‘There seemed no hope, no joy…nothing until the storytellers moved in’

How did it all begin?

My parents came from two ends of the cultural spectrum. My paternal grandfather was one of the early engineers from Roorkee in the 1895 class full of Brits. He helped build the Belur Math for Swami Vivekananda. My father did his engineering from Shibpur and post graduation at Leeds. My kid brother inherited the paternal engineering genes and went to IIT Kanpur and the USA for his Masters. This was West Bengal bhadrolok education at its best.

The maternal side were zamindars from East Bengal. Life was all about literature, classical music and art. And yes, also animals, as over the last hundred and fifty years the family have kept as pets 99 elephants, a tigress, dogs, rabbits, a wild boar, Arab horses, New Jersey cows, Leg Horns, Rhode Islanders, Black Minorcas, deer and ducks. The gun rack held 30 rifles and shot guns covering every make and bore. Cameras were Leica and Voigtlander.

My mother was the darling across the length and breadth of the family. 1940s Benares felt she was the city’s best looking girl. 1950s Calcutta saw India’s greatest sitarist flirting with her till my father firmly spoke to the maestro. They were heady days but too short. She left us early and an ocean of emptiness swallowed me. There seemed no hope, no joy and no future. Nothing until the storytellers moved in.

My maternal grandmother was married at 10. She was the Shakuntala Devi equivalent in Bengali literature. Hundreds of pages of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, nearly all of Tagore’s thousand plus poems, tracts from major Bengali writers and poets; she knew them by heart. With wonderful emotion she could rattle off a piece or pages from memory. She brought us up in my mother’s absence with unending storytelling sessions moving from the epics to detective Byomkesh. She shot with a Voigtlander and chipped in as wicketkeeper (because of her bulk) in our tennis ball cricket. She was a foodie. My No.3 storyteller.

Representational image (Source: Dreamstime)

My maternal uncle quit city living and bought a barren 20 acre patch next to the Chaupahari Jungle near Santiniketan from Lord Sinha. He spent the next 30 years and all our family wealth in transforming the plot into a Garden of Eden. He was a master storyteller. His tales would be of Shivaji, Prithviraj Chauhan, Mahabharata and the wonders of Mother Nature. He was environmentally Rio, Kyoto, Copenhagen before they happened. I travelled for hours sometimes sitting on his shoulder holding onto his hair through green paddy fields or in a bullock cart on a moonlit night listening to a ghost story that sent shivers down my spine. My mama painted, wrote and played the esraj. He was a foodie. My No.2 storyteller.

My grandmother’s middle brother settled in Ranchi after Partition. He was a great hunter. I slept next to him and heard stories about the jungle. Man-eating tigers, charging rogue elephants, stealthy leopards, angry bears, the night sky, bird-calls, John Hunter, Maharajah of Sarguja’s shoots, cricketers Keith Miller, C K Nayudu, freedom fighter Matangani Hazra. I lived and breathed the stories. He used a Leica, rode an Arab horse, milked a New Jersey cow and drove an Alpha Romeo Spider racecar and was a foodie. My No.1 storyteller.

And then I grew up. My own story unfolded. The highs and the lows. I looked back and realised the same valleys and crests had happened in the lives of my three storytellers and yet… And yet they never lost the joie de vivre that flowed through their veins. They embraced life disregarding the bad times and clinging to the good with grace.

Their stories are the bedrock on which my journey travels. I’m blessed to have my maternal gene.

(The writer is a storyteller at Udaipur Tales, a three-day international storytelling festival, being held in Udaipur. His deep understanding of India motivated him to set up The India Foundation, a non-profit organisation, which provides deep holistic understanding of India to leaders in business and promotes elements of Indian heritage and culture.)