Do You Know Where Fire Went?
A tale from the north-east
One day a pair of sparrows, pecking around the edge of a sacred grove in the Kameng Valley, gazed up at a tree which appeared to have no end as it towered over them, up and up.
“Do you think it touches the sky?” whispered one sparrow to the other, overawed.
The other was a cocky fellow with a bright eye and an alert air. “We could always ask,” he said.
“Who?” asked the first.
“ H-him,” said the cocky sparrow, not quite so cockily, for the bird he indicated to his mate was gigantic, and had an intimidatingly enormous beak to match.
This majestic creature, the great hornbill, had been flying to and fro from the depths of the sacred grove where the light filters green through the leaves of huge, ancient trees and barely reaches the dark, moist leaf litter of the forest floor. He obviously had a nesting family and was making several trips to collect enough food to regurgitate for both mate and chick, who were sealed within the hollow of a big tree, and would be for the next four months. The hornbill was taking a break from the incessant flying, and had alighted on a branch not too far from the sparrows.
“Hello,” said the sparrows. “C-Could you tell us if the tallest trees really reach the sky? We haven’t flown so high up yet.
“Well, sometimes the sky comes down to meet the trees, and the clouds swirl and curl around the top of the forest,” said the hornbill indulgently. “I love that. Tell you what I don’t like, though. Fire! It’s a beast that eats everything it finds. We are lucky the river is nearby, and the trees and the river work together to keep us as safe as they can. Fire is scared of Water.”
“Oh, how is that?” asked the sparrows, surprised. They had seen Fire many times in the distance, and they didn’t like it either.
And this is the tale the hornbill told.
DO YOU KNOW WHERE FIRE WENT?
Shaiontoni Bose
Long, long ago, in the densely forested plains of the lands around the River Kameng, Fire and Water fought furiously with each other.
It was a terrible battle. Fire’s flames leapt and coiled, burning beast and bird and tree, and its smoke writhed through the forest, choking all those it didn’t burn.
Wherever Water and Fire clashed, steam rose as Fire resisted the waters of the great rivers of the plains.
But all green things are friends of Water, and the forest allowed the river to rise and rise until it broke its banks and raged and flooded the plains, and rose and rose halfway up the mountain.
This made Fire afraid. It began to climb higher and higher up the mountain, where much is dry and fire-friendly.
Still the river rose and still Fire ran, until the mountain was covered in water almost to the top! As Water lapped against the peak of the mountain, with no place else to go, Fire hid.
And at last Water, unable to catch fleet-footed Fire or see where he hid, sank once more, and the river returned to its quiet flowing in the forested plains.
Little did Fire know a small grasshopper was watching. For a while, Grasshopper was quiet and held its secret to itself, but grasshoppers like to sing, and this one could not hold its secret in much longer, and one day it sang to Monkey,
“Do you know where Fire went?
It looked for a home as dry as bone,
As far from Water as it could go,
It went and hid inside that stone.”
Monkey, gleeful in his discovery, could not hold it in. He was friends with a proud, dignified boy with a topknot called a podom on his head. Monkey could not hold his secret in though his elders had warned him. “Be careful,” they had said. “Those men, they took the podom from our heads and now wear it on theirs!” But Monkey and the boy had grown up together, and both were young, and so Monkey told his friend the secret.
“Do you know where Fire went?
It looked for a home as dry as bone,
As far from Water as it could go,
It went and hid inside that stone.”
And of course, as men do, the boy took the stone, and found Fire and made it work for him, and life has been different for Man ever since.
The sparrows had listened with great attention to the hornbill’s tale. “We’ll make sure to keep an eye out for Fire,” they chortled, “and if we see it, we’ll be sure to let Water know!”
“It’s good to keep our eyes open, we can’t be too careful,” agreed the hornbill. And with a cheerful honk, flapped off once again on his errands.
As our forests dwindle all over the country, birds like the hornbill are dwindling too, from loss of habitat and food. They are a flagship species for forest conservation as they are also ‘forest farmers’ responsible for seed dispersal of indigenous trees. They are excellent parents and take great care of their nestlings. The mother enters and seals herself in with her baby for several months, while the father makes at least eleven trips a day to supply a kilo of food to both mother and chick.
Story credit and copyright © Shaiontoni Bose 2021
For those who came in late, this is how the Story Birds were chosen: A Chirpy Tale.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a story adapted from several collected by Verrier Elwin and can be found in his collection, Myths of the North-East Frontier of India.
The main story of Fire hiding in a stone is of Nyishi origin. At the time Verrier Elwin collected these tales, the Nyishi people were called the ‘Dafla’. Since ‘Dafla’ was a pejorative term, in 2008, their name was changed to ‘Nyishi’.
The bit about the grasshopper and the monkey is an Ao Naga story and was so enchanting I had to include it. The allusion to the podom (top knot) is actually included from another Nyishi tale also collected by Verrier Elwin.
The silly rhyme is my own.
The illustration is inspired by Japanese woodcuts.
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SOURCES
Elwin, Verrier. Myths of the North-East Frontier of India. Department of Cultural Affairs, Directorate of Research, govt of Arunachal Pradesh, Itanagar. First published, 1958. Third reprint, 2012.
von Fürer-Haimendorf, Christoph. Tribes of India: The Struggle for Survival. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.
Guha, Ramachandra. "Savaging the Civilised: Verrier Elwin and the Tribal Question in Late Colonial India." Economic and Political Weekly 31, no. 35/37 (1996): 2375-389. Accessed June 6, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4404559.
Applied Environmental Research Foundation(AERF), India: Biodiversity research.
One of our readers, Shukla Chanda, sent in this lovely photograph of a baby hornbill on her balcony.
Your artwork is splendid. The wave "eating" the fire was supremely realistic and reminded me of Bengali tales we were told as children, where monsters shouted "hau mau khau" in anticipation of relishing their prey...although in this case, the water wasn't a monster of course.
This was so sweet! Loved it! And the "silly rhyme"...reminded me of the stories we heard as children when there was always a repetitive rhyme in it.