Easterine Kire’s Spirit Nights, set in a village of animists, agriculturalists and hunters in the hills of Nagaland, begins with the warm bonding between a woman, Tola, and her grandson, Namu. Spiritual beliefs regulate the everyday living of the villagers, who recall and respect taboos at every juncture. Taboos guide the actions of the Nagas and also bind them as a community.
As Namu’s parents are dead, Tola is his father and mother. She takes him to the jhum fields daily, teaches him how to cultivate rice and vegetables, and brings him back home before sunset. One day when Namu protests about leaving the fields before it gets dark, Tola responds sharply: “And what are you going to do with the dark when it comes?”
Taboos for a reason
That question, posed in the first few pages, is a sign of the grave tragedy that is to befall the villagers. Tola, like her father, the village seer, is the “seer of men’s destinies”. She reluctantly receives prophecies in her dreams and knows how to heed the warnings that come with them. She dreams one day that the “tiger has eaten the sun!” It is a message of impending doom.
A Naga tribal leader monitoring his people during a performance | Photo Credit: Getty Images
When a taboo gets breached in the spirit world, darkness envelops the village. It is a darkness so black, so dense, so intense that the villagers stay put, shrouded in fear and uncertainty. “There was no romance or magic to this dark time, except perhaps its own baneful magic,” Kire writes. “This blackness had eclipsed anything resembling light, man-made or natural. It drove them to despair and robbed them of all energy.” The villagers are instructed not to step out of their homes lest they get whisked away by evil spirits or hungry animals. They cannot tend to their fields even though they are running out of food. They don’t know how and when this darkness will go away. There is only one person in the village with the ability to get rid of the all-encompassing darkness, but the villagers must wait patiently and obediently for light.
Also read:Review | ‘A Respectable Woman’ by Easterine Kire
Kire’s tale is inspired by a story of darkness narrated by the Rengma Naga and Chang Naga tribes of Nagaland. It was through extensive research of oral narratives of the tribal people, Kire said elsewhere, that she learnt about their customs, practices and beliefs. She effortlessly weaves bite-sized fables and age-old folklore into this well-paced work of fiction. Allegories abound, as in her previous works, but they don’t weigh the book down.
In Spirit Nights, Easterine Kire pulls us into the Naga’s world of spiritual struggles | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
Into the lives of the tribes
The only issue is that while Kire’s prose is fluid, some dialogues feel determinedly clunky. There seems a disconnect between the writing and the setting in parts. For instance, in one place, Choba the headman says: “When you are out on the fields and you hear the danger signal, no other thought should come to mind save the one to run back to the village and save yourselves or save others... We take all the necessary measures well ahead of time and bring a replacement from the forest.” In another dramatic portion, where you would expect a frightened Namu to be particularly inarticulate, he is surprisingly coherent. “We did a head count and that is how we found out about the missing families. Their houses were bolted from outside and no one could recollect seeing them when running back from the fields,” he tells Tola.
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But this is only a quibble. Those awkward portions are overshadowed by Kire’s greatest gift — of being able to pack in daunting themes of greed, arrogance, rebellion and envy into a slim book, while also shining a light on the expansive world view of the tribal people. While in her previous books, she made accessible to us the histories and lived realities of the Nagas, in Spirit Nights she pulls us into their world of spiritual struggles through wisdom, imagination, magic and adventure.
She gives a fresh lease of life to ancient wisdom, to truths that we preach but don’t practice, through a powerful female protagonist in a patriarchal set-up. It is no mean task to make a book full of profound themes an easy read, the kind that one goes through with child-like wonder. Kire does that effortlessly in Spirit Nights.
