Telling the Stories of Gorakhpur That Can't Be Swallowed up By Contemporary Horrors

“Gorakhpur, I said, the land of my father, my father’s father and his father’s father before that – centuries of bones and flesh turning to soil and mud, nurturing the soil that has nurtured us, aeons of a snake eating its own tail – Gorakhpur, I said, must be the muse.”

It is possible to finish reading the six skilfully crafted short stories that make up Omair Ahmad’s Tall Tales by a Small Dog in a single rapt sitting. By the time a reader has done so, it is clear that the author has made his inheritance his own. Set in Gorakhpur, these stories are so comfortably Gorakhpuri, they are their own affirmation.

At the outset, let me state that Omair is a friend, but well before I knew him, I read his novella StoryTeller’s Tale. The book achieved something rather unique – transcreating a storyteller’s oral world into words, drawing from and capturing the cadence of Hindustani in English prose. As a TV journalist I know what a stunning feat this is, the reality of the world as it is cannot just be recorded on camera and transcribed for it to become real on the page.

This distinctive ability runs through his fiction, though each book is strikingly different. It is very much in evidence in Tall Tales by a Small Dog, an invitation, like a kissagoi, to hear some tall tales. The writing is sharp, from the plot twists to the humour and irony – and speaks directly to many of us today who read largely in English but still inhabit an emotional world shaped by the mother-tongues of our parents or grandparents.

Gorakhpur is the muse, and Kallu Maharaj, the narrator is “a small dog of indeterminate colour and parentage, with a tendency to tuck in his tail and skitter away at the slightest sense of danger…only to return, courting danger from a distance.” As we settle down to our image of the narrator, Omair, the writer, speaks directly to us, shaking out complacent acceptance of this description, “Wars have been won in such fashion, so for this, I will not judge him.”

Omair told me he had considered telling these tales through three characters – an SHO, a village mukhia and a dog – before he settled on Kallu Maharaj, because who else would know the streets of our towns and cities better than a dog.

The outside world in such towns is a masculine world, and that is the world we see reflected in these stories. The first of the stories, ‘The Dog Thrower of Chote Qazipur’, establishes the world of the narrator, Kallu Maharaj, and his place in it. It tells the story of Bilal and his gang – young men who owned the alleys of Chote Qazipur:

“So when I tell you that Bilal and his gang walked the alleys late at night, that they were known rowdies of the area, got into scrapes and fights, you have to understand the limits of their misdemeanours… They didn’t commit any crimes against the state; only against good taste.”

As the outside world imposes itself on these galis, the gang cannot remain unchanged:

“Nothing hurt Bilal more than this. Riots and deaths, arson and murder, even the creeping change of names and attitudes were somethings we had no control over, so we tried not to think about them. But friendship was something else. And Amit hadn’t even said goodbye.”

It is against this world that is falling apart, already flagged off in the first story, that we must read the ones that follow, as they wander into Gorakhpur’s past, both real and unreal. Omair has that insider-outsider relationship to Gorakhpur, a “third-culture” gaze which allows him intimacy, even compassion as the absurd flairs or idiocies of his characters are being etched out.

Also read: Book Extract: A Dog’s Tale of Gossip, Myth and Mischief

In ‘Buddha’s Smile’, Kallu Maharaj tells us the story of Knownto Sharma, a pickpocket whose command on Gorakhpur’s railway station is unrivalled until he is outmatched by the firangi Carnegie King. One of the tallest tales in the collection leads you to Deng Xiaoping’s origins in Gorakhpur.

There are other protagonists, equally larger than life, who are more rooted in history. Jalali Sahib, the protagonist in the story ‘Dagger in the East’, is drawn from Omair’s own family history that takes into its ambit the story of 1857, when Gorakhpur “liberated” itself from British rule for over a year.

Jalali Sahib is a jailor, sentenced to death for having “opened the jail doors that summer of 1857 to let out each and every person held under the whip of the Angrez – almost all of them for failure or refusal to pay taxes…”

This is as much a story of a jailor cheating death as it is about the “rebellious heart of the Purab (East)”, touching upon the revolt of the Buddha, of the indigo plantations and Gandhi. It is not a pedantic lesson in history, more a reminder of how limited our learning of it is and how great the amnesia of our current politics.

Much like in the first story, contemporary events drop in and out. Close to the end, there is a  mention of a paediatric doctor in charge of an encephalitis ward at the hospital – unmistakably a reference to Dr Kafeel Khan who was hounded by the government for saving dying children.

It is the closest Omair comes to militating against the manner in which Gorakhpur has come to feature in the headlines but he does not set out to explicitly decode or explain the city. Nor does he lapse into romanticism about small-town India – no nostalgic descriptions of mango trees and khus screens and lazy summer afternoons.

In a recent discussion on the book, the conversation veered to whether Gorakhpur is truly a city or a town. Undoubtedly, as a sprawling rapidly developing place with a large population, it is a city, but when you go to Gorakhpur from Delhi, you are seen as a big city person coming to “humara chota shehar”. Paradoxically, the Gorakhpuri will also remind you that theirs is no small town and list all that makes it a bustling city. As Omair writes in the Author’s Note, “It isn’t just the content, but also the way we speak in out little cities and towns, how we draw the panorama of the world in such a way as if we are always smackdab in the centre of it all.”

It is this duality that Omair draws out with ease.

The characters and the plots with all their fantastical turns have a realism to them that evokes similar cities and towns, far removed from Delhi, but possessing their own sense of self. But above all it is the story, of one place and one town or city, as you will, that cannot be swallowed up by contemporary horrors. It is a story of Omair’s mitti.

At a time when ‘story-teller’ is a word being bandied about with such painful ease, it is a relief and a pleasure to come across one who truly fits the term.

Radhika Bordia is an independent journalist based in Delhi.