STRANGER THINGS

IN Subi Taba’s stories, bullets or the swing of a machete may killa tiger but it will live again.

- PARAMITA GHOSH

The spirit of a dead animal can go looking for its hunter, turn him into a tiger, and get him killed by other men. The usual signs of a finish or calamity — a dead brother, a marriage ended with widowhood, a man’s friendship with a python — are repeatedly tied in her work with ideas of mortality and immortality, death and its denial, idylls and their violation. In her endings are her beginnings, but she can flip it the other way around as well.For her uncannily beautiful stories of lives lived like fairy-tales, Subi Taba, a poet and writer from Arunachal Pradesh, has won the Ramnath Goenka Sahithya Samman (RNGSS), 2025, for Best Fiction for Tales from the Dawnlit Mountains (Penguin). The RNGSS citation has hailed her “capture of the moral universe of mountain communities negotiating change”.

In Arunachal, the natural world is not benign or decorative, says Taba. “It watches you back. Forests, rivers, animals, and spirits coexist with humans in ways that are not always comforting. Eeriness is also a way to approach trauma indirectly. Certain experiences—especially those shaped by violence, silence, or isolation—cannot be addressed head-on,” she says.

Gothic tenderness, violence

But in her prose, there has been no holding back. In her story, ‘Love and Longing in Seijosa’, a young widow looks back on nights of passion in a house on a lake still as a funeral; nature seems to be in the know of what is to follow: