for their affinity for the ribbed shiny shells of Niang long and Niang ksah (insect larvae). All of them, including the Garos, however share a common trait ... to make the most delicious things out of the amazing foliage and animal wealth the state has been bestowed with. As they say, as long it's not man, it's food.