“Rain time in Sohra was also story time,” we’re told early on in this seminal and shapeshifting novel about the north-eastern Indian Khasi community. “The perfect time to tell a tale is a rainy night.” A real-life journey the author made to the jungle village of Nongshyrkon, nestled in the West Khasi Hills of north-east India, inspired the book. It’s also a homage to the narrator’s home town, Sohra – changed to Cherrapunjee in colonial times – “the wettest desert on earth”. But through sheer determination and passion for storytelling, as the rain falls, stories grow.
At the start, Ap Jutang lays out his intentions: “It is very much in the spirit of Hamlet that I would like to tell you the story of my people – to clear their wounded name.” In the 1990s, the narrator found himself in Delhi, and discovered how the rest of India treats its citizens from the north-east. “I was just too different. I didn’t look like the rest of them; I didn’t speak like them. I didn’t act like them. Had they known me, they would have learnt that I didn’t eat like them.” Repeatedly stereotyped, mocked and marginalised – by his fellow citizens, by government policy, by history and also by literature – he is determined to correct the falsehoods about the religions and customs of the Khasi people.
