Book: GIANTS
Author: Huthuka Sumi
Published by: HarperCollins
Price: Rs 299
Stories form the soil in which the roots of communities are embedded. Our rush towards pseudo-progress has created new stories, relegating older ones to the margins, thereby pulling our roots apart. Now, befuddled by ethical, moral contradictions, we seek change. Huthuka Sumi’s debut novel draws sap from this tension, telling us how we could remember, reclaim and re-root.
To transform 13-year-old Kato into a storyteller, Giants weaves an intricate pattern of ethnic Naga-Sumi symbols, folktales, local histories, global turmoil, and the personal lives of the mountain village, Ayito Phu. Kato, himself mute, must voice stories that ‘great change’ will soon wrench out. The oxymoron — a mute storyteller — allows Giants to show how a story transcends the mere telling of it. Imagination, courage, and faith can allow Kato to be a memory-keeper, telling stories of interconnected worlds of humans and the Timi-ala, the giants who protect the land.
Without slipping into the exotic, as is often expected of indigenous stories from the Northeast, Sumi presents a palimpsest of knowledge and wisdom where experience and exchange between humans and non-humans play equal roles in tutoring the ways of this relationship. Kato learns from his mother, grandmother, the Timi-ala, Kene, that life is more than the immediate. ‘Change’ that comes as war, death, loss of magic, must be transcended: Giants hopes that stories of the land would serve as a regenerative force.
When Kato publishes his first book about the stories of the land, we witness Sumi’s seamless blending of imagination and reality, an exercise without which stories wouldn’t resurge. Stamping ‘magic realism’ on the narrative to rationalise it seems reductive. Community stories are timeless folds of wisdom, so Kene appears on numberless pages, smudged with ash-darkness, as if reflecting how stories follow us as shadows. Transcending the local, Sumi’s tale urges us to resurrect the forgotten stories of our interconnected lives to realise that real growth lies in nurturing the roots on which the foundations of who we are and who we are yet to be stand.
