Book Review: When The River Sleeps by Easterine Kire.

Book Review: When The River Sleeps by Easterine Kire.

Quote: Perhaps the answer lay not in striving but in being. In simply accepting that the loneliness would never be eliminated fully, but that one could deal with it by learning to treat it like a companion and no longer an adversary.

Ville a hunter wakes up from a dream, ventures out to search for the heart-stone; that holds the power of the river that's asleep. And this stone is guarded by wailing-angry-widow-spirits.

Many attempts have been made at magical realism in Indian English writing, and I didn't like them. My personal opinion is that magical realism needs a deep connection with nature, maybe never explicitly explored in the text, but the traces of that connection always shows in the words written. And I have always argued that North East India is the most fertile ground to plant the seeds of magical realism in.

Easterine Kire, pens our deep connection with nature for the national readership to gawk at (sorry to be mean). Ville's journey is a physical and metaphorical one. He walks through the enchanting forests of Nagaland, meets people who have morphed into tiger spirits, finds a village of all women with magical powers, and other hunters who help in his quest.

But the book reminds us that man-nature relationship can be harmonic and sustainable, nature can be preserved if our needs are shared and limited within a community. Kire gives us an intimate view of how the communities work as a place of support and at times discrimination.

The forest is Ville's wife, a provider and a protector, who needs to be treated as an equal. There are different forms of antagonists in the story, each one is a personification of human greed. It's not a hero's journey but an ordinary man heeding to the call of nature.

What I loved most is that Ville is not a young man; a middle-aged bachelor, who meets and forms respectful bonds with various women. He meets Ate who is quarter of his age, instead of the obvious age is a number romance trope, he treats her like a daughter he never had and decides to help rebuild her life. Now, this kind of wholesome and nurturing masculinity is very hard to find in modern-day narratives.

Though set in contemporary time, the story runs parallel to a world that's untouched by the overwhelming presence of technology, though Kire drops hints of destruction and deforestation lurking in every nook and corner, Ville is a man of nature he cannot imagine a life without nature. He is a hunter and guard of the forest, he is employed by the forest department. His interactions only happen with the villages he passes through and spirits he overwhelms.

It's the ending of the book, that left me with huge sense of loss. For someone who has grown up with hills always in view, I could understand the fear of losing all the green around us. Greed cannot be defeated permanently, it's always there in some form or another waiting to bite a chunk out of the land or the mountains or the land.

The story can double as a mythical tale as well, like a story that gets told generations after generations yet it's meaning remains elusive.

P.S.- the book is a gift from Sarath and Anushree from my book club, I am still trying to figure out the suffix for them if it's dada and didi or dadā and baidou. That's a debate for another time.