Return to the age of innocence
Syed Badrul Ahsan revisits fairies, elves and ghosts
Elai Dadu'r Ek Baksho Golpo
Badiuddin Nazir
Illustrations Samar Majumdar
The University Press Limited
CHILDHOOD for many of us was much more than a coming by experience. It was all too often a long journey into the lands of the imagination. And those lands were peopled by elves, sprites, fairies, ghosts, gnomes and spirits. And we came to know of these supernatural beings from our mothers by and large, from our fathers to a certain extent. There were all the gripping tales of good, innocent men waylaid by ghosts and demons in the shape of wild beasts even as storms lashed the woodlands on the edge of the village. Branches were ripped off the huge trees and unnatural laughter was heard as the leaves scattered in the rainstorm. The weary traveller, having lost his way in the storm, was now at the mercy of the ghostly beings now dancing all around him in eerie manner. He stumbled, he slipped; and he found, to his consternation, that his natural ability to scream out in fear had suddenly and inexplicably left him. And so it went on till dawn, when the evil spirits fled; and the exhausted traveller, by then unconscious and prostrate beside a clear village pond, was rescued by peasants on their way to the fields.
There were loads of such stories that caused a shiver to run through our beings as we heard them for hours on end. And we heard them in the village, deep in the night, when monsoon cloudbursts gave way to incessant rain in the pitch dark. When the storyteller stopped, none of us could dream of taking a walk outside, for were there not spirits of the dead up there in the shivering trees? And was the sound of the leaves not a sign that ghosts were up and about? It was such a long time ago and yet there are the moments when we go back to recalling the tales in their vivid detail. It is that particular remembrance of the past which Badiuddin Nazir now brings into our midlife through this remarkable collection of stories. They are rooted in his imagination, for they once sprang from the storytellers now part of the heritage he comes from. In Elai Dadu was the quintessential weaver of tales. And, of course, he had a box full of the most riveting stories a child would want to hear. Nazir speaks of the clime, in this case a rural setting in what is now West Bengal, from which the tales sprouted. And yet these are stories that a child in any part of the old India, the one that existed before politics made a casualty of it in the 1940s, might have heard. There could have been the slight variations, but the essence would be the same. In a huge way, therefore, Nazirpara of Nazarpur in Howrah takes on a deeper meaning. It is circumscribed by geography and yet it transcends such physical barriers to attain a universality of its own.
The stories here come in a package that bind the biographical and the purely fictional. The biographical relates, obviously, to Elai Dadu and his surefire way of placing himself at the centre of these tales. In a very significant way, they also bring to the fore the remembrances of childhood innocence in the writer. And that perhaps is the thread which holds the stories together. Badiuddin Nazir could well have gone for a simple retelling of the tales. That he has opted to have the Elai Dadu persona run through the tales brings into the recalling of old times an ambience that is as lively as it was when the stories first made their entry into the lives of the young. Dadu mingles with the stories. In more ways than one can imagine, he becomes a participant in the making of the stories. A sign of that is in the tale of Father Richie, who decides to visit his village and would not be daunted by tales of a spirit inhabiting the room he wishes to spend the night in. And then there are yarns on the diversity of spirits one can come across in the Bengal clime.
There are the good ghosts, those with near humane qualities and therefore quite unwilling to put people into a state of fear. There are then the ghosts noted for their arrogance. You find them in a celebratory mood on the night of the Kali Puja, their eyes spewing fire and their mouths emitting smoke. And, yes, there are ghosts in the form of midget women. You call them Jhanpri ghosts. Elai Dadu, you might suggest, was well versed in ghosts and spirits and could reel off their names and background so easily you would wonder how he had come by such information. That was what left his listeners fascinated. And, to be sure, Dadu made it a point to let these boys and girls know of all the many kinds of trees these spirits dwelled in, embellishing the descriptions with images ranging from the plainly ordinary to the frighteningly bizarre.
These are stories you need to revisit. They are tales your children ought to be familiar with. Badiuddin Nazir has done something stellar: he has taken us back to the old age of innocence. And in Elai Dadu you will spot shades of your grandparents and your parents, of the times when the winds howled and the rains fell and they spoke to you of an unreal world that was out there, just beyond your grasp.
Syed Badrul Ahsan is Editor, Star Books Review.
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