Review: “Funeral Nights” by Kynpham S. Nongkynrih – An Ode to Storytelling

“Rain time in Sohra was also story time,” we’re informed early in this compelling novel about the Khasi community in north-eastern India. “The perfect time to tell a tale is a rainy night.” This narrative is inspired by the author’s journey to Nongshyrkon, a jungle village in the West Khasi Hills of north-east India. It also serves as a tribute to the narrator’s hometown, Sohra – renamed Cherrapunjee during colonial times – known as “the wettest desert on earth.” Through fervor and a passion for storytelling, the novel blooms as the rain pours.

Initially, Ap Jutang outlines his mission: “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, discovering how people from other parts of India perceive north-easterners. “I was just too different. I didn’t look like them; I didn’t speak like them. I didn’t act like them. Had they known me, they would have learned that I didn’t eat like them.” Repeatedly stereotyped, mocked, and marginalized by fellow citizens, government policies, history, and literature, he is determined to correct misconceptions about Khasi religions and customs.

The novel follows a group of friends and strangers traveling from Shillong, the capital of Meghalaya, to witness an ancient six-day funeral ceremony, Ka Phor Sorat, conducted by the Khasi tribe Lyngngam. This ceremony will end with the cremation of a beloved village elder, whose body has been preserved in a treehouse for nine months. This feast of the dead is a waning tradition as many Khasis have converted to Christianity, and the group is keen to observe it. They arrive ahead of time due to a miscalculation. While waiting in the jungle, they spend their nights around a fire, sharing 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 rifts between the old and new worlds. The story unfolds over ten chapters or ten nights, each chapter filled with nested narratives. The poetic prose is interspersed with poetry and history, fact juxtaposed with anecdote, and the author delves into memoir, myth, travelogue, and reportage.

I found myself wholly submerged in its wet world, delighting in its many digressions.

Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron and the Arabian Nights, the book pairs well with Janice Pariat’s “Everything the Light Touches,” another peripatetic novel set in Meghalaya. If Pariat’s narrative is about travelers and discoverers, Nongkynrih’s story is about travelers and storytellers. And if, as Pariat writes, this is “a place that falls off the map,” both books redirect the compass to the center of their world: the Khasi community and culture, often overlooked and misunderstood by the rest of the country and the world.

Extensively researched and intricately portrayed, the novel delves into everything from the natural world to the socio-political landscape of the Khasi tribe. It 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 unique, cheeky humor spares no one, not even his community. “Funeral Nights” is an enchanting and revealing epic ensemble, immersing readers in a warm, honest conversation between friends.

Like any good journey, it has twists and turns, false starts, pit stops, roads not taken, and tales not told. At 1,000 pages, it is a formidable endeavor. I found myself completely immersed in its wet world, delighting in its many digressions. Readers seeking a straightforward plot will miss the book’s true purpose: to be an ode to oral storytelling in all its complexities. It requests—no, demands—full immersion.

The narrator states at the beginning: “I do believe that, in telling you about [Sohra], I will reveal myself, for everything that I am has been shaped and molded by my hometown—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 within us shifts, and we, too, feel shaped and surrounded by the rain, the rivers, and the stories.

Funeral Nights by Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih is published by And Other Stories (£19.99).

Source: The Guardian