Short Fiction
A different landscape
AMRIT JYOTI MAHANTA
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The narrative probes how the past has impacted the Naga psyche.
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These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone, Temsula Ao, Zubaan/ Penguin Books, 2006, p.160, Rs. 195.
"NAGAS too are humans, but of a special type. Underneath the iron armour in their hearts there blossom the beauteous flowers of timeless humanity". So wrote Dr. Birendrakumar Bhattacharya in a preface to his famous novel in Assamese Iyaruingam (1960) based on his experience with the Tangkhul (a Naga community) society in the 1940s when the disquiet in the Naga hills had just started. The characters in Temsula's bunch of 10 stories in this collection amply affirm Dr. Bhattacharya's words. The author says in the beginning: "But while the actual struggle remains a backdrop, the thrust of the narrative is to probe how the events of that era have restructured or even `revolutionised' the Naga psyche".
These stories are snippets of those innocent habitats of Naga hills whose peace was shattered by political designs the suffering folk hardly understood. She seeks to compel the readers to empathise with the suffering souls. To pick just one example — "But this only further aroused him; he bashed her head on the hard ground several times knocking her unconscious and raped her limp body, using the woman's new lungi afterwards, which he had flung aside, to wipe himself" ("The Last Song"). Such frank narrative by a Naga woman writer brings out the ghastly reality in that part of India powerfully to readers fed on news-stories with their hackneyed jargon of "insurgency", "mainstream", "encounter", "surrender", "atrocity" and "human rights".
The real tragedy
Take two youngsters' experience of seeing a stark naked woman walking along a hilly track, whose "breasts bounced with every step". "Her newly washed skirt was spread over the basket on her head" to dry. No, Sashi and Imli's boyhood was not devastated at this unexpected spectacle. They lost their childhood, all its bliss and mirth, when they became murderers of five human beings (soldiers) "before they were sixteen". The memory of this "dark area" of his life shatters an old Sashi more than their engrossed (they hadn't even bothered to look at her face) gaze on the dark area of a naked woman ("An Old Man Remembers").
To Temsula's credit, she succeeds in maintaining a distance from subscribing to any particular set of opinion while bringing forth the pain and suffering of the Naga people as a community and shaking the readers' conscience. But at times the intellectual consciousness overpowers the writer and the narrative appears more like a research paper. An often jittery language makes its own contribution. An example: "The formerly friendly Kachin rebels at the border refused to help them saying that certain elements in the underground Naga outfit had entered into a secret agreement with Rangoon to help them hunt these rebels down in return for arms and ammunition for them to fight the Indian army" ("Shadows").
Other concerns
Terrorism and with it the (in)human cruelty is not the only subject of these stories. In stories like "The Pot Maker", or "The Journey", readers come across various aspects of Naga life which are often not symbiotic with the modern codes the society is gradually embracing. Women's unequal role in domestic and social life is one of those aspects ("The Night"). But again, the woman writer succeeds in not sounding like a feminist. However, in "The Journey", readers are a bit puzzled by the author's effort to be restrained in describing a lesbian relationship, when she is otherwise so uninhibited in bringing out the unusual and grotesque realities in other stories.
The title, with Stories From A War Zone, betrays an attitude to perpetuate stereotypes in a book where the author asserts in the preface, "Our racial wisdom has always extolled the virtue of human beings living at peace with themselves and in harmony with nature and with our neighbours". On the whole, Temsula makes a sincere effort in delineating a milieu which, for all its political sensitivity and cultural diversity, has not been adequately dwelt upon in the Indian literary dialogue; an effort more commendable when seen against the fact the society described is not one with a traditional written literature.
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