The headhunting memory tale

At a Glance

• Central figures: Meren, a young Ao Naga warrior seeking his first head; Temsülong, the old warrior who carries the memory of forty raids; and the spirit of the slain enemy whose skull must be appeased at the village gate.
• Setting: An Ao Naga village in the Mokokchung district of Nagaland, in the hills above the Dikhu River; the oral tradition is preserved through the songs and stone-pulling feasts of the Ao people.
• The turn: Meren takes a head in a raid on a rival village but fails to perform the appeasement song at the moment of killing, leaving the spirit of the dead man unsettled and dangerous.
• The outcome: Temsülong must lead Meren back to the place of the killing to complete what was left undone, and the village endures a genna period while the skull is ritually seated among the other trophies at the village gate.
• The legacy: The skull joined the row of trophies at the village morung, and the song Temsülong sang became the version taught to the next generation of warriors - a reminder that a head taken without the proper words is not a trophy but a curse.

The skull was still wet when Meren carried it into the village. He held it by the hair, which was long and black and matted with mud from the path. The dogs came first, then the children, then the women standing in the doorways. Nobody cheered. The old men sitting outside the morung looked at the skull and looked at each other and said nothing.

Temsülong was the one who stood up. He walked to where Meren had stopped - right at the threshold of the village gate, which was correct - and looked at the skull for a long time. Then he looked at Meren’s face.

Did you sing?

Meren did not answer.

The Raid on the Village Below the Ridge

The raid had been planned for three weeks. Five young men from the morung, all unmarried, all past their first tattoo but not yet marked with the chest tattoo of a proven warrior. Meren was the tallest and the fastest. He had dreamed of a hornbill feather in his hair since he was old enough to sit in the morung and listen to the old men talk about the raids they had made when the world was larger and the enemies were closer.

The target was a Sangtam village below the ridge on the far side of the Dikhu. Not enemies exactly - there had been no feud, no stolen cattle, no woman taken. But a warrior needed a head, and the head had to come from somewhere. The five of them crossed the river before dawn, barefoot on the stones, each carrying a dao and nothing else.

They waited in the bamboo above the village until one man came out alone to check his fish traps. He was older than Meren expected. His hair was gray at the temples. He squatted by the water and pulled up the trap and shook it and two small fish fell out. He put them in a cloth. He stood.

Meren was on him before the man turned. The dao caught the neck cleanly. The body dropped into the shallow water. The fish floated free from the cloth.

The other four watched from the bamboo. They had not moved. The head was Meren’s to take, and he took it.

What Meren Did Not Do

Every Ao boy who sits in the morung learns the sequence. You strike. You take the head. You hold it by the hair and you sing the appeasement - a short song, four lines, addressed to the spirit of the man you have killed. You tell him his death was clean, that his spirit will be honored, that the skull will sit at the gate of your village where the other skulls sit and where offerings will be made to all of them together. The song binds the spirit to the skull. Without the song, the spirit stays at the place of the killing - loose, angry, uncontained.

Meren knew the song. He had practiced it in the morung at night, whispering the words so the other boys would not hear him rehearsing what should come naturally. But when the man’s body fell into the water and the blood clouded the shallows and the fish drifted downstream, Meren’s mouth went dry. The words were there but his throat would not open. He picked up the head and ran.

The other four ran after him. Nobody spoke on the way back. The river crossing was harder with one hand occupied.

Temsülong at the Gate

Temsülong had taken nine heads in his youth. His chest tattoo spread from his collarbones to his navel - the full marking of a man who had earned the right to pull a stone and host a feast of merit. He had pulled his stone thirty years earlier, and it still stood at the edge of the village path, chest-high, dragged up from the riverbed by forty men while the women sang.

He knew, looking at Meren’s face, that the song had not been sung. He could see it in the way Meren held the skull - too tightly, at arm’s length, as if it might bite. A skull that has been sung to can be carried close. It is quiet. This skull was not quiet.

Temsülong told the manjhi - the village headman - what had happened. The headman declared a genna. No one would work the fields. No one would enter or leave the village. The drums would not sound. The genna would hold until the spirit was settled.

Then Temsülong told Meren to eat, and to sleep if he could, and to be ready to walk before dawn.

The Path Back to the Dikhu

They went together, the old man and the young one, carrying the skull between them in a cloth. Temsülong walked slowly. His knees were bad from decades of climbing these ridges. Meren said nothing. The jungle was thick and wet and full of sound - the barbet calling, the cicadas, the drip of water from every leaf.

They reached the spot by midmorning. The body was gone. Someone from the Sangtam village had found it and taken it away. But the blood was still on the stones, brown now, and the shallow water still ran slightly darker there.

Temsülong set the skull on the bank, facing the water. He knelt beside it. He did not tell Meren to kneel, but Meren knelt.

The old man sang the appeasement. His voice was thin but steady. Four lines, each one repeated twice. He named the dead man’s spirit - not by a personal name, which they did not know, but by the name given to all the spirits of the taken: the one who crossed over by the hand of the living. He told the spirit the skull would sit at the gate. He told the spirit there would be rice beer poured on the stone beneath it at the proper times. He told the spirit the killing had been clean.

The jungle went quiet while he sang. Even the barbet stopped.

When it was done, Temsülong picked up the skull and handed it to Meren. It felt different now. Meren could not have said how, exactly, but his hand relaxed around it. He carried it close to his body on the walk home.

The Skull at the Gate

The genna lifted when they returned. The skull was washed with river water and set in the row at the village gate, beside the others - some old enough that the bone had gone the color of smoke, some still pale. Temsülong poured rice beer on the stone beneath the new skull, and the women came and looked at it, and the old men came and looked at it, and the headman said the genna was finished.

Meren got his tattoo. The ink was tapped into his chest with a thorn and soot, and it hurt as much as everyone said it would, and he did not flinch. But when the young boys in the morung asked him to tell the story of his raid, he told them about the song. Not about the strike. Not about the blood in the water. About the four lines Temsülong sang on the bank of the Dikhu, and what happens when you forget them.

That was the version the boys learned. That was the version they carried.