Kungawrhi and the serpent
At a Glance
- Central figures: Kungawrhi, a young Mizo woman known for her singing voice and her beauty; a great serpent that dwells beneath a lake; Kungawrhi’s mother, who makes the bargain.
- Setting: A village in the Mizo hills (Mizoram), in the oral tradition of the Mizo people; the story centers on a lake in the deep forest beyond the village fields.
- The turn: Kungawrhi’s mother, desperate during a famine, promises her daughter to the serpent in exchange for food.
- The outcome: Kungawrhi is taken into the lake by the serpent and does not return; her song is heard rising from the water long after she is gone.
- The legacy: Kungawrhi’s story persists in Mizo oral tradition as a cautionary account of what is lost when a parent trades a child’s life for survival, and her voice from the water is said to be heard near certain lakes in the hills.
The girl was singing when her mother came back from the lake. She was always singing - while she pounded rice, while she carried water, while she sat on the bamboo platform outside the house and watched the mist come down the hills. Her voice carried. People in the next village said they could hear it on still evenings, coming over the ridge like something with wings.
Her mother set down the basket. It was empty. The fields had given nothing that season, and the forest was picked clean of roots and greens. Kungawrhi stopped singing and looked at the basket and said nothing.
The Lake Below the Fields
Below the village, past the jhum fields where the burned stumps stood black against the red earth, there was a lake. It was not large but it was deep - so deep that no one had ever found the bottom. The water was dark green, almost black in places, and very still. Fish lived in it but they were strange fish, pale and blind-looking, and most people did not eat them.
The serpent lived at the bottom of that lake. Everyone knew this. It had been there longer than the village. Some said it had been there longer than the hills themselves. It was enormous - the old men said it could circle the lake three times with its body - and it was intelligent in the way that old things in deep water are intelligent. It did not bother the village. The village did not bother it. This was the arrangement.
But that year the rains had failed. The jhum fields dried out before the rice could head. The streams that fed the terraces went to trickles and then to nothing. By the time the cold season came, the village was hungry in a way that went past hunger into something quieter and more dangerous. Children stopped crying. Dogs disappeared. The old people sat very still and looked at the ground.
Kungawrhi’s mother went to the lake.
The Bargain at the Water’s Edge
She went alone, in the early morning before anyone else was awake. She stood at the edge of the dark water and she called to the serpent. She called it by a name that she had learned from her own mother, who had learned it from hers. The name is not repeated in the telling.
The water moved. Something rose - not all the way to the surface, but enough that she could see the shape of it beneath the green water, coiled and vast.
She told the serpent that the village was dying. She asked for food. Fish, rice, whatever the lake could give. The serpent listened. The water was still except for a faint current that moved against the bank where she stood, as if something were breathing down there.
The serpent’s terms were simple. It wanted Kungawrhi. The girl who sang. It had heard her voice from the bottom of the lake and it wanted her brought to the water.
Kungawrhi’s mother stood there for a long time. The mist was thick and wet on her face. She could hear, very faintly, her daughter singing from the house up the hill.
She said yes.
What the Lake Gave
That evening, fish began to appear at the surface of the lake. Not the pale blind fish that had always been there, but fat, silver fish, more than anyone had seen. The village ate. The next morning there were more. Rice appeared on the bank - dry, clean rice in piles, as if someone had threshed and winnowed it and left it there. The village ate again.
People asked where the food was coming from. Kungawrhi’s mother said nothing. She fed her daughter the best of the rice and the fattest of the fish. She braided Kungawrhi’s hair and sat with her on the bamboo platform and listened to her sing. She did not explain.
This went on for several days. The village grew stronger. Color came back into the children’s faces. The dogs came back from wherever dogs go when there is nothing to eat.
On the seventh day, Kungawrhi’s mother told her to come to the lake.
Kungawrhi at the Water
Kungawrhi followed her mother down through the dead jhum fields and past the burned stumps to the edge of the dark water. She had been to the lake before, many times. She was not afraid of it.
Her mother told her what she had done.
Kungawrhi did not shout. She did not run. She looked at her mother for a long time, and then she looked at the water. The surface was very still. She could see her own face in it, dark-haired and dark-eyed, and below her reflection something else moved - slow, enormous, patient.
She began to sing. It was not a song anyone in the village had heard before. It came out of her the way water comes out of a cracked jar - steady, unstoppable, not loud but filling every space. The song went down into the lake and the water trembled with it.
Then she walked into the water. She walked in up to her ankles, her knees, her waist. The water was cold. She kept singing. Her mother stood on the bank and did not move. The water reached Kungawrhi’s shoulders, her chin, and then it closed over her head, and the surface went still, and the singing stopped.
For a moment there was nothing. The mist sat on the water. A bird called from the trees on the far side.
Then the singing came back. Faint, from deep under the water, Kungawrhi’s voice rose through the green dark and broke the surface like a bubble. It was the same song. It did not stop.
The Voice in the Water
Kungawrhi’s mother climbed the hill back to the village. She did not speak of what had happened. When people asked where Kungawrhi was, she said the girl had gone away. In time, people stopped asking.
But the voice did not stop. Fishermen who went to the lake heard it - always faint, always from below, always the same song that nobody could quite learn because it changed each time they tried to hold it. Some said the serpent had taken Kungawrhi as a wife and she lived in a house at the bottom of the lake. Some said the serpent had swallowed her and the song was her spirit trying to get out. Some said she had become something else entirely, neither girl nor serpent, but the voice of the water itself.
The food kept coming for a while. Then it stopped, as these things stop, and the rains returned, and the village went back to its own fields and its own labor. But the singing from the lake never stopped. On still evenings, when the mist comes down the Mizo hills and the water lies flat and dark, people say you can hear Kungawrhi - not words, exactly, but a voice, rising from below, patient and clear and impossible to answer.