In my days of babyhood, when I couldn’t tell beans from bugs, my mother always recited the saga of this brave tiger cub Baggu, who had carved a name for himself for flouting instructions. So he did everything he was specifically asked, by his mother Baghmati, not to do, like meddling with other animals’ affairs and stealing water from the crocodilian waters, thus always landing in trouble; but in the end, through the stroke of luck and the shield of courage, brave Baggu braved the danger and managed to live another day. It was always the same story, with minor tweaks here and there: sometimes, he got his head stuck in a cave, and sometimes his tail stuck in quicksand. Sometimes he’d ire a group of clever monkeys, and sometimes he’d make hyenas furious. There were two conclusions she drew for me, as I was too little for drawing conclusions, which were: bravery is a virtue, and not listening to the mother is a sin.
Anyways, it wasn’t the literary perspicacity and profundity of the yarns, but the way my mother recited it, with emotions and drama and keenness of Victorians describing the orient, that kept me hooked to the plot.
Another bunch of stories were told by grandparents, who had richer imagination from decades of holy baths in the sea of myths. Those stories were rooted in folklore, and had witty interactions between people and animals. There were smart pigeons and stupid peasants, and a Cat and Mouse chase. It also, occasionally, had a fathead emperor. Sometimes they talked about churails with long fingers singing beckoning melodies from the shadowed bamboo trees. Sometimes they talked about ferocious deities who roamed at 3am in the morning and burned people. The conviction with which they spoke made their words as authoritative as a witch trial testimony, and all the urban rationalist cousins that huddled around were convinced that laws of physics worked differently in rural realms.
Then came the dark and gory tales of uncles, the horror further toned up by the icy winter nights, and the blanket-wrapped men around the fire in the middle of nowhere. Those were not stories, but real histories of murders, dacoity, custodial deaths and other crimes of higher order. Unlike the earlier inventions and myths, these were often, first hand accounts of the scenes, narrated in first person. They went into graphic details of how the throats were slowly severed from the head, reproducing with a Mozartian finesse the sounds of saws slitting the skin, and the alterations when it hit internal, sturdier organs. They showed how the man was packed in a sack and the sack was hung and beaten till it was a pulp. As they spoke about the desecration of bodies, they casually sipped from the little tea cup and took a moment to admire the elaichi. In the background, womenfolks would gather and wince, sometimes grunt in agony and gasp in terror, but such was the narration that they still listened with curiosity and forgot the boiling pots on the earthen chulhas. With my little arms wrapped around their knees, I shuddered at such ghastly tales, only to descend into unspeakable nightmares in my sleep.
Contrary to the tumultuous childhood, as I grew up, I tumbled into the world of radio FMs and storyteller RJs. It was the pre-Jio era when the world functioned fine without the 2x speed. Romance was a slow-cooked Haleem. Book reading was a leisurely boat ride. Towns were urbanising at a comprehensible pace. It was the time when RJs, from their metropolitan pulpits, told us the stories which they had collected from the junction: where progressive thoughts strolled along the dirt road, breathed the village smoke, and mingled with the melodic moos of happy belled cattle. That was when I started listening to Nilesh Misra’s Yaadon Ka Idiot Box, and in no time, my whole lodge, and the rest of good old Ranchi, started tuning in to 92.7 Big FM at the holy hour. The voice and the narration, and the songs that were played at critical moments, transported us to Yaad Sheher (The city of memories). The show left us with a healing smile and erased the memories of the hardships of the day.
When I came to the university, I quit listening. It was that phase of life when you tamed the tiger and roared around the jungle. You carved your own stories and waited for the world to eulogize and immortalize your tale. And so we roared till our voices were all we could hear. Then came the covid, and everybody screamed till they fell dead, and when it withdrew, there was an unending silence of grief.
I don’t have any remembrance of how I lost my way and took this road, but after I heard the Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by Stephen Fry, I was drawn into the fascinating world of audiobooks. Soon, audiobooks were my companions during arduous train journeys. I’d finish Jurassic Park on my way home, and 1984 on the way back. Read by professional readers, the narration painted every image so vividly, it reminded me of those childhood tales I could translate into cinema in my head. It was as if I was doing time travels, in myriad universes, and without the effort it takes to read the texts. It was as if the people of my past were whispering straight into my ears, the English tales which they couldn’t understand in the real world.
Here’s a list of audiobooks I am currently listening to.
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dracula by Bram Stoker
You can go to Librivox to download these for free.
Happy Reading. đź“š
roastedmoongfalis 