Collector of Stories
By: Sanket Mishra
Tags: Slice Of Life, Stories, Biography, Creative Non Fiction

Words are strange little beasts — cannibals, feasting upon other words. In a world akin to the jungle, it is every word for itself. When equilibrium is attained, you need magicians to make sense of it all. To explain this, I would like to take the help of this wonderful story I read this year, “Pockets” by Amal El-Mohtar. In it, Nadia, the protagonist, puts her hands into her pockets and strange things keep appearing in it: a piece of fudge, a tube of red lipstick, a pin, a map of Syria, a gun. Words are like that. Disjointed, weird and murderous. But in the hands of wordsmiths like Amal El-Mohtar they work. And take your breath away.

Wordsmith do not own words or the stories that the words create.

Every story can mean a different thing to a different person. I was introduced to the story “The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Liu in a webinar on the principles of Clear Writing earlier this year. It describes how a child reacts to a mail-order-bride-mother from China. But it is not just that. It can be a story of a common person during Mao’s cultural revolution. Or about the magic of culture. Words are as much about you as they are about the fictional worlds they live in.

A notion exists that wordsmithery is an “elite” art, and some people can do it. Nothing can be further from the truth. Everyone has a story to tell. In fact, everyone has multiple stories to tell. As we keep living our lives, we keep telling our stories. The current Gatekeepers of words might need to label and justify a small subset of stories and promote them as “valid” stories. But these Gatekeepers are just a relic of the past. Their pedestals will soon come crashing down, and newer storytellers will take their seats. This cyclical nature will soon make everyone’s story heard. It will come later than we want. It will come when the writers are long gone. But we all know words are immortal. And words will break the glass ceiling, the pink ceiling, and then take the fourth wall down with it. Have you read The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate by Ted Chiang. The story is long and takes its own sweet time to unravel. But what a joyride it is. Words, like evolution, need time.

But it is not just words. Human beings were born to erupt into stories.

Stories flow unrestrained through our beings. Like the scar on the knee telling the story of when you slid ten feet on a downhill slope while trying to perform a stunt in your new bicycle. Or the cut above the eye whispering about the near-miss while playing drunk indoor cricket. Have you ever looked at a stranger and imagined what their lives are like? On a crowded street, did your eyes wander to the older man who is dragging two kids away from the ice cream stall and wondered why? Or to the man crouched like a wobbly question mark in the corner of the train, his shirt flaps no longer restrained by his pants and his tie hanging loosely around his neck. Ever wondered what typhoon descended on him? Yes? Then you are a storyteller. Every action, every move, every sound is just a story wanting to be heard -A minute few are translated into words. The rest like everything else in linguistics is lost in translation.

Children often grow up around dolls and legos. Year by year, the toys multiply, and soon enough, they become difficult to manage. Children are seen throwing them all around the house, and parents are seen collecting them into storage boxes. Throw and collect. The cycle goes on. Until children no longer find the toys attractive, and they are put in storage boxes forever.

Stories were my toys, and I never got over them. Stories of Gods behaving like boorish beings. Stories that made me question right and wrong. Stories that challenged the status quo. Forbidden family stories that weren’t willing to escape the front door. Stories of Naxalism. Stories of Gas tragedies. Stories of accidents in which I escaped unhurt. Stories of my sister daring the colossal ocean. Stories of gender. Story of choice. Stories of lack of it. Stories of caste. Stories of marriages. Stories of the divide. Stories reeking of patriarchy. Stories making me vomit. Stories making me laugh. Stories making me cry. Everywhere I saw a story was being made. I had no choice. I became a collector of stories.

More stories reside in my head than I care to count.

I do not remember every story always. Like the clothes in the wardrobe of a bachelor, they have been dumped one over the other. The story of my sister holding on to the tail of the bull merges into the story of my mother stealing rasagulla from the plate being offered for god. I don’t remember whether it was my dad or me who was driving the bike when the accident where nothing happened, happened. I don’t remember the voice of my Bapa, and in my head, he sounds like Amitabh Bachchan as Shahenshah. I have a slight lisp as I speak, more when I am anxious, I cant trace back to a story. I think surgery was involved. Or maybe it was when I was playing drunk indoor cricket.

I have my own stories too. Stories about the things I love. Like a story about a god who has no superpowers. Or a story about a transgender woman finding love. Or a story about revolution. Or a story about the first book I bought.

But I can’t tell if they are mine or they are one among the many I have collected. I wish I could tell.