A House Remembered in Ashes

Reading Requiem for a House in Manipur, a poetry book published by Copper Coin and authored by by Hoihnu Hauzel felt like a punch in the heart. Not just because these are beautiful poems shaped by loss and longing, but because the book felt deeply, almost unbearably, personal. I know Hoihnu as a deeply thinking, feeling human being. And I also share a relationship with Manipur, one of the eight states of India’s Northeast. This former princely state is where I have come to know and love over the past five years. That shared emotional geography made this reading experience less like encountering a book and more like walking through a memory that refuses to settle.

When I was travelling there a year ago, she had asked me, “Pallavi, can you get me a picture of the house?” I went looking for it, driving past a row of charred houses and a burnt church, trying to figure out which one might have been hers. I am not even sure if I spotted it. The whole moment felt surreal, standing before what used to be homes, now reduced to ruins. It was even hard to imagine that an entire community of people once lived there. That sense of disorientation, of searching for something that may no longer exist, runs like an undercurrent through this entire anthology.

This collection of 43 poems, I am told by the poet, was written over a period of two years — from the outbreak of the conflict on May 3, 2023, to the time the manuscript went to press. That timeline matters. These are not distant reflections shaped by time’s softening lens; they are immediate, lived responses to rupture. The poems carry the rawness of proximity and grief that is still unfolding, memory that is still tender, loss that has not yet learned how to settle into silence.

My connection to the place is also shaped by the work that has taken me there. For the past five years, through MOHAN Foundation, a 30-year-old NGO working to promote organ donation in the country, I have been helping initiate transplant and deceased organ donation programs in the state. In a unique public–private–NGO partnership, we have been able to help Jawaharlal Nehru Institute of Medical Sciences (JNIMS) begin living renal transplants and also establish a state eye bank to initiate corneal transplants.

Along the way, I have met many families who, in their darkest moments of grief, have said yes to organ donation. I may not know which community they belonged to, but I know that such decisions reflect the deepest humanity — that in a moment of unbearable loss, you choose to give life to someone you will never know, without knowing which community they come from. That profound humanity stands in stark contrast to the forces that create displacement and division — and it is this tension that makes Hauzel’s poems so piercing.

Earlier in my career, while working with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, I saw firsthand the trauma of displacement, the devastation of people who had lost their homes and their sense of belonging. Perhaps that is why the poems in this book cut so deep. Hauzel’s work does not merely describe loss; it inhabits it. Her words move through grief with an intimacy that is both unsettling and necessary, forcing the reader to confront the human cost of conflict without the comfort of distance.

One of the most striking aspects of this collection is its structural discipline. The poems, particularly those that centre on the house, are written with a kind of deliberate, almost architectural precision. The movement is systematic: beginning at the gate, then meandering through the garden, into the kitchen, past plants and rooms, up the staircase, and into the intimate spaces of objects left behind — the piano, the garage, the barn, the beds. This is not just a description; it is an act of reconstruction. The reader is invited to walk through the house as it once was, to inhabit it room by room. And in doing so, the poems perform something remarkable — they rebuild, in language, what has been physically erased. Yet this reconstruction is not without pain. Each remembered detail carries the weight of absence, each object a reminder of rupture. The act of revisiting becomes, inevitably, an act of mourning.

It is in this context that the poem When the Children Did Not Cry emerges as the most powerful in the collection for me. Its line — “Their silence was the loudest thing we carried into the dark” — lingers long after the poem ends. There is something profoundly unsettling about that silence. Children, by instinct, cry. Their crying is a form of protest, of need, of life asserting itself. But here, even that instinct is extinguished. The silence becomes a testimony — not of peace, but of fear so deep that it suppresses even the most natural human response. It reminded me, with painful clarity, that in moments of violence and displacement, innocence is not spared. Childhood itself becomes collateral damage. The poem does not rely on dramatic imagery or overt sentiment; its restraint is precisely what gives it such devastating force.

The idea of home in this collection is expansive. It is not merely a physical structure but a repository of memory, identity and importantly, of continuity. When a home is lost, it is not just walls and roofs that disappear; it is a way of being in the world. Hauzel’s poems understand this deeply. They ask, again and again: what does it mean to belong when the place that anchored you is gone? How do you carry memory when its physical container has been destroyed? And perhaps most importantly, how do you continue to live in the aftermath of such erasure?

The book has drawn praise from eminent and award-winning authors. As Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih observes, Hauzel’s work is an elegy for her lost home, and it almost feels blasphemous to speak of the beauty of these poems when that beauty has emerged from such profound human pain. That tension — between aesthetic appreciation and ethical discomfort — is central to the reading experience. Easterine Kire notes that her poem of hiraeth — that untranslatable longing for a home that is lost or unattainable — is likely to leave readers misty-eyed. And it does. But it also does more. It unsettles and provokes.

It is heartbreaking to think about how easily homes, memories, and entire lives become collateral damage in political games where ordinary people are left, in the end, to pay the heavy price. And yet, despite everything, the poems are not devoid of hope. There is resilience here, somewhat quiet but persistent enough to lend hope. There is a refusal to forget, a determination to bear witness, a belief. However, fragile as that memory itself can be a form of resistance.

Despite everything, my own memories of Manipur are filled with warmth. I have loved working with the people of this state to make transplants and organ donation a reality. There is always a familiar feeling when the aeroplane begins its descent, and I see the vast expanse of Loktak Lake shimmering below. Indeed, that is a reminder that this land holds beauty, resilience, and hope.

Perhaps that is why these poems feel so powerful. It takes immense courage to write about such loss, to give language to something so intimate and painful. Requiem for a House in Manipur is not just a book of poems; it feels like someone trying to hold on to what has been lost, to piece together a shattered world, and to ask and, rather insist, that we do not look away.

My engagement with the state will continue, and I only wish for peace to descend once more on this land that has already endured far too much.