On stories

All stories do not start the same way. They also don’t have the same personality. Some are bold and sassy. Some are shy and retiring. Some are enthralling and enchanting. Some are pure fantasy. Some are passionately erotic while others are all soft romance. But they all do have a beginning. Endings are another matter entirely.

I love listening to and reading stories. From the time I could crawl into my father’s lap and listen to his wonderfully evocative rendering of the stories from the Ramayan and Mahabharath, I was hooked on to them. As I grew up I wanted to rewrite some of them because I didn’t like the endings or the treatment meted out to my beloved hero or heroine. Every attack on them, every insult, every painful experience pierced my heart and I wanted to erase all of that away. So Karna’s story absolutely had to be rewritten. I didn’t like it at all. How could life and God (Krishna was one sneaky God!) be so unfair? What happened to the ‘dharma would win’ bit? Karna was betrayed, insulted, abandoned, taken undue advantage of and even killed in a particularly cowardly fashion. I was incensed and completely full of righteous indignation when I first heard it as a tot. That emotion is still what I feel each time I read that story. Yet of all stories it is my favourite.

I have issues with the tale of Sita’s being thrown out of the kingdom because of aspersions cast on her chastity by some washer man. What is the moral of that particular story? How come no one asked what Rama did all the while Sita was in captivity? How many tests of fire must a woman pass before she is considered ‘pure’? Possibly the idea was to show that Ram was perfect and despite being a king was governed by the same rules as anyone else. That doesn’t make much sense either since there was nothing in the story to indicate that this was the routine punishment for wives under clouds of doubt. It could also be that Ram is shown to be a true yogi who cuts all ties with the object of his greatest affection in order to stand by the appearance of right. Sadly this becomes another story with the power to arouse very strong emotions which provides fodder for religious extremists who take all of the Ramayan as a literal treatise of how to live life in the twenty first century.

Our mythology is full of such stories which can strongly affect minds. A story, whatever may be its genre must ultimately have something to say. The message can be good or bad but it must exist. Maybe that is why a lot of the stories I read now seem pallid in comparison with the old tales. They seem confused as if the author himself has no idea of what he says or why he’s saying it. The complexity of a Mahabharat or Kathasarithasagar with their manifold levels and layers is something that cannot be replicated but even if you ignore all of that, the fact still remains that each of those myriad stories is beautifully told. For sheer enjoyment, even now nothing beats a story well narrated.