Book Review: Peace In The Land Of The Dead Draws Readers Into Manipur's Past And Present

Lian Dousel—the author of the short-story collection Peace in the Land of the Dead—is a writer from Lamka, Manipur. Lamka is the second-largest town in Manipur and an abiding presence in many of the stories in the collection. In “Kau”, young Kimte is packed off by her mother to Lamka to study nursing. She is told that she would “grow to love Lamka” and find a way to support her family, which is financially crippled by her father’s alcoholism. The material world crushes Kimte. The other world makes contact with her on the day she boards a bus to return to her hometown for her father’s funeral. This eerie encounter happens on an isolated stretch of the highway; a place rumoured to be “where demons of the old faith are believed to take refuge since Christianity came in from the West and settled in the land”.

“Kau” is one among many stories in the collection where the real and the surreal entwine. Dousel weaves in elements of magical realism, horror, myth and folklore into his richly imagined narrative tapestry, drawing readers’ attention to the many stories and beliefs embedded in Manipur’s mosaic. A keen observer of the human condition, he writes with empathy about those who are oppressed by gender and class hierarchies. Manipur’s loners, stoners, mourners, misfits—all find a place in his stories.

In “Papa Brought the Creature Home”, a grieving couple finds solace in the presence of a demonic creature and their neighbours are aghast. Eventually, the community stages a drastic intervention to get rid of the creature. Here, too, the boundaries between real life and the supernatural are easily breached. The creature becomes entangled in the meshes of the human world, which is haunted by both the living and the dead. Dousel invites readers, sceptics and believers alike, to open up to other dimensions of existence. As I kept reading, the words of the narrator of another story in the collection titled “Old Demons in the New World” echoed in my ears: “The lucid part of my mind knew that this could not be real. But it was only a small part.”

The stories sensitively interrogate faith and belief; the inroads of modernity into Manipur and its impact on the traditional way of life; and the influence community and society wield on individual lives.

In “The Night of the Fire”, when two teenagers who are in love elope and “disappear completely”, the whole community goes into a tizzy. People call the two lovers’ story “a folktale come to life”—the tale of Khupching and Ngambawn, the doomed lovers who ran away to be together after they were “denied their happily ever after”. “The Night of the Fire” traces the trajectory of life in Lamka since the early 1990s; the winds of change sweeping across the land, the growing influence of Western culture on the youth, adults despairing that “young minds were bent towards sin, singing along to blasphemous words that preachers rephrased in their sermons with disgust”. Rattled by change, many talk about something “satanic” at work in the world. The church steps in to save corrupt young souls. Waves of religiosity wash over the community. The entire episode is narrated as a flashback by a group of the missing couple’s friends who delve into the episode years later, revealing the collective psyche of their community in the process.

“Cicadas” revolves around two young boys who share a drug habit. Their furtive attempts to find the money to buy drugs are convincingly sketched. I found one scene in the story particularly powerful: the description of their drug-fuelled journey on the riverbank into “a land of psychedelic chaos with potential for both cosmic ecstasies and hellish nightmares”.

Dousel has a gift of transporting readers into other realms, for offering us a different perspective on reality, acquainting us afresh with joy and sorrow, tragedy and doom, legend and myth.

One story that comes across as a bit laboured is “Hydrangeas”. The plot and the tone struck me as overtly dramatic. But here, too, Dousel’s sympathies are firmly aligned with the less privileged and his reason for writing remains the righting of wrongs.