‘The Storyteller’s Tale’

Omair Ahmad’s novella The Storyteller’s Tale is a stylish third of a book, a meta-tale about the art of telling tales. A dispossessed storyteller fleeing Ahmad Shah Abdali’s sack of Delhi happens upon a begum from the opposing side. She gives him shelter, and at night they take turns telling the same story from different angles, Kurosawa-style.

In the tale, the begum is both beautiful and as compelling and inventive an embroider of tales as the tired horseman she takes in. This is a pervasive male fantasy, the writer’s version of Barbie/commando Lara Croft. There are far fewer great female standup comedians as men. It’s not that women can’t, for we all know women who are frickin’ hilarious — but the vast majority simply don’t to any great degree.

According to traditional gender roles, most men tell stories and jokes and needle each other as a display of social dominance, while most swomen use storytelling to build interpersonal connections. One friend is never happier than when he’s surrounded by a gaggle of pretties tittering over his every tale. When his stories don’t entertain, he loses interest and wanders off to find a new audience.

The book is stylish but vaporous, an entertaining and innovative 122 pages of neo-myth which find little purchase in the memory a scant few weeks later. There are three angles to a tale, full stop. The begum is beguiling. Nothing much is lost or gained. Had Ahmad fleshed this out into a full novel, he may have turned this tone poem into an epic like The Enchantress of Florence.

Thanks to anonandon, whose review of the book is here, for heaving it from the desh.