Books: Story Power

Never has Somvati Amavasya had quite such an exotic name. Then, perhaps, never has an anthropologist and folklorist -- who is also a novelist -- turned the focus of her academic training on it. Love, Stars and All That, Narayan's debut novel, was an enquiry into the life of a young American-Indian girl with messed-up values. Her new book is a turn in another direction.

During a visit to Kangra, where Narayan's American mother now lives, she met Urmilaji, a local story-teller, to discover the value of those who live by stories. Recorded here are 21 stories, some connected with fasts and feasts and others just rattling good yarns meant to help pass long winter evenings. Narayan engages in a dialogue with Urmilaji and the result is a richly textured offer that attempts to map the social contours of a community whose worldview is shaped by stories told down the ages. Equally, it is a tribute to the veracity of the oral tradition and a portrait of a doughty Pahari woman who lives by the tales she tells.

Narayan's vocabulary confronts the anthropomorphic world of demons and fairies to translate its simple code to the western reader. Although she is sensitive enough to preserve the inflexions of the narrator's voice so that the warmth of the living experience is not deconstructed merely as ethnology, something is missing. There is the fidelity to detail, but Narayan is unable to make the reader acknowledge that these stories still speak to the community. The reader never really enters this enchanted world completely. So both Narayan and Urmilaji are wrong in believing that TV is snuffing out these stories. Their diminishing appeal is due to a loss of faith. To listen to folktales is to willingly suspend disbelief.

The connective tissue in Urmilaji and Narayan comes from a different DNA altogether. And it shows.

AUTHORSPEAK: SOHAILA ABDULALI
Back to the Roots
The US-based writer is inspired by her native village

As much as she loves the never-ending cultural excitement in Greenwich village, her home in New York city, Sohaila Abdulali cannot, just cannot, think of making the Big Apple her permanent home. Her soul lives elsewhere. "I will go mad unless I have the tranquillity of my parents' orchard near Karjat in Maharashtra," says the debutante novelist. The Karjat quietness is obviously a trigger for creative forays. Her soon-to-be released novel, The Madwoman of Jogare, is set there . "I have done my best work at the orchard," she says. "Many of my friends do not understand what a person who has spent many years in Boston and New York has been doing in a place where there was no electricity or telephone till the other year. I like the solitude I get there."

Abdulali who did her college studies in the US -- she has a master's degree from Stanford -- not only wrote a substantial part of Madwoman in Karjat, but also sought asylum there from time to time to prepare several reports for Oxfam, the British relief agency. Soon after HarperCollins India publishes her novel, three of her children's books will also be published in India. The children's books grew out of a grant she received from Ford Foundation to write educational books. That does not mean Abdulali is taking a break. She is working on her second novel, which deals with Wall Street skulduggery, with guidance from her younger brother Adil who works for a Wall Street firm.

Considering the creative phase she is passing through, it isn't any wonder that she sees a book at every turn. While she was studying at Brandeis University a few years ago, she worked as a sleep technician in a hospital to supplement her income and now she feels that the experience there can be woven into another novel.

Madwoman is the story of a young painter and her eccentric orchard- growing family. While the book deals with such themes as unrequited love and cultural uneasiness between the East and the West -- a predictable theme for any NRI writer -- ultimately it is about how rural societies are threatened by urban values. "There is something of my family in the book," she says. "But you shouldn't look for too many connections because the book has a lot of sadness and devastation."

-Arthur J. Pais