Orality in after-twilight hours

Imagine yourself sitting by the chulo in the kitchen of a village mud house, the fire playing on the face of aama as she rearranges the wood under the pot from where waft the delicious smells of dinner. With the crackle of the fire and the frown on her face, she tells you stories, occasionally stopping to blow the dying cinders or wave the smoke away as it waters her eyes. Imagine again sitting on a sukul in the aagan, sucking sugarcane while baajey sits on the porch, smoking hookah, the bubbles making a frothy sound when he stops to inhale mid-sentence of a story.[break]



Ajit Baral’s book The Lazy Conman and Other Stories are a collection of such stories you would hear by chulos and in aagans.



Baral’s collection of folktales give the reader an insight into the kind of life the people who share these stories live, what their desires are, what they hold important, and how they believe that society and social hierarchy functions. Like any other folk stories, the tales in this book are didactic and entail moral lessons, and animals, plants, humans, and gods interact with each other easily. They deal with the issues of greed, cunning, beauty, robbery, pride, and similar topics.



Stories such as the Goddess of Tales Get Angry and The Farmer’s Victory are simple accounts of how human deeds can anger gods and goddesses. However, while in the first one, humans must make amends in order to appease the goddesses’ wrath; in the second, Mahadev learns to admit defeat and acknowledge the farmer’s victory. The dynamics between human beings and gods are fascinating as these tales don’t necessarily establish humans as being subjugated by the powers of gods, but as beings who are on equal footing with the supreme beings they worship.



In The Story of a Jacket, this notion is stretched to the point where the human being is smarter than the gods, and the divine must turn to the mortal for help. Even Karkatok, the god of serpents, must turn to Newar, the expert on afflicted eyes, to help his wife recover from sore eyes. The plot develops to include a ghost who is greedy, and steals the jacket Karkatok gave Newar.



That a ghost should have greed and steal a material thing gifted by the divine to a human adds another dimension to the strong roots Nepalis have with superstitions on a literal level. On a deeper one, it could be interpreted as the gifts that people are given by the divine upon birth, gifts that could be stolen, or wasted through transient mundane occupations. However, Karkatok returns to reveal the ghost and save the day for Newar. This ending again shifts power balance in favor of the divine. The Story of a Jacket is also the legend behind the Bhoto Jatra, held annually in Kathmandu.



The stories address laziness, cunning, and wealth. However, the moral compass sometimes seems to shift and lose the expected direction. For instance, in the title story The Lazy Conman, cunning is rewarded and laziness is accepted when the protagonist proves successful in generating instant wealth. The wife doesn’t say anything when the lazy conman goes back to being lazy after having conned quite a few people. However, in The Boon, cunning is punished and the god (Ganesh) is accepting one man’s dependence on another for better ideas that are, albeit, sly. Therefore, cunning and the result it creates are confusing. The stories don’t always punish the sly but are rather harsh on the simple-minded characters that are unable to think for themselves, such as in The Simpleton.



The animals in this book are often portrayed as sources of wealth. Sometimes, they are presented as beings that egest gold coins. Such stories end with the moral lesson that greed is bad, but if you really put animals to work diligently, it can reap profits.



The illustrations by Durga Baral deserve mention as they capture the cruxes of the tales, and effortlessly narrate the stories through sketches. The language and presentation of the book is simple, straightforward and uncomplicated, and could easily target young readers as well as older ones. Stories such as Invisible Death which is a brief, translated version of Lalu ra Kaal (prescribed in high school Nepali textbooks ) are popular folklores.



The Boon is another well-read tale that is seen in moral science or English literature school textbooks. Most of these stories are familiar to Nepalis, and it is an encouraging endeavor to put them together in English. It would be interesting to see alternatives to the established framework of these stories, or push boundaries of traditional telling to surrealistic writing like Angela Carter does to fables.

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