The lost lover

At a Glance

• Central figures: Kungawrhi, a young Mizo woman known for her singing voice, and Chalthanga, the hunter who loved her and followed her beyond the world of the living.
• Setting: The Mizo hills of present-day Mizoram, in the oral tradition of the Mizo people; the story moves from a village to the land of the dead, Mitthi Khua.
• The turn: Kungawrhi dies, and Chalthanga refuses to let her go - he crosses into Mitthi Khua to bring her back to the living.
• The outcome: Chalthanga finds Kungawrhi among the dead but breaks the one condition set upon their return, and she is pulled back into the land of the dead forever.
• The legacy: The story remains in Mizo oral tradition as the reason the living and the dead cannot cross back to each other - the path between Mitthi Khua and the village is closed because it was tried once and failed.

Kungawrhi’s voice carried across the valley in the evenings when she sang from the edge of her family’s jhum field. People in the next village could hear it. Chalthanga heard it from across the river one evening while cleaning his dao after a hunt, and he stopped what he was doing and listened until the song ended. He did not go home until he had heard another.

They married in the way marriages happened. Her family agreed. His family agreed. He was a capable hunter - a Pasaltha by any measure, though he did not boast of it - and she was strong and her voice was admired. They built their house near his mother’s house, and for a time there was nothing wrong with it.

The Sickness in the Rains

The sickness came during the rains. It was the kind of fever that moves through a village and takes some and leaves others. Kungawrhi’s mother was taken first. Kungawrhi nursed her and buried her and then fell sick herself, and by the time the rain thinned she was dead too.

Chalthanga sat in the house. The fire had gone out. His mother came and rebuilt the fire and cooked rice and set it beside him, and he did not eat. His cousin came and said the body needed to be prepared, and Chalthanga prepared it. He did everything that needed to be done. He carried her to the burial place and put the stones in their right positions and said the words that were said. He went home.

For seven days he did not hunt. He did not eat much. On the eighth day he picked up his dao and his spear and walked out of the village, but he did not walk toward the forest where the animals were. He walked toward the ridge where, it was said, the path to Mitthi Khua began.

The Path Below the Ridge

The elders said the path was there but no living person should walk it. The dead walked it once and did not come back. There was a river at the bottom, a dark river with no name that the living used, and on the other side of the river was Mitthi Khua - the village of the dead, where the dead lived in the same way the living lived, only everything was dimmer and quieter.

Chalthanga found the path. It went down steeply through thick bamboo and then through forest that grew darker as he descended. The air changed. It became cool and smelled of wet stone. The birds stopped. He kept walking.

He reached the river. It was shallow but very cold, and the stones underfoot were smooth as if ten thousand feet had crossed there. On the far bank he could see cookfire smoke and hear faint voices, not quite like voices he knew. He crossed.

Mitthi Khua looked like his own village, almost. The houses were the same shape. The paths between them were the same width. But the light was grey even though he had entered in the morning, and the people he passed looked at him without recognition. Their eyes were flat. They were not unkind - they simply did not register him with any urgency. He was a living man, and they were not, and this difference did not alarm them. It only made him irrelevant.

Kungawrhi Among the Dead

He found her near a stream, washing clothes. She looked up at him and her face did not change at first. Then something shifted in her expression - a flicker, as if she remembered heat after a long cold.

You should not be here.

He told her he had come to take her back. She shook her head. She said the dead do not go back. He said he would not leave without her.

An old man appeared then - some said later it was the keeper of Mitthi Khua, or the spirit who tended the boundary. He looked at Chalthanga for a long time. He said a living man had no business in his village. Chalthanga did not move.

The old man set a condition. Chalthanga could take Kungawrhi back along the path, up through the bamboo, across the river, and over the ridge. But he must walk ahead of her and he must not look back at her until they had both crossed the ridge and stood on living ground. If he looked back before then, she would return to Mitthi Khua and the path would close behind her.

Chalthanga agreed. Kungawrhi stood and left the washing where it was.

The Climb Back

They crossed the river. The water was colder going back. He could hear her feet on the stones behind him - bare feet, lighter than they should have been, but there. The path climbed. The bamboo closed over them. He did not look back.

The forest grew warmer. He could smell the living forest now - rot and blossom and bird droppings and resin. Her footsteps were still behind him. Or were they? The sound seemed to thin. He strained to hear it. A twig cracked. Then silence. Then something that might have been a footstep or might have been water dripping from a leaf.

The ridge was close. He could see sunlight through the trees ahead - actual yellow sunlight, not the grey of Mitthi Khua. Ten more steps. Five. He could not hear her feet anymore.

He turned.

She was there, three steps behind him, her hand reaching toward his shoulder. Her face was almost alive again. Color had come back into her skin. Her lips were parted as if she was about to speak, or to sing.

But he had turned.

The color drained. Her hand dropped. She looked at him the way she had looked at the stream - flat, distant, already forgetting. She stepped backward. One step, two. The bamboo closed around her. The grey swallowed the path behind her and then there was no path at all, only thick undergrowth and the sound of insects.

The Ridge

Chalthanga stood on the ridge in the sunlight. The valley below held his village. Smoke rose from the cookfires. Someone was calling a name - not his name, not hers. An ordinary evening sound.

He went back down to the village. He lived the rest of his life there. He hunted. He ate. He did not marry again. People said that on certain evenings, when the mist came up the valley and the air turned cool and grey, he would walk to the ridge and stand there listening, though there was nothing to hear.

The path to Mitthi Khua did not open again. The elders said it closed the day Chalthanga looked back, and it stayed closed. The dead stay where the dead are. The living stay where the living are. That is the way of it now.