Tag: Ghost in the Tamarind

Like many an Indian child, I first heard the story of Vikram and the vetal (vampire is a most unsatisfactory translation) from my mother. The story is referenced in the opening pages of my novel Ghost in the Tamarind when Ramu, one of the two main characters, playacts at being Vikram sent to bring back the undead vetal for the Brahmin’s ritual. The consequences of this playacting, as the reader soon discovers, are horrific.

The Vikram story is just one of the many I learned from my mother, who is the purveyor of stories in my family. So many of the stories she has told me over the years have made their way into my novel that when the moment came it seemed quite obvious to me what the dedication should read:

For Amma, K. S. Champakam,

first and best teller of stories

The most important of my mother’s stories to make it into Ghost in the Tamarind concerns my great-grandmother Gomati. It is my mother who has passed on the family lore regarding Gomati to me in the guise of stories. This lore is the inspiration for the character Gomati Paati in the novel, though I have little doubt that the real Gomati would not recognize herself in Gomati Paati. Certainly, Gomati is not exactly Ramu’s grandmother Gomati Paati—she couldn’t be because no son or grandson of hers was anything like Ramu. However, like the Gomati Paati of the novel, my great-grandmother Gomati too became a widow when young, preserved what she had inherited from her husband for her children against great odds, and went on to die of old age. These are things I know because of the stories my mother has told me.

In writing Gomati Paati, it might first appear that I was doing what Creative Writing classes routinely exhort—drawing on what I knew. But Write what you know is a useful dictum for writers only if it’s accompanied by another—write what you wish you knew. Description of what is accompanied by imagination of what could be—that’s the balance to strive for. It’s a balance to be found in any good storytelling. Thinking back, I find it in my mother’s stories too. In my mother’s stories of what is and what was there was always an element of what could have been: If only Gomati had been born in another age or in other circumstances, who knows what she would have done?

Real life inspires but in becoming fiction transcends itself. When I started my novel all those years ago I intended Gomati Paati to be an important but secondary character confined to the early pages of the novel. But Gomati Paati refused to be so confined. She refused to die off early. Every turn in the novel found a new need for her, until she became a character who survives almost till the very end. It is possible to recognize in this willful behavior on the part of Gomati Paati—yes, she seemed to achieve a certain autonomy of her own in the process of her invention—the potential of a story that begins in imitation to leave imitation behind.

In Chinua Achebe’s great novel Things Fall Apart, Nwoye learns the power of storytelling from the women in his family just as I did from my mother. I am tempted to think there’s a lesson here—a lesson about women and the power of stories that walk the line between what is and what could be. Doesn’t it make sense that those who experience the constraints of society most severely are the ones who would be most dissatisfied with pure description of how things are and thus rely on their imagination to invent what could be? Isn’t this what that most exemplary of storytellers Scheherazade does in the Arabian Nights?

I won’t defend this notion about the special relationship between women and storytelling right now. It is not really defensible in the rather glib way I’ve made it. But I will say that one of the people from whom I have learned the power that stories have to test that line between what is and what could be is surely my mother.