The literature of North East India occupies a contested space where memory, trauma, and political contestation intersect. This paper reads Easterine Kire’s Mari as a paradigmatic text for understanding how prolonged socio-political turmoil shapes everyday life in the region. Situating Mari within a comparative frame that engages Mamang Dai and Siddhartha Deb, the study uses postcolonial and subaltern theory—particularly the concepts of othering (Edward Said) and subalternity (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)—to examine how historical developments (colonial penetration, World War II, partition migrations, post-independence insurgency) affect the physical, emotional, social, cultural, and psychological lives of North East communities. The paper argues that Kire’s close, diary-inflected narration offers a counter-archive: a civilian and feminine perspective that resists both colonial erasure and national silencing. Reading Marialongwith Dai’s folkloric recuperation and Deb’s migrant realism demonstrates that North East fiction produces a multi-layered record of survival, fragmentation and resilience, and the fact that literature is indispensable when it comes to decoding the human behaviour in regional political turmoil.