“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.
The novel follows a group of friends and strangers who journey from Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, to witness a rumoured ancient six-day funeral ceremony, Ka Phor Sorat, which is performed by the Khasi tribe, Lyngngam. The ceremony will conclude with the cremation of a beloved elder of the village, whose body has been preserved in a treehouse for nine months. This feast of the dead is a dying tradition – most Khasis have converted to Christianity – and the group is eager to experience it. Miscalculating the date, they arrive early. While they wait in the jungle, they spend their nights around a fire exchanging stories – “stories big and small, not so much about death, but about life, past, present and future, rural and urban, high and low” – and debating the ruptures between the old world and the new. Ten chapters, or 10 nights, unfold, each consisting of stories within a nested narrative. Poetic prose is interspersed with poetry and history, fact is juxtaposed with anecdote, and the author has his inky fingers in many genres: memoir, myth, travelogue, reportage.
Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Arabian Nights, the book is perhaps best paired with Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches, a similarly peripatetic novel also set in the state of Meghalaya. If Pariat’s is a tale of travellers and discoverers, Nongkynrih’s is one of travellers and storytellers. And if, as Pariat writes, this is “a place that falls off the map”, both books point their compass to the centre of their world, the Khasi community and culture – so often overlooked and misunderstood by the rest of the country, let alone the world.
An intensively researched and intricately rendered account of everything from the natural world to the sociopolitics of the Khasi tribe, the novel reflects a realm where “the real and the surreal get blurred, spirits and deities become part of what is human and the imaginary is ever in conversation with the everyday”. The narrator’s particular brand of cheeky humour spares no one, not even his own community. Funeral Nights is an enchanting and revealing epic ensemble, and reading it feels like being exposed to the warmth of the fire, listening in on an honest conversation between friends.
Like any good journey, it has twists and turns, false starts and pit stops, the road not taken, and the tale not told. At 1,000 pages, it is a mighty endeavour. I found myself wholly submerged in its wet world, delighting in its many digressions. Readers looking to trace a straightforward plot will miss the book’s true purpose, which is to be an ode to oral storytelling in all its complexities. It requests – no, demands – full immersion.
At the beginning, the narrator says: “I do believe that, in telling you about [Sohra], I will reveal myself, for everything that I am has been shaped and moulded by my home town – not only by the customs and manners of Sohra’s people but also by the silent influence of the hills, rivers and woods that surround it and surround me still.” By the end of this transformative book, something shifts within us, and we, too, feel shaped and surrounded by the rain, the rivers, the stories.
• Funeral Nights by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih is published by And Other Stories (£19.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
