“In these sleepy little hill towns, there is a secret path every child knows, a trail every nostalgic adult remembers,” so begins Avinuo Kire’s riveting novel, Where the Cobbled Path Leads. This path is trodden by Vime, a young Naga girl beset with grief and melancholy over her mother’s recent passing and her father’s remarriage.
Vime’s stepmother Khrielie is a child of war, born out of the Battle of Kohima that halted the Japanese advance in 1944. Khrielie personifies what every war brings but refuses to take back — culturally detached genes. A British soldier courted her mother when the war began and departed when it ended, never to return. It leaves Khrielie without a genealogy to speak of, without a lineage to seek refuge in, without, that is, a proper place within Naga society; a person society might then call upon to cover up empty spaces, such as the hearth of a widower’s house.
Against the odds, Vime and Khrielie come to connect in an intimate embrace of curiosity and care, destiny and destination, faith and family, congealed further as they are lured into the “in-between” – a spatiotemporal domain in ancestral Naga cosmology where souls wander along their final journey. Vime’s mother, Apfo, is trapped there by the spiteful spirit Tei.
The cobbled path leads to a charismatic wisdom tree, Kijübode, the place where the Earth was birthed. Kijübode is also the gateway between the human, the “in-between”, and the spirit world, which reveals as a continuum of numinous beings — from the recent dead whose loved ones refuse to let go of them, spirits of animals, plants, and kharü (village-gates), to the residual supreme Creator, Ukenuopfü, in the high sky.
This division of the Naga world in a multidimensional reality wasn’t always there. When the Earth was still fresh, humans and spirits supposedly lived and loved together. Then, with the birth of greed, jealousy, egotism and other negative emotions in humans, the spirit collectives began to withdraw into another realm modelled along the human world with villages, forests, and traditions.
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In their self-banishment, the spirits realised their own fatal flaw: their inability to grieve — that deepest of emotions born out of love. Now, it made them envy and hanker after men. Humans, in turn, dispatched fragments and images – of memories, musings and reminiscences – into the spirit world, continually constructing and regenerating it. This created a Naga cosmology of distinct yet deeply intertwined realms, locked in a dialectic form which neither could escape. Not even the colonial form of Christianity and its ontology of denial (of spirits, the agency of nonhumans, the unbeknownst) was ever able to hermetically close the door between the human and nonhuman worlds.
From the late 19th century, missionaries, predominantly from the Puritan tradition of the Baptist American South, preached against the possibility of Christianity and Naga cosmology and culture coming together; a view today shared by the orthodox ranks of the Naga clergy. But this is a view equally alien to the embodied experiences and epistemologies of many Naga villagers quite like Vime and Khrielie.
By deliberately keeping the door between the human, the “in-between”, and the spirit world ajar, and by narrating how spirits diffuse themselves throughout the fabric of Naga social existence, Kire expands beyond the dominant copy-paste rationale of Christian conversion as a process of turning difference into similarity, of closing off the agency of nonhumans, of reducing ancestral Naga ways of being and knowing into the universalistic categories of Euro-American traditions. Instead, by thinking about what it means to be a distinctly Naga Christian, Kire allows Christianity to emerge as a many-layered conversation rather than as a coercion of colonial Christianity.
Towards the novel’s end, as Vime and Khrielie try to find a way out of the spirit world, Kire speaks of the possibility of chüsenu, a longstanding Naga prophecy, a true Armageddon when everyone will fight, everything is topsy-turvy, hunger is all around, and the dead will again rise. This is human’s end-game, when all that made the indigenous spirits escape from them – their greed, selfishness, and infighting – comes full circle with the destruction of the world altogether.
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It is still not too late for humans to avert this doom by overcoming their greed and careless neglect of others. As Kire relates through the travails of Vime, grief is one such transcendent glory of humanity, which in its pain connects, heals, reflects, and reveals. In a society where loss, trauma, and grief, caused by decades of agonising violence on account of the India-Naga war, is passed down generations, this is a resilient message of hope.
With Where the Cobbles Path Leads, Kire emerges as a vanguard voice in the literary scene of Northeast India, with echoes far beyond.
Jelle JP Wouters is associate professor, Anthropology and Sociology, Royal Thimpu College, Bhutan, and author of In the Shadows of Naga Insurgency (OUP)
'Where the Cobbled Path Leads' by Avinuo Kire (Source: Amazon.in)