Omair Ahmad’s latest novella The Storyteller’s Tale is a testament to the power of human imagination and expression, finds Sandhya Iyer

A distressed storyteller, unable to see his beloved city burning anymore, rides off on a stolen horse. He lands near an isolated casbah, where a begam stays with her retinue of servants. Impressed by his eloquence, she invites him in. Thereafter begins a battle of wits between both the storyteller and the begam, who take turns to narrate fables that are intertwined into each other. The storyteller finds an outlet to express his rage at the ongoing violence through his stories, while the begam stresses on love that transcends everything. Their stories gently tether towards a kind of forbidden love, as both form a connection in journalist-turned-writer Omair Ahmad’s novella The Storyteller’s Tale.

According to Ahmad, the idea for the book came when he was doing a short research project about the poets of Delhi — from Amir Khusro in the 12th century to Daag Dehlvi in the 19th — and how they dealt with the realities of their city. “One of them, Mir Taqi Mir, left Delhi in pretty much the circumstances I describe in the beginning of the book, and it is his poetry that I’ve used. He was a fascinating figure, the only poet that Ghalib ever praised, and who had deep feelings about his city, as well as being a great poet on the theme of unrequited love,” says the author. “I had initially written the story without a historical context, simply beginning with a storyteller coming out of the wilderness and seeing a beautiful house. There were no side characters, and the politics came in later only when I contextualised it in 18th century India,” he adds.

Powerful ideas

Referring to his initial expectation of the novella, Ahmad says, “I really didn’t think about the audience. I was only exploring old ideas of pain in various fables, myths and stories I’d heard as a child.” The author believes fables and myths are very powerful tools of storytelling, which is why he used them in the book. “Think of Karna’s rejection by Kunti and his relation with the other Pandava brothers, in the Mahabharata and how powerful that idea is. I was moved by the fables when I was a child. So when I sat down to write the first of these stories, I retold a fable that had affected me in my own way,” he says.

Both the stories, that are narrated by the begam and the storyteller, are about two brothers — one more privileged than the other. Ask him to elaborate on this motif and he explains, “A lot of the book is about privilege and power, and how that affects love. Whether it is power that is the overriding principle or love, and who pays the price? In the first story, the wolf is the weaker one and it pays the price; in the second, Amir’s son is the powerful one and yet he pays the price, and so on. How we deal with power, in a relationship that has to do with love or with politics, is a constant.”

Perpetual contradictions

Mindless violence is the central point of the book and also a recurrent motif in all the stories. Does that aspect pertain to the period alone or was the author conscious about the theme resonating with our current crises — with wars and human rights violation all around? “I certainly wanted to highlight the theme of violence, and the fact that it is also a contemporary feature of our life even today.

As I said, I only contextualised it in South Asia later, but it’s amazing that Ahmad Shah Abdali or Ahmad baba, who is considered the founder of the modern Afghani state, is the personification of violence to us. These contradictions are still with us, and I think that humanity will always contain this seed of destruction,” Ahmad says, adding, “I have worked on international politics and militancy for a major part of my life, and violence is something that I’ve had to confront and think about.”

For now, the author is already working on his next two books. “I’m currently working on a novel, Jimmy the Terrorist, dealing with issues of alienation, radicalisation, religion and politics in eastern Uttar Pradesh from the 1970s to the 1990s. The other book is a non-fiction on Bhutan, partly a travelogue and historical narrative about the country emerging into the world, and its push towards democracy,” the author informs.