India, Oct. 28 -- Stories the Fire Could Not Burn, a part memoir about the loss of home, chronicles the Kuki-Zo tragedies in the ethnic conflict between the majority Meitei and the minority Kuk-Zo community in the violence in Manipur between 2023 and 2025. How did you balance the personal with the collective narrative?

I write what I know and what impacts me personally, and about the most horrifying humanitarian crisis that has happened in my lifetime. I've seen successive governments come and go. Manipur was never at peace anyway, but not to this extent. There has never been such animosity between communities because we've always held it together by some force or the other. Manipur is like a little India. Imagine about 29 different trib...