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Tell-tale yarns of a poet-raconteur

By Nawaid Anjum

It is the 1700s. Delhi, the city of poets, has been ravaged, devastated by the founder of modern Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Abdali, himself a poet. The house of the storyteller, modelled on the great Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir, has been destroyed. The storyteller, who carries the weight of the fmemories of Shahjahanbad, the capital of Delhi, once the seats of sultans and emperors but now reduced to debris, has escaped to Rohillakhand. It is here that he gets to "speak of the devastation that seeing the destruction of the city had caused within him".

Delhi-based author Omair Ahmad’s novella, The Storyteller’s Tale (Penguin Books), a modern-day fable, is an exchange of stories between the storyteller — who is doomed to destitution in the wake of Abdali’s invasion — and the Begum of an isolated cusbah where he has sought refuge in.

The welter of stories, told back and forth, encompasses an entire spectrum of multi-layered emotions: love and loss, loyalty and betrayal. A "duel of narratives", it explores the alternate ways of looking at life, echoing the sentiments of people who were displaced by Abdali’s forces in the 1700s.

Mir, who was forced to leave Delhi, had written: "Dilli jo ek shahar tha alam mein intekhaab, Hum rehne wale hain usi ujde dayaar ke.

(Delhi, that chosen city of the world, I am an inhabitant of that destroyed garden).

The historical context of the novella, says Omair, was chosen later. "I’d written the story essentially as a duel of narratives between a storyteller who walks out of the wilderness and a woman in a beautiful house," he says, adding that it was Ravi Singh of Penguin who suggested that he "contextualise" the story and build up the two characters. "I proposed putting it in the context of Mir, and his heartbreak at the destruction of Delhi. It now feels as if I couldn’t have written it any other way. Maybe before the adaptation I would have told you it wasn’t important, but now I can’t imagine it any other way," says Omair.

The author says he had initially only written one story, from the storyteller’s point of view. "I wrote the second only because a friend — Olivia, to whom the book is dedicated — said I’d been unkind to the woman. So it was a challenge of sorts to look at the set in a different way, and so it evolved, more naturally than by craft. I didn’t plan it, so I can’t tell you how. I think the stories themselves — the root stories from the myths that I tapped, had those layers and contexts built in, I just added my own perspective," says Omair, who was conscious of the novella’s political overtones while he was writing it. A political essayist, he has after all spent 14 years studying politics. And it was "hard" for things like that to "slip by unnoticed".

The historicity of the novella, says Omair, "adds to the book, but it isn’t necessary for a person’s understanding". He says: "That’s why I’ve never taken his name in the book. If you know who I’m talking about, fine, if not, it could be just anybody. And in a way that’s very important to me, that anybody who wants to can relate to the story."

Omair, who was born in Aligarh and has his roots in Gorakhpur, earlier captured the tale of two friends who fall victim to political unrest in a small town in Uttar Pradesh, in his debut novel, Encounters (2006). Encounters, he says, was a fictionalised telling of the story of the "curfew days of the ’90s and the radicalisation of young men who got sucked into things they neither understood nor were able to handle". Omair holds that the times have been "unkind" to UP of late, and it will take years for the state to recover. His next novel, Jimmy the Terrorist, deals with some similar themes set in eastern UP. (Encounters was set in western UP).

Another of Omair’s forthcoming book is a part-travelogue, part-historical book on Bhutan, where he is currently researching. Omair says: "I had met Michael Rutland, who’d been the tutor to the fourth king in 1970, when the fourth king was still the crown prince. I was fascinated with Michael’s story — an RAF officer, physics teacher, another military stint in Oman, and then back to teaching — but Michael felt I should concentrate on Bhutan."

Over the last three years that Omair has been researching the topic — through the elections, the coronation of the fifth king, and now as he is in Thimphu while the young king is travelling by car and on foot to distribute land to farmers in the south of the country — the author says he has to agree with Michael that it’s a "fascinating" country. While Omair hopes to wrap up the book within a few months, he is aware at the same time that there is so much he doesn’t know and wish to see and learn about yet that it will "always feel like I should have researched for another decade at least".

Omair is also working on a collection of stories titled Unbelonging and a biography of his great-uncle. Also in the pipeline is The Fabled City, a fictional take on "some of the interesting things that have made the city of Gorakhpur through a set of interlinked short stories" told by three narrators, a farmer, a policeman and a dog.

Short stories. Biography. Travelogue. Novels. Does Omair feel comfortable with a particular form? Well, it’s "hard" for him to say as he is comfortable with most. "They all have their own flavours and joys, and if Penguin is kind enough to offer me the contracts, why would I refuse? It’s like asking a kid in a candy shop why he has unwrapped five different sweets," says Omair in a lighter vein.