Saswat Panigrahi
The Storyteller’s Tale
Omair Ahmad
Penguin, Rs 225
The great city of Delhi was battered and bruised at different periods of history. One such destruction the glorious city was witness to was when Ahmad Shah Abdalai, the founder of the Durrani empire, plundered it in the 1700s to satiate his thirst for loot and pillage.
Memories of that large-scale destruction haunted one storyteller. He wanted to speak of the pain the devastation had caused in his heart. That storyteller is the protagonist of The Storyteller’s Tale by Omair Ahmad. Without a name, he is simply called “the storyteller”. The central aspect of the book is the love for beauty. Perhaps, the writer has rightly said in his introductory note, “...in many chambers of music and dance, the word love was spoken of in many ways, it was nothing but a currency of exchange of looks and glances, and promises that were never truly what they pretended to be.”
The storyteller’s love for the city of Delhi comes alive when he is asked which place he belongs to. “Dilli jo ek shahr tha, aalam mein intekhaab…jisko falakh ne loot kar barbaad kar diya/ Hum rahnewale usi ujde dayaar ke.” (Delhi, that chosen city of the world/ … That the heavens have looted and laid waste/ I am an inhabitant of that destroyed garden.)
As the story unfolds, the protagonist finds himself in an isolated casbah which happens to be that of Mirza Azeem Jalal-ud-din Khan. Here the storyteller encounters a Begum suffering the ‘imprisonment’ of loneliness in the Mirza’s absence. He is intoxicated by her incredible beauty.
The Begum invites the storyteller in to share some stories. The protagonist dwells on tales of love, loyalty, hurt, fear and distrust. This provokes the Begum into responding with her own story — a tale of two brothers who were each other’s closest companions and about the adventure of their youth. The tale takes the storyteller by surprise. In a sharp move, he starts retelling the Begum’s story through a many layered tale of innocence, love, friendship, sacrifice, loyalty, betrayal, anguish, perfidy, promises, success, and loss.
As the story moves on, the storyteller directs the Begum to that part of the tale which deals with raiders and looters and describes how the brave had thrown away their lives to keep the marauders at bay. Perhaps somewhere the storyteller is aware of the fact that the master of the haveli was a worse brigand, aptly called a captain of men — Mirza.
The storyteller speaks his words with felt experience. He despises the raiders because they destroyed something which they couldn’t build and whose greatness they could not even fully grasp.
At another level the storyteller’s tale reminds the Begum that it was the same city her husband raided. The narrative seems to tell her that the storyteller had come to intimately know those myriad layers of suffering over time.
While coursing through the book, the reviewer finds that the author has tried to experiment with his imagination and style by narrating a set of stories within a story, where each character has a different story to tell. However, what the writer has disregarded is the complexity of his presentation. There are lots of sub-stories surrounding the main theme, where some stories are in their appropriate context, others not. In the process the main theme seems to get overshadowed.
The Storyteller’s Tale
Omair Ahmad
Penguin, Rs 225
The great city of Delhi was battered and bruised at different periods of history. One such destruction the glorious city was witness to was when Ahmad Shah Abdalai, the founder of the Durrani empire, plundered it in the 1700s to satiate his thirst for loot and pillage.
Memories of that large-scale destruction haunted one storyteller. He wanted to speak of the pain the devastation had caused in his heart. That storyteller is the protagonist of The Storyteller’s Tale by Omair Ahmad. Without a name, he is simply called “the storyteller”. The central aspect of the book is the love for beauty. Perhaps, the writer has rightly said in his introductory note, “...in many chambers of music and dance, the word love was spoken of in many ways, it was nothing but a currency of exchange of looks and glances, and promises that were never truly what they pretended to be.”
The storyteller’s love for the city of Delhi comes alive when he is asked which place he belongs to. “Dilli jo ek shahr tha, aalam mein intekhaab…jisko falakh ne loot kar barbaad kar diya/ Hum rahnewale usi ujde dayaar ke.” (Delhi, that chosen city of the world/ … That the heavens have looted and laid waste/ I am an inhabitant of that destroyed garden.)
As the story unfolds, the protagonist finds himself in an isolated casbah which happens to be that of Mirza Azeem Jalal-ud-din Khan. Here the storyteller encounters a Begum suffering the ‘imprisonment’ of loneliness in the Mirza’s absence. He is intoxicated by her incredible beauty.
The Begum invites the storyteller in to share some stories. The protagonist dwells on tales of love, loyalty, hurt, fear and distrust. This provokes the Begum into responding with her own story — a tale of two brothers who were each other’s closest companions and about the adventure of their youth. The tale takes the storyteller by surprise. In a sharp move, he starts retelling the Begum’s story through a many layered tale of innocence, love, friendship, sacrifice, loyalty, betrayal, anguish, perfidy, promises, success, and loss.
As the story moves on, the storyteller directs the Begum to that part of the tale which deals with raiders and looters and describes how the brave had thrown away their lives to keep the marauders at bay. Perhaps somewhere the storyteller is aware of the fact that the master of the haveli was a worse brigand, aptly called a captain of men — Mirza.
The storyteller speaks his words with felt experience. He despises the raiders because they destroyed something which they couldn’t build and whose greatness they could not even fully grasp.
At another level the storyteller’s tale reminds the Begum that it was the same city her husband raided. The narrative seems to tell her that the storyteller had come to intimately know those myriad layers of suffering over time.
While coursing through the book, the reviewer finds that the author has tried to experiment with his imagination and style by narrating a set of stories within a story, where each character has a different story to tell. However, what the writer has disregarded is the complexity of his presentation. There are lots of sub-stories surrounding the main theme, where some stories are in their appropriate context, others not. In the process the main theme seems to get overshadowed.
-- Review published in Book page, Sunday Pioneer on Mar 24 2009
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