My Heist Plan #1: The Storyteller's Tale

Wannabe writers like to think of their first novels as lovely organic things that grow, evolve, become - stuff like that. I think of mine as a big fat heist booty. It will be the cleverest way to get to a jackpot, as I go picking all the fine bits from all the fine novels along the way :D

So, to begin, since I promised, The Storyteller's Tale. It was my Airport Read - that one piece of reading I always always buy at the airport (even if I am, like I was this time, carrying 6 books with me in my cabin baggage). There's something about airports that makes me excited and anxious at the same time - this in-between space where I see hundreds of people and their stories in a state of transit. A good book gives me something to anchor myself (and look busy so that nobody can guess my story-in-transit).

But The Storyteller's Tale - it wasn't just an ordinary Airport Read that anchors. It blew me away instead.

Superficially speaking, what I love about the book is how slim it is. Nice, big font. Easy on the eyes. Page turns so soon, so easily. Brevity. 10/10. But Omair Ahmad doesn't just stop at brevity or economy of words. This man, he makes it into an art. His words and sentences are chiselled to perfection, like a gorgeous sculpture that always seems to just about come to life. No faff. No fancy acrobatics with tongue-twisty words. No artfully constructed phrases that you could never hear youself saying out loud in life. The Storyteller's Tale is impossibly, at once, profound and absolutely banal.

At a certain level, it is a simple Arabian Nights type story. About an encounter between a fleeing storyteller, and a rich marauder's wife, on a stormy night, when the poet needs refuge at her highway-side haveli. They strike a deal: he tells her a story, she gives him a meal and a room to sleep in. But what makes this story bloom, to become something that stings at the back of your eyes and makes your throat ache with strange-sad desire, is how it shows you the power of a story. I realised, in the few sparse words of this novella, what stories can really do. What they do to me; why I love to lose myself in a book. Why I love to listen to people, to know their stories. Why I love to make a story out of my own life and fit other people's stories in it.
Because only a story can hold you together, even as it corrodes its way into you.

The Storyteller's Tale is full of all those details of that paradoxical pleasure-torment of telling a story. The relief when words tumble out, even though "heavy with longing, wrapped in a fire." How stories take shape as you speak, always taking you by surprise, "the story he would tell rose within him; he felt the words, spoke them soundlessly as he rediscovered the tale, felt its texture as it emerged." How stories are born of a desire to have an effect on a listener; and just how maddening that desire can be, "to change the shape of her lips by the power of a story that he had to tell".

And the exact feeling of finding a book that knows you. Have you ever stopped mid-read, shut a book and turned it over to stare at the author pic on the back cover, and ask silently, 'how the hell do you know me so well, stranger?' Well, I have. And it's usually after a moment when, while reading a passage in the book, I suddenly feel a bit, umm... naked. The Storyteller's Tale describes this moment a lot better (and I did shut the book and look for Omair's picture on the back cover after this line, but there wasn't any):

"He had taken her own fable, a story of her own lands and opened vistas within it that she had not seen, had undressed her like a lover, with care, marvelling at a beauty she had never noticed."

I also love how he ties powerful, spillage-prone, overwhelmingly seductive emotions into evocative sentences held loose, as if with spidersilk-thin skeins: The effect of seeing a heartachingly beautiful face ("...he was lovely beyond words, so beautiful that the word itself lost its meaning"). How leaning into a cold wall, letting its cold seep into you, can be a "comfort in the familiarity of discomforts", they help to bind, "to trap his passion so that it didn't run amok and embarass him". He even gave me a mantra to deal with these overwhelming emotions; it goes something like this: It was a moment, and it passed.

And then there's seductive sweet-sad tragicness of the most overwhelming emotion of them all, king of mindfuck and soul-honey: Love.

"And isn't that the sum of all love? The whole story of love? Something that takes you by surprise, something that is seen from a distance, and yet recognised instantly and clearly? Something you are scared of your whole life long, and yet, when faced by it, reach for with open arms?

And isn't that the story of folly, the sum of it? Fools who see mirages in the desert and convince themselves they are real, who fall in love with ideas and illusions, give their whole hearts up to them, and blame reality when it intrudes, who strive for that which can never be theirs? Isn't that the brutal truth of love, that you can never choose the ache it leaves you with, that it doesn't matter if you offer to take the pain on your unprotected breast, it will still stab you in the back?

...Half the story of love is the discovery of it as you put it behind you. And with that discovery comes the knowledge that your own journey is still incomplete... the road is still open and there is much to see, but only if you have the courage to see that the first step is always a departure.

And this book, this man, they make me want to write. Because all this while, I had been waiting for a story - a sweet, kind, untold story floating in the Story Universe - to find me, to tell itself through me. But now, I think I've acquired some cruel edge that makes me restless, not content with waiting. There are so many stories I carry with me, stowed away over the years in that involuntary faculty of archiving memories in excruciating detail. What I need to do, is just arm-twist them into doing what I say.

"I realise now that not all of us are born with stories. Only some are gifted with quests and are strong enough, cruel enough, to shape a story by themselves. For the rest of us there is only a chance to be part of their grand tale. And if we fail in that, we fail in everything, for nobody will remember us; they will only know the stories and we will not have a place in them."