Carrying 'Home' Through The Flames: A Memoir Of Memory And Survival From Manipur

“Home is not just where we live; it is where we find pieces of ourselves scattered across time and space. In food, in faith, in memories, in the simple comforts we hold on to, home is something we carry with us wherever we go,” writes author and journalist Hoihnu Hauzel in a deeply personal account that forms the heart of her new book, published by Speaking Tiger.

Titled Stories The Fire Could Not Burn, the book is both memoir and testimony, an intimate record of the violence that engulfed Manipur in 2023 and the lives it fractured. Drawing from memory, reportage and personal loss, Hauzel pieces together stories of displacement, grief and resilience, documenting how ordinary lives were upended by the conflict.

Yet the book is not only about devastation. It is also about what survives it; community, memory and the fragile idea of home that people carry even after the flames have taken everything else.

Hauzel’s own home in Imphal was burnt down on May 4, 2023, when an armed mob attacked it during the violence that erupted in the state. When she writes about that day, she does not dwell only on the destruction of a house but on the life contained within it—the quiet, intimate things that made it a home.

She writes about her father’s library, about the books she now regrets not borrowing more often despite being the only one he “allowed to take them out.” Four of those books, “now mine,” she writes, sit in her library in Gurgaon. She has never read them, but they remain there like “silent companions.”

Through the remnants of a life once lived like the remains of her niece’s piano, the family parlour, her sister’s bonsai collection, Hauzel takes readers through her most personal loss. It is not the loss of a place alone, but of the moments and memories that once lived there. She also writes about the helplessness of watching it all unfold while she was far away in Gurgaon.

Each chapter gently returns to the same lingering question: what do we call home?

Through the stories of neighbours and friends who lived nearby,the book shows you that what was lost was never merely material. For some, it was a family album. For another, it was their dog, whom they could now only see in a photograph, “waiting patiently among the blackened ruins.”

These fragments of memory also echo in her poetry collection, Requiem for a Home in Manipur, where the images of her grandfather’s orange tree, her mother’s office, the Christmas tree and the kitchen appear as quiet markers of a life that once was.

But the book does not only recount the losses that followed the violence that erupted in 2023. Through the author' childhood, you see a state already shaped by conflict. Imphal, she writes, had long been familiar with gunfire. It was “normal” to hear gunshots, “Anytime. Anywhere.”

Manipur, in her telling, was a place where violence often intruded quietly into everyday life.

“It’s a place where silence is often interrupted. In our sleep. In our walk. In our work,” she writes, describing a childhood lived under the constant possibility of unrest.

In such a landscape, peace felt fragile, almost imagined. “That makes peace a fleeting and elusive state,” she reflects. And yet, she remembers the small things that softened those years: “In that setting, what softened the edges of our childhood were flowers.”

As a child of conflict, Hauzel’s reflections move beyond Manipur; to Kashmir, Kabul and Myanmar, drawing connections with people who have lost homes, who have had to uproot their entire lives in a single day.

In that sense, the book becomes more than a personal story. It is also a reminder of how necessary it is for voices from conflict zones to document their own histories, not just for themselves, but for the communities they represent.

Hauzel does not write only as a journalist or an author. She writes as a daughter who sees her father’s eyes well up at the thought of the books and typewriter he lost, watching her mother’s quiet sadness when she sees a picture of their old home, and as an aunt who wishes her nieces and nephews could experience an ordinary, wholesome childhood in a home she once called her own.

The book feels shaped not only by emotion, but also by responsibility, the responsibility of telling stories that might otherwise remain unheard.

During the violence in Manipur, which displaced over 60,000 people, injured 1,108 and left 258 dead as of November 2024, there was also an unexpected surge of writing. At least eight books were released between July 2023 and June 2024, an outpouring of literature rarely seen during an ongoing conflict, five of which were from the tribal community.

It included first-person accounts, histories of different tribes such as the Hmar, Zo and Thadou, and reflections on the socio-political struggles of the region. Many were compiled by student leaders, scholars and writers from the tribal region across different states in India. 

It was, in many ways, a collective attempt to record what unfolded when the rest of the country and much of the world seemed to look away, a sentiment Hauzel herself reflects upon in the book.

Even today, as people in Manipur continue to demand security and stability, the questions raised in the book remain unresolved.

“As citizens, security is supposed to be a guarantee,” she writes. But when that guarantee collapses, the question becomes much larger, one that the nation itself must confront.

“In our case, there was no answer.”

The book ultimately reminds readers that the tragedy of Manipur is not only about burnt houses or displaced families. It is also about the fragile idea of belonging, about what happens when the place people call home disappears overnight.

A home, Hauzel suggests, is never just a structure of walls and roofs. It is made of memories, of objects touched by time, of people who once filled its rooms with ordinary life.

And when the fire takes the house, what survives are the stories people carry with them.

Stories the fire could not burn.