The village Somal, nestling away in the forest tracts of Memphis, had a population of less than three hundred. It was a remote village cut off from the rest of the world (the nearest bus stop was ten miles away); nevertheless, the people of the village lived in a kind of perpetual enchantment. The enchanter was Nambi the storyteller. He was a man of about sixty or seventy-- who could say! If anyone asked Nambi what his age was, he referred to an ancient famine or an invasion or the building of a bridge and indicated how high he had stood from the ground at the time.
He was illiterate in the sense that the written word was a mystery to him, but he could make up a story, in his head, at the rate of one a month; each story took nearly ten days to narrate.
His home was the little temple at the very edge of the village. He spent most of the day in the shade of the Bunyan tree that spread out its branches in front of the temple. On the night he had a story to tell, he lit a small lamp and placed it in a niche in the trunk of the banyan tree. Villagers, as they returned home in the evening, saw this, went home and said to their wives. “Now, now, hurry up with the dinner, the storyteller is calling us.” As the moon crept up behind the hillock, men, women, and children gathered under the banyan tree.
The story-teller would open the story with a question. He asked, "A thousand years ago, a stone's throw in that direction, what do you think there was? It was not the weed-covered waste it is now. It was not the ash-pit it is now. It was the capital of the king----"
It was a story building on an epic scale. The first day barely conveyed the setting of the tale, and Nambi's audience had no idea yet who would come into the story next. As the moon slipped behind the trees of Memphis forest, Nambi would say, "Now friends, the Goddess says this will do for the day." He would abruptly rise, go in, lie down and fall asleep long before the babble of the crowd ceased.
The light in the niche would again be seen two or three days later, and again and again throughout the bright half of the month. On the day when the story ended, the whole crowd would go into the temple and pray before the goddess.
By the time the next moon peeped over the hillock, Nambi was ready with another story. He never repeated the same story or brought in the same set of persons and the village folk considered Nambi a sort of miracle. They quoted his words of wisdom and lived in a kind of an elevated plane even though their daily life in all other respects was hard and drab.
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