Tell A Tale AND OTHER STORIES

Why Tell A Tale? Homo Sapiens ('wise man'), are possibly better described as Homo Fictus ('storytelling man'), suggests Jonathan Gottschall. We are compulsive story-makers, story-tellers and story-consumers. We tell of what happened, what never happened, what might happen and what might never happen. We tell of stories that were lived and experienced, and also of stories which are entirely figments of our imagination. Stories help us to understand ourselves and also the 'other'. We make stories and stories make us. Each of us is a story, beginning with our birth and unravelling till our demise. Those who are special continue to tell their stories even after death. As a child in a small village in Odisha, I was hungry and desperate for stories. Family elders soon ran out of stories to tell me. Since I had no access to a library, I began reading 'Hari Vansha Purana' (Epic of the Dynasty of Hari or Vishnu) and Ramayana, both in Odia verse and meant to be sung tunefully. But these epics were so full of riveting stories that the verse didn't deter me. This collection includes diverse stories and anecdotes - two ghost stories, a murder story, a historical piece, one autobiographical and a few other semi-autobiographical stories, a satirical story and several anecdotes. Some stories are set in Odisha, some in Madhya Pradesh and other parts of India, some others in Australia, China, Italy, and elsewhere. None of the stories and anecdotes is entirely fictional, each happened in a time and a place. However, to retain the privacy of characters, their names have been changed. A few of the stories in this collection - When June Never Comes, Tell A Tale, Spit for Spat, Rice Kheer Down Under, Wall and Peace, Poison in the Well, and Serpentine Retribution - were published as 'middles' years ago. For this collection, these pieces have been only minimally edited. A 'middle' had to be short, with a word limit of about 500 words. That's why these pieces are like appetisers, or a small 'bite'. The other stories have been recently written. I hope the readers may enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoyed writing these.