Opinion Temsula Ao and the comfort of stories

In an interview, poet and writer Temsula Ao, who died on Sunday at 80, recalled a visit to the grave of her mother, who had died when Ao was very young. She spoke of an ancient belief among her people, the Ao Nagas, according to which when a person dies, the soul leaves the body and turns into something else — perhaps a bird or a butterfly, or maybe a stick or a stone. That day, by her mother’s grave, Ao’s grandmother swore she saw a bird taking flight. Memory of that visit, with the mother sobbing by her daughter’s grave, haunted Ao for years.

The circumstances of her early life — a “fractured childhood” as she called it in her memoir, Once Upon a Life: Burnt Curry and Bloody Rags — were difficult to say the least. She was born in Jorhat, Assam, and was still in primary school when her parents died within nine months of each other. While her older siblings started working and got married, her youngest siblings were raised by members of the extended family. Ao herself was sent off to a boarding school, and was married off even before her matric results were out.

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Stories grew to be her comfort. Between her teaching job and raising her children, she could only manage to find tiny oases of time in which to compose poems and write. Her works carried the echoes of her personal pain and that of Nagaland, capturing both human redemption and sorrow amidst deprivation and strife. Ao received the Padma Shri in 2007 and her most popular book, Laburnum For My Head won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2013. In her later years, and especially after the publication of her “cathartic” memoir in 2014, Ao looked back at her difficult journey with a sense of wonder. She noted, “It is not for nothing that we have this phrase ‘blessings in disguise’.”