Rich in symbolism, Kire’s story, resonant of her Naga roots, has the pellucid quality of folktales
Once upon a time there was a village, an old woman, a widow. These are stories we have heard at the back of our consciousness. Tales told by grandmothers or jealously hoarded in the pages of yellowing books, if we are not lucky enough to be part of an oral tradition. Easterine Kire, the first writer from Nagaland to publish in English, has the wealth of Naga tradition behind her, with its links to the earth and its disconnect from the 21st century, and its gadget-ridden life.
Kire draws from her Naga roots and tells a story with the hills and its rocks and trees as a primeval backdrop. It could have been set in any time, because it lacks, perhaps deliberately, the trappings of urbanisation, keeping the form of the parable—at one level evoking Paulo Coelho, at another staying true to her heritage of shamans and storytellers. An almost Native American world in its conceptualisation, as that of the Northeastern tribes usually is.
Son of the Thundercloud is a tale of 300-year-old sisters and a miraculous child born at the touch of a raindrop destined to save a village from the ravages of a spirit tiger that widowed his mother and killed his seven brothers. The tale is told through the thread of a wandering man, Pele, who travels from village to village after losing his family to drought.
Pele is the bringer of rain to a world where nothing is fixed—the stars move the earth every night, shifting direction, observed by a pair of sisters who are 400 years old and who have never seen rain. There are messages for the modern world interwoven in Kire’s text. The point that the trees are there for the good of the earth and that those who destroy trees destroy the earth. Or that rain and thunder can destroy as much as drought and famine. In all this, the undercurrent of global warning is apparent. The storytellers have been vanishing for centuries because stories open up the mind and lead to freedom of thought—Kire touches on this in brief almost throwaway moments. She also, rather obviously, extols the virtues of vegetarianism with a mess of vegetable pottage.
Kire’s language is simple—the stuff of folk tales rather than the evolved poetry of magical realism. Her chapter headings maintain the mysticism of the rest. What she describes too are basic things, a home being built—Pele builds several huts and Rhie, the widow’s son, builds his own boy’s hut, working with the tactile feel of wood and jute—travel from one village to another and a discovery of the earth’s pulse.
The text is multi-layered—the widow conceiving at the touch of a raindrop, for example, is a metaphor for the barren earth growing fertile through rain. The tiger spirit that possesses the souls of men in the absence of wisdom could be greed, while the magical spearhead is the blessing of strength handed down through the generations.
Nagas, as we know, are both hunters and head-hunters and the peace of the Old Ones contrasts with the all too human jealousies of the villagers. That Rhie, the son of the raindrop from the thundercloud, would destroy the tiger was known, but following the true course of the narrative makes us realise that the end is also predictable because this is how it has always been in folk tales and epics.
We are alone and nothing lasts forever—there are no sweethearts in Son of the Thundercloud, despite girls with curly hair. The love Kire describes in this particular parable is for things that are eternal and that go beyond the everyday. Like Job in the Old Testament, Pele loses one family at a sweep, but the family he finds instead is older than time. His quest ends in positive affirmation and the realisation that life is a coming to terms with one’s being. Not ‘and they all lived happily ever after’, but ‘he lived positively in this life and beyond’.