Do you remember your favorite book from childhood?
The first series of books we had at home was the Amar Chitra Kathas. ACK is an Indian publication and they used to print comics based on Indian Mythologies, so they had the entire series of stories from Ramayana and Mahabharatha and stories of national heroes and stories from the Panchatantra. Mum had picked up the series to encourage us to read on our own, but I was a lazy reader. I preferred to listen to the stories, rather than make the effort to read them by myself. My favorites were the Panchantantra stories, and the Jataka tales. These were comics where the animals and birds in the forests would talk to each other. I loved these stories, and when I used to go to bed, I used to beg Mum to tell me a story before I went to sleep. I used to go to bed with Dad on the floor and my younger sibling was with Mum on the cot. After dinner, we would lie down for a story. Mum was an excellent storyteller, she loved stories and she loved telling us stories. But I was a picky listener. I wanted a new story every night. I got into the habit of listening to the full story and then falling asleep, so I believed that I could not sleep without a story. So, even on days when Mum would be tired and too exhausted to think of something new, she would try to pass off an older story that we had heard, but I would have none of it. So she told me a new story.
“Once upon a time, in a land far far away lived a farmer. He had a field that was 5 acres big, and that’s very big,’ she would insist when I would fuss about using absolute values in a bedtime story. ‘Harvesting a field this size would take him ten days or more’ she would add, and when I started stirring again to interrupt the story, she would continue pretending not to notice my distraction, “the grains harvested by the farmer had to be kept safe until he could take it to the market. It had to be removed from the field, cleaned, and then dried and stored in the godown or shed. This farmer had a big shed, that was almost as big as his field because he had to store the grains. This shed had a window high in the wall, it was a big airy room with only one big door. The farmer used to keep the shed clean so he would not have rats in them, and the windows would help to keep the grains fresh.
One day, a sparrow flew into the granary, it was so happy to see so many grains, that it picked one and flew out. Outside it met its friends and informed them about the location of the granary and the abundance they held and flew back to the nest. Soon after, another sparrow came in collected a grain and flew out. Then the next sparrow flew in collected the grain and flew out, then the next sparrow came in collected the grain, and flew out, and then on and on it went. Mum was wicked, because when this story started, I was excited, hoping that something magical would happen once the granary was empty. It would fill up again or the king would reward him, but the story never proceeded beyond the granary. Every day a new bird species would come, collect one grain, and then fly away. This happened for a few nights when I got bored and cried to Dad about how Mum had been lying to me and cheated me of a nice bedtime story. “She falls asleep while the birds are picking the grain, and the story does not get over at all” I wailed to him one evening. Taking pity on me, Dad offered to tell me a story.
The story of Hari Singh Nalwa. HSN was a brave warrior in the Indian army, who was often at war. I was fed up with the minute details Mum had added to her story, so when Dad tried to qualify the factions at war, I refused to let him. “They were at war, there was a lot of blood everywhere, then what happened?” That was all I wanted to know. But that’s when Dad would say, he is fighting the war, you see, it’s a tiring thing, this war, and when you are at war, everyone is tired. There is no food, everyone is hungry. No water, and everyone is thirsty. That’s when Dad would add this really beautiful lake on the battlefield where HSN took his horse for some water, to drink, rest, and refresh.“You can take your horse to the water, but you cannot make it drink” he would insist. So HSN had to wait for his horse to be ready to drink the water. The first night, we spent time waiting for the horse to drink, but I only fell asleep after the horse had his fill of water, confident that tomorrow the horse and his esteemed rider would travel to their next adventure and I would know how it ended. The following night, the story started where we had stopped the previous night, the horse was relaxed and ready for another day. HSN mounted his steed and off they went riding across the dry land. The hooves of the horse striking the dry earth, clickety clacking nonstop – ‘tagarataka taka taka taka tagarataka taka taka. They were going uphill, the horse was tired, and the sound of the hooves was slower, ‘tagarataka taka taka taka tagarataka taka taka taka’ he would say slowly feigning exhaustion in the telling. ‘The next night the horse and rider were lost in the wilderness, galloping up and down the hillside, tagarataka taka taka tagarataka taka taka’, he continued. It took him three nights after which I lost interest in this story and went back to Mum to ask her for a story because Dad was going with some horse on some random ride across the wilderness and was reaching nowhere of interest. Mum wanted to continue the granary story because, after so many days, the granary was finally over, but I refused and asked for a new story.
The siblings passing by offered to tell me a story. Excited at the prospect of finally getting a story that I did not have to put the effort to read, I jumped in between the two of them. “Once upon a time,’ they started, and I stopped them there and said their story had to be something different, no horses riding on land in search of adventure and no grains and birds. Agreeing to my conditions they started again, ‘Once upon a time, in a land far far away lived a king and queen named, Imelda and Ralph’, “no NO!” Insisted the other sibling, if you tell the story, then I get to choose the names she added, ‘their names were, Tom and Rosy’, “such boring names” interrupted the oldest sibling, “Kalyani and Karthik” The other said, and off they went naming all versions of boy and girl names they could think of. This went on for almost an hour and I got bored and went back to Mum’s room, to find that she had fallen asleep and there would be no story for me that night. Until that night, I believed that I would not be able to fall asleep without a story, but I did. I no longer required a story to sleep. And that changed the way I started looking at storybooks. I could sleep without stories, which meant that I could now read the stories without the fear of falling asleep in the middle. A game changer!
As hilarious as these three stories are, believe me when I tell you, I looked for these stories in the comic collections I had, and never found the versions I was being told. Those were the special embellishments Mum, Dad, and the Siblings added to my story time. I have read the Hari Singh Nalwa story several times, but I still don’t remember the original story as well as the version my Dad told me. Some stories become that much more memorable in the telling.
Just a little more 