NEW DELHI, 25 May: Poet-writer Subi Taba says her debut book Tales from the Dawn-Lit Mountains is a souvenir of her life in the hills of Arunachal Pradesh and she feels delighted to have liberated these stories dwelling inside her.
The stories in this collection are shaped by the hilly terrains of Arunachal, stirred by the mountain rivers, flavoured by the harvests of the soil, and tempered by the tribal people living in the isolated hinterlands under the shadows of magic and realism, she says.
“Each story is a glimpse into the heart of life; a peek inside the dark corridors of a bamboo house in the hills; a look at the wild outcry rising amid a fire lit up in the distant mountain villages,” Taba adds.
She says she has taken “creative liberty to fictionalise glimpses and layers of cultural history, familial ties, ethnographic identity, symbolism of animals, geopolitical transition, life’s mundanity, and nature and supernatural beliefs existing within the ethnic tribes of Arunachal.”
“I feel delighted to have liberated these stories dwelling inside me, which have now been set forth on to their journeys, expanding like white smoke rising above the roof of a village hut,” Taba, an agriculture development officer, says.
Tales from the Dawn-Lit Mountains, published by Penguin Random House imprint Vintage, features stories that are products of visceral observation and a delicate understanding of the ethnic communities living under intervening shadows of magic and realism in the isolated hinterlands of the state.
The subjects of the stories are varied: A village haunted by an insidious spirit tiger; a bee sting reminding a Nocte boy of his brother’s beheading and transforming him into a deadly headhunter; a Donyi-Polo priest practising his animistic rituals to preserve the fading vestiges of his indigenous religion; and the curse of a high priest following a thief who stole forbidden sacred ornaments. (PTI)
