Kecaikhati belongs to a stratum of worship older than the Hindu pantheon that eventually enfolded her. Among Bodo-Kachari communities across northeast India, she commanded fear and devotion in equal measure. The Rabha people celebrate the Kechai-khati festival annually. Scholars have linked her to the Tai-Khamti female deity Nang Hoo Toungh, and some identify her with the Buddhist goddess Tara -- connections that trace the tangle of spiritual traditions flowing through this borderland where India, Myanmar, and Tibet converge. Four classes of Deori priests administered the temple. The Bar Bharali and Saru Bharali collected temple dues and procured animals for sacrifice, while the Bar Deori and Saru Deori performed the rituals and chanted the hymns. Even after the Chutiya kings brought Hindu customs to the region, worship at Tamreswari followed the old tribal forms.

A stone inscription dates the temple's brick-and-stone boundary wall to the Saka year 1364 -- 1442 AD -- built by Mukta Dharmanarayan, son of a Chutiya king. The Changrung Phukan Buranji, a chronicle from 1711, records that the roof was sheeted in copper, giving the temple its name: Tamreswari, from the Sanskrit for copper. Two giant stone elephants with silver tusks flanked the main entrance. The walls rose without mortar, block fitted against block. When British surveyor Dalton visited in 1848, the stone structure still stood but the copper was already gone. T. Block arrived in 1905 and concluded that the surviving square structure in the corner could not have been the main building -- a grander temple must have once occupied the center of the complex. S.F. Hannay described doorway blocks of reddish porphyritic granite, each seven and a half feet long, of an "adamantine hardness." The lintel bore a carved chain of lotus flowers.

The temple thrived under the Ahom kingdom until the reign of Suhitpangphaa, between 1780 and 1795, when the Konbaung dynasty of Burma invaded Assam. The priests fled. Rituals ceased. The jungle began its slow reclamation. By the time archaeologist Debala Mitra surveyed the site in 1956, she could still discern that the temple had been a Chaturayatana -- a complex with four shrines -- built of sandstone and granite within a rectangular brick enclosure roughly 208 feet by 130 feet. The compound wall stood four feet wide and eight feet tall, with a stone gateway on the eastern side leading down to a stream where carved granite blocks lay scattered in the riverbed. Then came the floods of 1959. The Paya River deposited enough silt to completely submerge the remaining structure. What Burmese invasion started, water finished.

The original Kecaikhati shrine at Tamreswari once stood near the Paya Reserve forest area in Arunachal Pradesh, along the Sadiya-Tezu route. That site, too, lies in ruins. But the Deori community -- descendants of the temple's hereditary priests -- has never stopped worshipping. They have established relocated shrines in Lakhimpur and Dibrugarh, carrying the rituals forward even as the physical temple disappeared beneath river silt. The coordinates commonly listed for Tamreswari Temple actually point to a different temple in Bormuria Deori, far from Sadiya, a confusion that speaks to how thoroughly the original site has been lost to the landscape. What remains is not stone but practice: the festivals, the offerings, the memory of a goddess fierce enough to eat raw and a copper roof bright enough to guide travelers home.