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."

Heckled into Afteryouth

(Too lazy to blog much, so am importing from my Facebook Notes)

Last night - the rainy, rainy night - I spotted a cozy kitschy looking rooftop balcony called the Urban Cafe in one of Khan Market's bylanes, and decided to come back some sunny day for a sunsoaked lunch. And I thought it a happy accident that that day was as early as today. Little did I know that I'd be in for a most bewilderingly rude shock, tailed by some squirmy illusion-shattering. I was hoping to be wallflower-like, in a quiet corner of a fuchsia box, with some cheesy melty snack and golden brimful of tea for company. The kitschy rooftop however, turned out to be this sheesha and desserts daytime lounge where all the college bachchas come to get their fix of nightlife coolth during the safe curfew-less hours of the day. I was mortified at the sight of such a vast conglomeration of hyper hormonal beings (I swear, the air was pulsing with alternatively repressed-blossoming desire), but had been spotted by all of them (just hate how they can do it so quickly, shamelessly and ardently, this check-out-the-newbie-who-walked-in thing), so couldn't just turn around and dash for exit. 'Table for one', I asked the waiter, who placed me in a tight wedge between a college gang, a gaggle of Diet-Coke and sheesha-consuming school girls, and a teenagey couple on the verge of breaking up. All of whom were totally trying to psycho-read me the way I'd just spot-checked their life-phases (lonely horny old hag? waiting for forever-late boyfriend? undercover detective sent by parents? - I can only imagine).

The music was loud, fast and something I couldn't have placed even if a meteor hit me there and then, turning me into the Omnipotent Musicy Person I have never been (my scanty and uncool ipod selection being, till date, my most obsessively guarded secret). The walled-in seats were glittery-psychedelic, and the smell of pointlessly tobacco-less sheeshas, nauseatingly fruity. I had a feeling of supreme paranoia - the kind you feel when you see the digits 3-0 floating towards you through the air repeatedly, while a voice inside squeals, 'but I was 21 just the other day!'. To think that all this while, you sat at the cool places and thought you were these people - epitome of words like hangin' out, chilled out, laidback - while everybody else around you was clearly too fuddy-duddy, too past their best-looking years, too bereft of the lushness of pre-youth. And then one fine day a waiter stop-gaps you into this setting and bam! - Life Context goes for a cubist leap-shift, leaving you exactly where you were, just a tad bit wriggling under the little avalanche of Stupid-er. What would a self-respecting, almost delirious, mildy epiphanously shaky-legged girl like me do in such a situation, where she's pinned and wriggling against the wall as dozens of curiouser teen eyes probe? How to prove she's not at all on a desparate wannabe with-it misssion? Of course, she'd order a cappuccino (just to show these little kiddos what solid non-icecreamy stuff blueblooded adults drink, and wish for a cigarette to magically materialise in her hand, to drive the point home even better), stare into space to prove she's not interested in eavesdropping on their conversations; adjust her phone on the table from time to time as if this is all just an interval before the Very Important Call that cool independent loaded grownups attend to; and of course, finish the coffee asap and exit with a strut that could be called purposeful if you didn't look at it for what it was - a sprint.

Outside, I consoled myself by thinking that the blush of my cheeks could most probably be mistaken for a reflective effect of my red muffler, now unfashionably wound up high around neck (why does Khan Market make me feel like an urchin, even on my fashionista days?) , and that there are always safe comforts like buying a First City from the baap of all dilli magazinewallas in the Fabindia bylane. Mag safely in hand (my youth and my city, under 150 pages every month, accessible for 50 bucks only), I walked down to the only other place that I could think of, fuddy-duddyness irony notwithstanding: Cafe Turtle. I climbed the creaky verdure stairs and heard meditative sitaar riffs and smelt the potent fragrance of bookshelves and relaxed: I know this shit. Settling onto a barstool against the balcony views of the busyness of the market, in a very calm, mature, adult way, I constructed a denial argument detailing the bizarreness of it all: how a bunch of kiddos wordlessly heckled me into middle-aged afteryouth. After an hour of reading the monthly horoscope, circling my choicest lil bit o' culture events in the FC calendar, trying clothes on sale, and buying exhorbitant flavoured tea bags, I'm happily re-illusioned about the vast abyss of my remaining youth years, and ready to catharsise my nightmare in a Facebook note. Indeed, all's well that ends well. Especially when it comes with an imagined audience and a cup of Lime and Orange tea for company.

Driving Through an Unexpected Monsoon

I love how my city springs surprises on me. Like how it's raining today - a freak Feb shower that started suddenly, without warning (or premonition even). There I was, driving down the endless roundabouts of Lutyen's Delhi, ruminating on the possibilities of a fuel tank needle resting high on 'F', feeling a bit invincible even, letting myself drift on auto-pilot mode towards wherever my steering wheel took me. And there I was, sitting on a makeshift chair outside a car accessories' shop in Khan Market, sipping on nukkad chai from a plastic cup, waiting for my car to be clothed in its fancy new seat covers, staring at people going about their shopping in fashionable almost-summer clothes, revelling in the newfound relish for the sight of skin (unsheathed from the sweaters, finally). And before I could smell some kind of longing in the air, it was a clean 'cut!' to inky blue night, nippy temperature, drop-strings of rain falling in a heap from overhead awnings, onto the glistening pavements. And a big wraparound feeling of what rain always is for me: equal parts familiar joy and unnamed loss.

And what sweet, kind, unfamiliar rain it was. The kind Delhi is parched for, year-round. Not the usual tepid drizzle, nor a torrential downpour. Just sheets of soft, gentle rain, falling cleanly, almost with an odd, unusual kind of consideration for those it would drench. The water snaking gently on my car's windscreen, making scaly animation on the steering wheel when the streetlight shone from above - like someone lovingly shading me into an artistic texture. Windows rolled up, with rainy rivulets running diagonally across. Bheege bheege gaaney on full volume. Foot firmly on accelerator. Mind on standby mode. I zipped down mundane-roads-turned-glam; as if suddenly wearing a sexy black sequinned cocktail dress of splashy rain (no traffic even, rainy Monday notwithstanding!). Turning me into some kind of sudden poet, smiling away enchantedly; a part of me enthralled by the unending moods of my city, a part of me dreading the moment when it'll all become a memory for me to cajole, poke, probe and conjure, just so I can make it last a little bit longer.