In families of our traditional storytellers, the children make a break with the profession - most often because they barely manage to scrape together a living. Our Ajis, or grandmothers were our link with the world of story, but these days with the decline in inter-generational living, we lose out on that as well.
Telling, we have believed, must happen. Many cultures believe that if you have a story to tell - and don’t tell it - strange things will happen.
Stories have unique and startling ways of making sure they get told!
A Kannada story narrated by A K Rama-nujan, who collected and edited the most definitive collections of Indian folktales, is a wonderful example of this. This is how it goes:
There once lived a woman who knew a story. She also knew a song. But she kept them to herself, she never told anyone the story or sang the song. Imprisoned within her, the untold story and unsung song felt choked, trapped. They decided to run away.
One day, as she slept with her mouth open, the story escaped; it fell out of her, and taking on the material form of a pair of shoes, sat outside the house. The song too hurriedly followed, and took the shape of something like a man’s coat, and hung on a peg.
This caused the husband to be very suspicious, especially when she kept insisting she did not know whose they were or where they had come from.
In a rage, he picked up his blanket, and went off to the nearby temple to sleep.
The flames in the lamps of the town, once they were put out, did not really go out. They moved to the temple and spent each night there, gossiping together till the lamps were lit again the following day. On this night, all the lamps from all the houses had reached the temple - except one, which came in much later. "Why are you so late tonight?" the others asked. "Because at my house, the couple quarrelled late into the night", said the flame. "Why did they quarrel?" The flame told them the events. As he finished, the other flames asked: "But where did the coat and shoes come from?"
"The lady of our house knows a story and a song. She never tells the story, and has never sung the song to anyone. The story and the song got suffocated inside; so they got out and have turned into a coat and a pair of shoes. Seeing this made the husband furious. It seems they took revenge".
The husband, lying under his blanket in the temple, heard the lamp’s explanation. His suspicions were cleared. When he got home at dawn, he woke up his sleeping wife and asked her about her story and her song.
"What story? What song?" she asked. She had, sadly, forgotten both of them.
Among the Cree of Manitoba, there is a similar belief that stories, when they are not told, live in their own villages where they go about their own lives. Every now and then, however, a story will leave its village and seek a person to inhabit. Some person will abruptly be possessed by the story, and soon will find herself telling the tale, singing it back into active circulation. Go tell the story; sing the song.