I never set out to be a storyteller. I just grew up listening—listening to my elders spin stories that made the dark less empty, stories that explained why the wind howled at night or why some trees were never to be touched. These stories weren’t written down, just carried in the voices of those who came before me. But voices fade, and with them, the stories, too.
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At some point, I realized that if no one wrote them down, they’d disappear forever. That thought unsettled me. So here I am, trying to capture fragments of the past before they slip through my fingers.
I don’t have a perfect system for this. Some nights, I’m scribbling down half-remembered tales from my childhood, trying to piece together details my mind has long since blurred. Other days, I sit with elders who speak of things I can barely grasp—events from a time when gods and spirits walked closer to the earth. I take what I can, knowing that every version has changed over time, shaped by whoever told it last. My job isn’t to make them perfect. It’s to keep them alive.
This book isn’t just a collection of folklore; it’s a map of where we’ve been. The stories follow the path of the Naga people, from the days when they wandered the land to the time they built villages and fought to protect them. Some stories carry warnings, some carry wisdom, and some are just strange enough to make you wonder if maybe, just maybe, they might be true.
I don’t want this journey to be just mine. I want to take you along for the ride. In the coming posts, I’ll share more about how I find these stories, the struggles of turning spoken words into written ones, and the strange, unexpected ways folklore intertwines with history. If you’ve ever heard a tale passed down in your family, I’d love to hear it. Because once a story is told, it doesn’t belong to just one person—it belongs to everyone willing to remember it.
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