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The Best Storyteller in the World

By Madhu Gurung; Illustration by Kusum Chamoli

Bajai," as we called grandmother, was the best storyteller in the world. Her tales of jewelled ladies and brave warriors, of civilisations that ended due to famine, floods, war or volcanic eruptions, filled our young lives with fantasy.

Nestling in the foothills of Mussoorie is a tiny village called Johri Gaun (Johri village) where we spent part of our summer and winter vacations every year. They were fun-filled days of sun-kissed air and raucous laughter, when we cousins met and had a great time. On our long walks we would nibble berries or catch colourful dragon flies, which we had nicknamed "helicopters". I always collected red ones. If anyone caught a whirring red helicopter they would yell out for me and I would run and open my shoe box to put it in.

By the time I really discovered Bajai, she was a very old woman, with countless wrinkles on her face. My mother was her youngest daughter. Bajai always wore white and smoked Batman cigarettes. I never got to meet Bajee (Grandfather). He was a prisoner of war in Italy, during the Second World War (1939-1945).

He returned home alive but riddled with asthma, to which he succumbed. Bajai never remarried. Nor did she let her maternal relatives pitch in to help a young widow and her seven children survive. Instead, she started tilling her land and growing her own foodgrains and vegetables

Now, when I think of it, Bajai always smelt like the first shower on freshly tilled earth. Her hands were always calloused, but even in their roughness there was a gentleness she could not disguise.

She always started her stories with a saying, "To the listener a garland of gold, to the story teller a garland of all forest flowers and this tale that I tell you today will be heard in heaven."

When she told her stories, we always crowded around her. Each one of us fought to be the closest to her as she took out a burning twig to light her filter-less cigarette. She would clear her throat looking at our eager faces. The kitchen fire would throw our dark shadows on the mud-washed walls. Our eagerly nodding heads would appear large and distorted in the lantern light.

And so would start a magical journey of words creating images larger than life. Even now, 30 year later, I just need to close my eyes to get that smell of a wood fire and dung cakes and Bajai's voice lilting as she imitated the sound of hooves on which the handsome prince rode…