Ghosts of our Culture and Tradition that once was!

Sitting huddled by the fireplace, roasting maize after dinner was the ideal pastime for us cousins during our summer vacations while we were young. Often, these sittings by the crackling fire would be accompanied by the narration of folktales by the elder members of the family.

We would gnaw the aromatic roasted maize taking occasional sips of the warm delicious red tea and listen in awe as the characters of the stories from the past came alive in our imaginations. The patter of the raindrops on the tin roofs and the croaking of the frogs from the nearby paddy fields would often lull us to sleep while the stories continued to weave on in our dreams as we made our way to bed.

In all the dreams we dreamt and the stories we weaved in our sleep, we grew and the stories that we once lived have now become mere shadows of what they used to be. When a friend of mine called me up and asked me to write a story about this, I tried to reach out to the child in me and bring back all the stories I’d heard when I was young. But doing so was like drinking a cup of bland red tea imagining it to be as good as the one I drank in tin cups when I was young; it never did justice to the original.

That was when I called my grandfather’s brother who’d narrate stories to us when we were young. We talked over the phone and I asked him if he would be kind enough to narrate to me one of the stories he used to tell us. He was kind enough to agree and this is the story he told me.

Back in the olden days when times were simpler and people depended on the bountiful supply of Mother Nature for survival, some young men of Huishu village (a village in the North-Eastern boundary between India and Myanmar) accompanied by the village elders were fishing by Namlung (name of a paddy field) at the Chalou River (a tributary of the Chindwin River known for the abundance of fishes in the olden days). It was an unusually hot day and one of the elders asked the young folks to collect some kaorik thang (name of a tree) branches so that they could wash the heat off their heads (these branches were crushed and used as shampoo).

Now, the Namlung is a famous location even to this day for a gigantic slab of rock that protrudes from the side of a small hill by the river. The river runs through this rock and at a certain place forms a clear swirling pool inside the rock. Story also has it that the stone would moo like a cow with its sound reverberating through the surroundings making it an altogether eerie place to be.

Those days, there was sparse vegetation on the gigantic rock slab with only a handful of trees and shrubs growing on it. And it so happened that one of the young men climbed the rock and cut off some branches of a kaorik thang that was growing on it. He then headed back to the place where the rest of his village folks were fishing.

Having fished almost half the day and the sun scorching as noon approached, the village folks decided to rest and relieve themselves of the heat. They pounded the kaorik thang branches the young man brought and washed the heats off their body, swimming in one of the shallow pools.

Soon after, they were fishing again but it wasn’t long before they caught sight of an army of soldiers clad in full armors armed with spears and daos at the distant horizon, advancing towards them.

Now, this story happened in the days when headhunting was prevalent and villages were attacked by their neighboring villages with brave warriors competing with each other for supremacy. Often, this supremacy was defined by the number of people they beheaded and the trophy of heads they collected.

The village folks, taking the army of soldiers to be warriors from their neighboring village, started fleeing. Most of them fled back to the village but a feeble old man couldn’t keep up with the others. The soldiers were gaining on him and he had no choice but to take a chance and hide in the thick reeds at the side of the river.

The army of soldiers soon approached the place he was hiding and were furiously poking through the reeds with their spears with one or two of them swearing they’d seen a man go into the reeds. The old man, shaking and sweating profusely was lucky enough not to be stabbed by one of the spears. The soldiers spread themselves and continued to look for the old man but maybe the gods were in his favor and the soldiers couldn’t find him. After what seemed to be an eternity, the leader of the Army made the other soldiers stop and asked them to assemble before speaking up.

“The man is not worth our rage or our energy. We shall go back home. It was just a branch of our Tarung (symbolic pillars that were erected outside Tangkhul houses) they cut down.”

“We’ll let them be today but if they do so much to cut down or even harm our Tarung again, we will surely attack their village and set it ablaze” he continued as his soldiers nodded and shouted their agreement in unison.

Soon, the army of soldiers was gone and by the time they’d disappeared into the horizon, the old man crept out of his hiding place and ran home.

Upon reaching his village, he found the villagers anxiously anticipating an impending war. Many were surprised to see him alive and asked him the whereabouts of the enemy. The old reassured his villagers that the army of soldiers were not warriors from the neighboring villages. He then told them everything he’d overheard as he hid in the reeds and explained to the villagers how they enraged the Kameos (Supernatural beings or Deities that the Tangkhuls believed once existed side by side with human beings) when one of the young men chopped off some branches from the Kaorik thang growing on the rock slab. The rock, he told them isn’t any ordinary slab of rock as it was where the Kameos lived and the Kaorik thang was their Tarung.

The villagers coming to know of the existence of the Kameos never once offended or disturbed them again and both parties continued to live in mutual respect and harmony.

Many generations have gone by and the Kameos of Namlung have never been heard of or seen ever since. The gigantic slab of rock still stands strong to this day but the fishes that once breathed life to the river are now gone just as the Kameos have silently bowed away. The river too has become a mere lifeless shadow of what it used to be.

Long after my grandpa’s brother hung up I was lost in thoughts wondering if we should only leave behind legacies and shadows of great things that once were for the younger generations or we should be striving today to preserve what little is left of our rich land, our culture, and our traditions.

This story first appeared in the Khanrin Magazine published by the Tangkhul Katamnao Long Delhi.