The “Bloody Rags” in the title do not refer to a tragic political or social reality in the life of Temsula Ao. The rag, here, is a piece of cloth that she fixed on her genital area when she began menstruating as a teenager. The other memorable act that she can’t rid herself of is how much she enjoyed mixing burnt rice and curry into a ball at her hostel.

The middle child of six and her father’s favourite, Temsula Ao was born in 1945 in the Assamese town of Jorhat. Following the sudden deaths of both parents she, along with her siblings, was left to fend for herself with little material comfort. Pain, hunger, frustration and loneliness marked her growing years until she was sent to a boarding school by the authorities where she found a purpose in education, a release from the circumstances that weren’t of her making.

“As she grows, reading whatever English books and magazines she gets and developing her own view of the world, she appears colder and more rational, but this is where her real journey as a woman begins – negotiating, in her mind, the notions of a wife and mother, her right to pursue individual goals, confronting the customs and prejudices against the women of the region, and recognising herself as a woman of the world,” sums up critic Sanjukta Sharma.

This is a memoir of those early years and the career they led to, which saw Ao become a distinguished teacher and an acclaimed writer. Her writing is often compared to Maya Angelou’s – wise, witty, ironic and unsentimental. In 2013, she received the Sahitya Akademi prize for her short story collection Laburnum For My Head.

Published in 2013.

Naga poet and novelist Easterine Kire won The Hindu Prize, 2015, for her novel When the River Sleeps: a book about a lone hunter, Vilie, seeking a faraway river, to take from it a stone that will give him untold powers. K Satchidanandan, one of the judges, described it as “a sample of how the mythopoeic imagination can work in our times”.

For Vilie, it’s a dangerous quest. As he forges ahead to catch the sleeping river in order to extract the “heart-stone” from its depths, he not only comes face to face with supernatural spirits that are as real as men and women, but also sorceresses, demons and armed men.

One can see Kire looking to escape from rapid urbanisation and, through the “heart-stone”, reaching the heart of Nagas’ rich but eroding culture – “their rituals and beliefs, their reverence for the land, their close-knit communities, and the rhythms of a life lived in harmony with their natural surroundings.” Also, by setting her story in the deep mountains of Nagaland with its idyllic villages and forests, she challenges the age-old image of her state as a warn-torn and bloodied.

“Kire’s oeuvre is diverse,” notes Mint. “From textbooks on Nagaland like A Terribly Matriarchy, to numerous volumes of poetry, novels and children’s books, she travels around the world, though she is currently living in Norway and her home is in Kohima, Nagaland’s capital.” A mother of three children, two daughters and a son, she travels in Europe with the band Jazzpoesi (with saxophonist Ola Rokkones and drummer Jon Eirik Boska) that sets jazz music to her poems.

Published in 2014.

It’s raining in Shillong. Firdaus Ansari, an unhappy, middle-aged college lecturer, is walking on a mushy street. Sophie Das, an adopted, eight-year-old misfit, is standing against a wet window pane staring past her own reflection. And somewhere, even though we don’t read it in the opening chapter of Lunatic In My Head, we hear Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon wafting in and out of IAS aspirant Aman Moondy’s world.

The three of them want to break out of their destinies and escape from the place they are born in, but they end up doing all the things that tie them further to it. “Things move slowly. Grand ambitions inevitably seem comic. People can be hugely lazy. I can’t remember what I did with my youth except wait for something to happen, write bad poetry and laugh,” Hasan reminisces about her life in Shillong where she lived until she was 26.

Firdaus, Aman and Sophie are also Dkhars or non-Khasi: a word that that the Khasis use to describe outsiders. “Several instances in the book are evocative of this discrimination,” points out Arunima Mazundar in the Times of India. “Sophie is scoffed at by Khasi girls of her age because the waitress refuses to serve her tea and snacks at the wedding. Aman, consciously aware of his outsider status, remains silent when the bully Max abuses the boiled-potato seller. And Firdaus feels no less than an alien when Ibomcha, her boyfriend, talks about taking her to Manipur to meet his mother.”

Yet they love Shillong. And nothing really happens as we reach the end. There is no war, not even great revelations. The book does not set out to explore and expose political struggles of the North-East. Instead, it subtly deals with the sensitive space that exists between the insiders and the outsiders, their desire to belong to the other, and the agony of not being able to do so.

Published in 2012.