Amar Chitra Katha Redux

Graeme Macqueen’s “Just like the Rest”, about a king’s encounter with the Boddhisatva “pre-incarnated” as a stag, is especially enthralling.

Michael Ondaatje’s lively account of a group of vultures trying to help a merchant is another of the highlights — complete with an illustration of a vulture-trap (almost certainly a modern addition) and a delightfully open-ended conclusion.

There are other, slightly less familiar stories — like the title one, a fine allegory, about the over-sheltered elephant Scarless Face and his king, who must step out into the world and see suffering before they can be truly happy. It’s written by Griffin Ondaatje, the editor of this collection, and his retellings are among the most evocative — notably “The Camel Who Cried in the Sun”, from a legend about the Prophet Mohammed.

Ernest MacIntyre’s “How the Gods and Demons Learned to Play Together”, my pick for the best story in this collection, comes from the Natyasastra’s myth about the birth of theatre — but it is equally about empathy and perception, about how quickly we pass judgement on those who are different from us.

The retellings that don’t work are the shortest ones (some barely two pages), which are workmanlike. It’s difficult to see the sense, for instance, in including vapid, joyless versions of “The Monkey and the Crocodile” and “The Deer, the Tortoise and the Kaerala Bird” — reading these, you’ll be crying out for the Amar Chitra Katha versions complete with colourful drawings. But such missteps are few and far between, and for the most part this collection stays true to what Macqueen says in his foreword: “When we retell and read these stories we become part of a community stretching back in time and reaching forward into the future.”