When time stalls, stories begin

The first and foremost duty of a story is to entertain in uneventful, dull, and monotonous times—at least this is what our dastans (tales) and their counterparts in other cultures suggest.

In Qissa Chahar Dervish, a classic 13th-century allegorical story traditionally attributed to Amir Khusro, the main characters accidentally meet outside the city of Constantinople after having “cast about like dust from place to place.” The gates of the city are closed and this is probably the reason why these strangers decide to sit together in the dim illumination of a lamp in their collective wait for a rather distant dawn. Here one of them proposes that they have before them a dull night “as long as eternity,” and that it would be better if each of them were to tell his own story so that “the night may pass in conversation”.

The uneventfulness of the situation also serves as the pretext for storytelling in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

The noblemen and ladies who have withdrawn to a villa on the outskirts of Florence amid a raging plague have various pursuits—carousing, music, singing, dancing, strolling, and games—to immerse themselves in during the evenings and nights of their voluntary confinement. However, unlike the outcasts in Qissa Chahar Dervish (Tale of the Four Dervishes), who face a long, dull night, it is the hotter part of the day after breakfast that proves more tedious to the Florentines in Boccaccio's story. To cope with this uneventful hour, one of the ladies suggests narrating stories. "By the time each of us has finished telling a story, the sun will have gone down and the heat will have lessened, and then we can go out and enjoy ourselves wherever we please," she says.

In de Navarre’s Heptameron, a group of noblemen and ladies is confined to a monastery—Abbey of Our Lady of Serrance—due to torrential rains and floods that have washed away a key bridge leading back to their hometowns in France and Spain. They now seek to devise some pastime “to relieve the weariness of their long stay,” which has separated the men from “chase and hawking” and the women from “their household cares, work, and dance.” They also ultimately find relief in stories, a remedy suggested by one of the ladies.

However, even when one is not confined to a place—by nightfall, pestilence, or torrential rain—but is instead on the move, the monotony of the landscape or the road can prove equally oppressive.

Harry Bailly, the host at Tabard Inn in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, understands this as he proposes to the pilgrims—who are to set out for Canterbury the next morning—to entertain themselves with stories on their journey.

“I know well that, as you travel, you intend to talk and amuse yourselves, for there is no pleasure in riding along the road as silent as a stone,” he says, thereby setting the stage for a storytelling contest in which each pilgrim tells two tales on the way to Canterbury and two on the return journey.

A story is arguably the account of an event—action, movement or change—and therefore it is natural that we need it the most in monotonous situations and tedious times of inactivity. We long to be agents of events or participants in action in real life. But when we are stuck in stagnant waters of time, we turn to stories—accounts of events and actions—as a compensation or a substitute for real action and eventfulness. But constant immersion in the thick of events can also be exhausting. Moreover, eventfulness is not inherently desirable, for at times a chain of events may culminate in catastrophe and a tragic end which we seek to avert at all costs.

Here comes the second duty of the story: to delay, keep at bay and, if possible, altogether avert an undesirable happening. But, in dastans and romances, the storyteller often has to cloak his real intention—of delaying or averting an outcome—behind the avowed wish to entertain.

Scheherazade, the erudite heroine of Alf Laifa [One Thousand and One Nights or Arabian Nights, a renowned collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age] , starts narrating a story, ostensibly at the request of her sister Dunyazad. Dunyazad has been summoned to Scheherazade’s wedding chamber before the consummation of the latter’s marriage with King Sheheryar.

The bride is to be executed in the morning according to a brutal norm that the disillusioned king has set after betrayal by one of his beloved queens.

Before tying the knot, Scheherazade has taught her sister when to demand a “new, delectable and delightsome” tale in the presence of the king to “speed the waking hours”. But once granted permission to tell a tale, the heroine of the Arabic masterpiece always leaves her story unfinished—at a cliffhanger—at the break of dawn, forcing the king to defer her execution for 1,001 nights out of curiosity.

The parrot in Sanskrit story Sukasaptati—and its Urdu adaptation Tota Kahani—"uses" stories for forestalling an undesirable eventuality. This eloquent bird's mistress—Prabhavati in the Sanskrit story and Khajasta in the Urdu dastan—has found a paramour during her husband's long absence.

She is ready to leave her house one night to finally meet her lover but the parrot starts a story—apparently instructing her how to maintain her illicit affair without sparking any scandal.

However, the story’s real purpose is to stop her from committing adultery. And the bird successfully does that as he prolongs the tale he starts in the evening until the dawn—for 70 odd days in the Sanskrit dastan and for 35 days in the Urdu adaptation.

The Baital—vampire—in the Sanskrit story Baital Pachisi starts narrating a riddle-story to brave King Vikramajit when the latter puts him on his back and walks towards the charnel ground where a Jogi is waiting for the two. The Baital's professed reason for narrating stories is that he is "loquacious by nature" and cannot stay silent for the long stretch of an hour-long walk between the tree where he lives and the Jogi's place—a reason somewhat similar to the one mentioned in the Canterbury Tales.

The Baital tells the king that he will distract his thoughts by means of "sprightly tales". He also describes stories as "profitable reflections"—a hallmark of "sages and wise men". However, the real reason why the Baital narrates stories that end on a difficult riddle is to stop Vikramajit from falling into the trap of the Jogi, who actually intends to kill the king to become the lord of the worldly and spiritual domains.

So each time the king answers the riddle correctly, the Baital immediately flies back to his tree, compelling the king to fetch him again. Thus, 24 times the king solves the riddle, and loses his burden, only to begin the weary task anew—protracting his journey to the Jogi.

But the narrators in dastans and romances do not always feel the need to hide their real purpose and they also present stories as direct exhortations toward—or warnings against—a particular course of action as cautionary tales—the third duty of the story.

Here storytelling becomes a contested instrument of persuasion, deployed by opposing sides toward contrary ends. While performing its third duty, a story intervenes directly in the course of events, slowing or accelerating action, and in doing so becomes an active agent in the shaping of fate.

In Alf Laila, when Scheherazade expresses her wish to marry Sheheryar, her father—a vizier responsible for arranging girls for the murderous king’s one-night marriages—vehemently opposes the proposal. In an attempt to dissuade his daughter, he narrates a story to her.

In Bakhtyar-Nama (a medieval Iranian romance), Bakhtyar is originally King Azadbakht’s only son, who was abandoned in infancy during the king and his wife's flight amid an invasion and thereafter raised by a bandit. This young man manages, through his intelligence, eloquence, and uncommon bearing, to rise high in the court of his own father, much to the chagrin and envy of the king’s viziers.

One day, under the influence of wine, Bakhtyar loses his way in the palace, accidentally wandering into the king’s harem and falling asleep in Azadbakht’s private chamber.

This mistake offers the jealous viziers an opportunity to remove this thorn in their side. One of them convinces the queen—who is in fact Bakhtyar’s mother, though neither knows the truth of their relationship—that she must accuse the young man of making advances to her to dispel suspicion from the king’s mind. Provoked by his counsellors, the king orders Bakhtyar’s execution. However, before being led to death, the young man begs leave to speak and implores the king not to act rashly, supporting his plea each day with a cautionary tale about rulers undone by haste, credulity, or bad counsel.

His stories cause the king to postpone the sentence, and thus ten successive days are won. At the end of this reprieve, the hidden truth comes to light and the prince is finally saved.

In Sindibad-Nameh—an earlier story, probably of Indian origin—it is the king’s concubine who seeks to seduce her stepson and, upon being rejected, accuses the young prince of sexual assault.

The prince, however, is unable to defend himself, for his tutor, Sindibad, having foreseen mortal danger in the stars, has instructed him to remain silent for seven days, warning that a single word spoken in that period would cost him his life.

Taking advantage of his silence, the concubine strengthens her accusation before the king.

Each day, however, one of the seven wise counsellors comes forward to plead for delay, narrating an exemplary tale to restrain the king’s wrath, while each night the concubine counters with a story of her own urging swift execution.

But does a story also have some other duty apart from addressing exigencies like breaking the monotony of an uneventful situation, postponing and averting an undesirable outcome or acting as an exhortation for some desirable outcome?

In Alf Laila, Scheherazade's real intention behind prolonging her stories is not only to defer her execution. She also wants to put an end to this custom, once and for all, which has already consumed the lives of hundreds of innocent girls. Before going into her wedding chamber, she tells her sister that she will narrate a tale “which shall be our deliverance, if so Allah please, and which shall turn the King from his blood-thirsty custom”.

This is the fourth duty of the story: to educate people indirectly and transform them into better individuals. A story here is an exercise in empathy. It allows us to inhabit the experiences of others and gradually leads us to question our own assumptions and biases while recognising the shared vulnerabilities of human existence.

It is through this indirect engagement with diverse lives that stories refine perception, soften judgment, and open the possibility of ethical transformation. In this sense, storytelling becomes a subtle form of moral instruction, not imposed through preaching but achieved through imagination.

In the last few words on the power of stories: if we go by dastans and romances, we will have to conclude that the curiosity invoked by stories is something more powerful than human passions such as hate, rage, revenge, lust, and even sexual desire; that stories and real life are interwoven; and that we need stories like sleep, water and food.

 

All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer