Fields of blood

The North East may be one corner of India where these stories are placed, but their likeness can be found in many areas of the world today," writes Ranjita Biswas, who has produced a highly competent, fluid translation of Arupa Patangia Kalita's eight novellas and stories compiled in Written in Tears (Harper Perennial). "One only has to scratch the surface to come face-to-face with the truth."

Most of these stories were written during Assam's most turbulent years, and Kalita has always had a way of telling stories as though the landscape formed the paper on which she wrote. But in so many of these stories, she captures that larger truth, placing her along with writers as diverse as Chimamanda Adichie (Half Of A Yellow Sun) or Phil Klay (Redeployment).

This collection is not about the insurgency as much as it is a manual for surviving loss, for living alongside drastic change and uncertainty, and Kalita's attempt often seems to be on an insistence that the individual be given dignity, not reduced to a statistic or a symbol of the long conflict. Her storytelling unfolds in ripples, moving often towards violence, but within those circles, there are glimpses of beauty, ordinary loves, everyday concerns.

In Anurima's Motherland, the protagonist dreams, not of the police or of abandoned houses, but of the honey bees she loves in the garden. "She dreamt that they flew away from the honeycomb again and again; once she tried to hold them with the end of her chador. Or she saw a bare branch of the tree trembling in the wind, or the base of the tree filled with dead bees…"

It is often women who centre her novellas, as with Mainao in The Cursed Fields of Golden Rice. Legends and demons, the weaving of shawls, a life built on simple, good things - "the fresh harvested paddy, zumai and the pitha" - of the harvest festivals intersect with the inexorable passage of time, the hardening of history around them as soldiers come to eat rice with chicken curry, oblivious to what they have demanded. "Mainao cooked the rice. She wept when she had to kill the hen, which had just started laying the eggs."

The reader begins to see violence and insurgency differently: not as events in themselves, not even as the outcome of political movements, but as near-demonic interruptions in the fabric of a life someone is trying to weave on her loom.

When Kalita summarises history, she does so deftly. She writes in Face in the Mirror of the early 1990s in Assam with the exhaustion and clarity of over-familiarity: "It was a time when money was counted only in lakhs and the number of deaths escalated every day. The group that wanted a separate state was becoming like the bharando bird; with its two mouths, it was devouring its own body." But Written In Tears is not so much a history of that time as it is a history of how people survive these times, and how they survive the multiple losses, the slow bleeding of everything around them - unable to leave, despite the many hardships of staying, the risks of turning to stone.

Some of her insights are startling, inverting what you might think you know. The idea, for instance, that much of the imported English school syllabus has no relevance is challenged as one of her main characters, Surabhi Barua, takes Alfred Noyes' poem The Highwaymen and breathes the landscape and the times into those tired phrases, seeing in his ghosts her own: "The girl tied to the pole, her mouth gagged by the soldiers."

But perhaps Arupa Patangia Kalita is at her best when she asks deceptively simple questions. In the final story, Ayengla of the Blue Hills, Ayengla wonders what people want, why they create problems and conflicts. From these ordinary, almost banal thoughts, she moves to a basic and hard question: "If they did succeed in getting their own land, who would rule it and who would have to leave?" Like the stories in Written In Tears, these are timeless, and timely, questions, with no good answers.

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