by Adib Khan
I don’t…I don’t want to function as a human. I have levitated and sprouted wings. I should have disappeared permanently inside those unravelled secrets.
It had been a long night of…well, a thousand hours. Or was it more? Much more. His mind had been an expanding universe reaching out to touch the extremities of whatever had been invented. Truth. Lies. Dreams. Reality. Heaven. Hell. Wonderment, rather than cynicism, made him recall the journey of a trial death. And now that he was back, he resolved to question the mullah and talk to Jesu again.
There was contrition and self-recrimination. He was unable to clutch and keep what had been within his reach. Ultimately he had failed himself and crash-landed back to earth because the gravity of the flesh had been too strong a force to overcome.
He permitted himself a smile at what he had said. He recalled enjoying the mortified look on the mullah’s face. Spurning Paradise was not difficult. No more frontiers, he was told. Nothing to strive for. No yearnings.
Everything is here. Whatever you desire is yours. The rewards of a believer, if only he would repent and renounce, choose the righteous way.
Renounce? What do I have to renounce?
You must not imagine. Here, we must not be infected with the make-believe.
That was a demand beyond fulfilment. An absurdity. He had looked around him. Then he thought about the distraught creatures and their cries of torment. What possibilities were in their pain! He empathised with the suffering.
Rays of sunlight prick his eyelids. He can see. Faces. Young. Curious. Peering into the ditch. The tip of a stick prods his navel. He manages to emit a sound. The children jump back.
‘An alien! From the moon!’ a squeaky voice cries.
‘A ghost!’
‘Ghosts only appear at night!’
There is a war-like cry as they run around the ditch. Now there is only one face leaning over cautiously to reconfirm what they have all seen. Gruff voices frighten the boy. He springs back and runs from the field. His companions drop their sticks and stones and follow him.
It takes several attempts for the prostrate figure to speak.
‘Let me tell you about places and beings you can never imagine. Orchards and rivers beyond the stars. Fires that never die. There are those who can fly. There is no sun, and yet there is always light. Darkness infinitely deeper than the night. No birth or death, and whatever we experience in-between is not known.’ The note of conviction in his voice pleases him. There is energy and eagerness he thought were lost.
There is no urgency to leave. Sensations have deserted him. His mind wanders to the bazaars and the streets. Noises filter into his ears. Throngs of shoppers. Glistening midriffs and shapely bums. Dark eyes and curious smiles. He sees himself standing on a wooden crate. A bright costume with protrusions on the shoulder blades. A new make-up kit. Red lips, fiery eyes and a painted tongue. He would learn to move as if he were on a cushion of air.
The police will not report their bungled effort. Lies will blanket their inefficiency.
There is no one missing. A miscount, perhaps? We have so many. It is easy to make a mistake in the confusion of the overcrowded prisons. Over the years we’ve had dwarfs. Not many. No, we cannot recall anyone recently.
It was intended to be quite different. A few more blows in the right places. You have a head as hard as a rock! That had probably saved him. They swung murderously and missed frequently, unable to adjust to his lack of height. They would have had him in the end as he lay in the ditch, but for the lusting couple who had headed their way.
He shuts out the morning light. Darkness is more bearable, like being inside a shack with a storm raging outside. He would travel south. Nagpur. Hyderabad. Bangalore or Mysore. So many more stories to be told. The two-headed boy who knew the past and the future. The beggar with the spitting snakes in his hair. The woman with a breast on either side of her navel. He smiles. Like a god I will descend. He likes the comparison. Like a god…
‘My name is Vamana,’ he struggles to mutter. ‘Incarnation of Visnu. Consort of Indra. My task is to nourish the world. My intention? To reveal the truth. Now listen to what I have to say…’
Words once spoken are never lost. His eyelids collapse. I am blessed with immortality. A faint glow of accomplishment spreads across his face.
A dirt road. He is riding on a cart. A pageant of noisy children. The distant voice of a river, full of awe and intrigue. There can be no distinction between lies and truth. Meena’s approving smile. A pure sky. A young boy places a crown of twigs and leaves on his head. Applause.
All this…for me?
We are nearly home…
Anxious faces and eager hands appear above him. They whisper and begin to shovel in the dirt. Faster…faster.
In the distance, a timeless city stirs to the rhythm of an ordinary day.
About the Author
Adib Khan was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he lived until 1973. That year he came to Australia where he completed a Masters degree in English Literature at Monash University. Khan currently lives and works as a teacher in Ballarat. His interests include reading, philately, cooking, listening to Western and Indian classical music, chess and cricket.
Khan’s first novel, Seasonal Adjustments, won the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and the Book of the Year in the 1994 New South Wales Premier’s Prize, was shortlisted for the 1994 Age Book of the Year Award, and won the 1995 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for First Book. His second novel, Solitude of Illusions, was shortlisted for the Christina Stead Prize for fiction and the Ethnic Commission Award in the 1997 New South Wales Premier’s Prize, and won the 1997 Tilly Aston Braille Book of the Year Award.
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Copyright
A part of this book was written with the assistance of a Fellowship at Varuna Writers’ Centre.
Flamingo
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Australia
First published in Australia in 2000
This edition published in 2010
by HarperCollinsPublishers Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
A member of the HarperCollinsPublishers (Australia) Pty Limited Group
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Adib Khan 2000
The right of Adib Khan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Khan, Adib.
The storyteller.
ISBN: 0 7322 6787 0 (pbk.).
ISBN: 978-0-730-49191-0 (ePub)
1. Dwarfs – India – Fiction.
I. Title.
A823.3
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