Adib Khan
fiction
MISSHAPEN AND MONSTROUS
David Matthews
Adib Khan
The Storyteller
Flamingo $20.85pb, 352pp
0 7322 6787 0
Adib Khan
AT THE BEGINNING OF Adib Khan's previous book, Solitude of Illusions, two boys were born in a village in India, one blessed, the other misshapen, priapic, and monstrous. Because that book is largely about the favoured boy, it retreats somewhat from the context of its early events, which take place in a world of superstition and fable. By picking up the first boy when he is an old man living in Melbourne and then following his reminiscences, the book blends different worlds: east and west, fantasy and realism, old and modern.
In this new novel the setting (apart from the realms of the imagination entered by the narrator) is entirely in Delhi. The central character and narrator is misshapen, priapic, and monstrous. That, at least, is the perception others have of the dwarf who calls himself Vamana, but it is an image that Vamana goes a long way to live up to. Inside his malformed body there is no caged pure soul. There are no such simple oppositions in this book, certainly not between east and west and not between poles on a moral spectrum either. Khan seems as much as ever interested in an eastern culture he has himself left behind. His characters, like Khalid Sharif in the previous book and Vamana here, are those who fail to find a place in a culture that has such a strong sense of itself and its history that it easily, even casually, expels those who can't or won't conform.
Vamana is the storyteller of the title. Narrative is his one real talent. He does not know his true origin but he fantasises one for us anyway. He is brought up by a loving adoptive (or perhaps, real) mother and her abusive husband. He goes to school, which is a disaster, and he soon escapes into the streets and finds himself living with thieves, prostitutes and eunuchs. He revels in his own bad deeds, becomes an indifferent thief, fantasises about sexual encounters with women and boys and wishes he was not a virgin.
The story is told in retrospect from the gaol in which Vamana has ended up and with the apparently certain prospect of execution ahead of him. There is a distant echo of the Thousand and One Nights here in the way that Vamana tells not only his own story but many others alongside it. But this particular game of tale-telling ahead of execution can only give a Scheherazade rendered in bitterly ironic and inverted form, given the nature of the tale-teller. Vamana is certainly a prolific narrator -- telling stories in his head, or to anyone who will listen (and several who won't). But the only escape (apparently) that he will be afforded is in the stories themselves. The power of narrative here is in its provision of temporary escape, not the ultimate deferral of execution. So The Storyteller, as narrative induced by impending death, is somewhere between the huge canvas of the Thousand and One Nights and the minimalism of Ambrose Bierce's 'Incident at Owl Creek Bridge'.
Incredibly, there is an endearing side to his grotesque, unreliable, amoral figure. Vamana is also extraordinarily naive. At one point, after reciting several love stories, he pours heart and soul into a passionate telling of one more romance. The audience hates it and abuses him. Vamana can't understand what they didn't like about his tale of the love between two homosexual lepers.
This is an interesting moment because it shows the degree to which mere narrative, or power over narrative such as Vamana has, is not ultimately the answer to anything. This is not magical realism revelling in narrative. Vamana could have been a vehicle for a descent into a fantasy world, but despite the fact that we seem to begin with a vision of heaven and hell given to the narrator, it becomes clear that the story takes place in a recognisable modern Delhi. It is a place with recognisably modern problems. The narrator might be naive and unaware of what forces operate around him, but the author is not. This is a place in which corrupt developers, driving expensive cars, flatten the dwelling places of the marginal people who are the novel's main characters in order to build cinema complexes. It is a world in which the niche that Vamana has managed to carve out for himself by telling stories is shrinking even as he occupies it because of television and its stories that come, as one character expresses it, into the home through the eye on the roof. This is a world in which a Scheherazade would have competed for the king's attention with cable television.
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Return to Australian Book Review /September 2000