Telling Tales

I started making stuff up from a very young age. I was a known “fibber” in my family, though people were generally kind about it and would say, “oh that Sharbari and her imagination!” Really, I would just lie through my teeth about things that happened to me and were about to happen, never really about not doing something or stuff like, yes I brushed my teeth, when I didn't. I would always own up to infractions or disciplinary issues. I just made up stories and then tried to pass them off as truth and then do a big reveal at the end. I think it was my way of testing my audience or seeing if I actually had an audience. Though I did not know that at the time.
I remember once, I think I was nine, and I was visiting my aunt Ruth and my Uncle Ismail in Nashville, TN when I captivated a couple of teenage boys by telling them, in sordid, Technicolor detail that I had almost been attacked by a great white shark off of Rocky Neck State Park in Connecticut and lived, limbs intact, to tell the tale. This was a couple of years after the movie “Jaws” had hit the theatres and folks were still jittery about it.
We were in the basement of my uncle's rambling house and the boys were my cousins, one Bengali, newly arrived in the US, and one white, born and bred in Nashville, and I held both their attentions, recounting how I had felt a tug and was taken under for an exploratory first sniff, if you will, by a metallic grey monster. Those were my exact words, “metallic, grey monster”. And none of the words used were a coincidence, especially the word, metallic, because you see, I was lying—totally—and that word was my marker, lest I get lost and start completely believing what I was saying. That's when storyteller/fibbers get tripped up I think, when they lose the fact from the fiction and get revealed prematurely. Metallic was foreshadowing, metallic was a clue to my captivated audience, which they would only pick up on after I admitted that I had dreamt the whole thing, because I had recently watched Jaws again and had dreamt of the mechanical shark used in the film, “Bruce”. Tah dah!
I remember that both boys threw their hands up in the air, disappointed. “A dream?” they said. “You're kidding me!” But they appreciated the length and breadth of the yarn I, a little, skinny, slip of a girl had spun. And I remembered that.

I was not aware of it of course but what I was, was a writer. Years later, a boyfriend suggested I write my stories down and stop trying to pass them off as real, only to turn around and go, “just kidding!” It was irritating, he said, but it was obvious I was a born storyteller; not a word out of place when I was leading people astray. I never told stories about what it was like to be first generation Bangladeshi, in the US,or waxed poetical about turmeric, saris and arranged marriages, but they did always have a bit of me in them, specific details that gave them a ring of truth. I used to swim off Rocky Neck—all the time—and great whites are known to inhabit the area. I just never met one up close. A minor detail.
And so it follows, the writers I love the most are the ones who tell the quickie, deceptively accessible, and “small” stories that capture the tight corners of the universal human experience and not the Muslim, Bengali, oops how did I end up in Amrika ones. Some of the best in the business are Alice Munro and Raymond Carver. Munro won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year. I study her stories, the construction, and pacing and well -placed details carefully. She manages to pack in entire sub plots that she may never even touch on; mere suggestions really, that shed light on the bigger story she is telling you now, by describing the interaction between say, a woman, and a train station attendant. Suddenly you start thinking about what the train station attendant does in his free time. He's a flirt, so you wonder, does he cheat? The woman is plain faced and so does not seem to hold the flirtatious man's attention. You wonder how much she is aware of that. Does it hurt her? These are questions Munro does not answer, but it adds to the complexity of her storytelling and it doesn't matter. Carver uses even less words to tell us about entire histories. His voice is generally a melancholy one and he knows instinctively that melancholy packs a meaner punch in smaller doses. His tales are haunting to say the least, and are about love, loss, disenfranchisement and men and women who have lost sight of their love for one another. His seminal, What we Talk about When We Talk about Love, I have read more than once.
As a Bangladeshi American writer, I have had to struggle with being looked at as just a writer and not be labeled an ethnic one. It's been a struggle because some of the writers who have come before me and have met with tremendous critical and commercial success have made creative choices that support that label instead of subvert it—repeatedly. These are wonderful, intelligent writers to be sure, but they have made it hard for the rest of us at times and have missed opportunities to tell more complex and muscular stories. Some tend to languidly strum only one string of a sitar—the one most agreeable to the Western ear--when the possibilities and arrangements are endless. And so before you run out and buy a book of stories tinged with turmeric and swathed in Benarasi silk, please give Hateship, Courtship, Friendship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro a try. And while you are at it, pick up Carver, who once said, “A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.”
That's always been my approach.