Iswaran the storyteller
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- ISWARAN THE STORYTELLER
- THE story was narrated to Ganesh by a young man, Mahendra by name. He was a junior supervisor in a firm which offered on hire supervisors at various types of construction sites: factories, bridges,dams, and so on. Mahendra’s job was to keep an eye on the activities at the work site. He had to keep moving from place to place every now and then as ordered by his head office: from a coal mining area to a railway bridge construction site, from there after a fewmonths to a chemical plant which was coming up somewhere.He was a bachelor. His needs were simple and he was able to adjust himself to all kinds of odd conditions, whether it was anill-equipped circuit house or a makeshift canvas tent in the middle of a stone quarry. But one asset he had was his cook,Iswaran
- Mahendra would be up early in the morning and leave for work after breakfast, carrying some prepared food with him.Meanwhile Iswaran would tidy up the shed, wash the clothes,and have a leisurely bath, pouring several buckets of water over his head, muttering a prayer all the while. It would be lunch time by then. After eating, he would read for a while before dozing off. The book was usually some popular Tamil thriller running to hundreds of pages. Its imaginative descriptions and narrative flourishes would hold Iswaran in thrall.
- His own descriptions were greatly influenced by the Tamil authors that he read. When he was narrating even the smallest of incidents, he would try to work in suspense and a surprise ending into the account. For example, instead of saying that the had come across an uprooted tree on the highway, he would say, with eyebrows suitably arched and hands held out in a dramatic gesture,
- “The road was deserted and I was all alone.Suddenly I spotted something that looked like an enormous bushy beast lying sprawled across the road. I was half inclined to turn and go back. But as I came closer I saw that it was a fallen tree, with its dry branches spread out.”
- The place I come from is famous for timber,” Iswaran would begin. “There is a richly wooded forest all around. The logs are hauled on to the lorries by elephants. They are huge well-fed beasts. When they turn wild even the most experienced mahouts not able to control them
- Not a day passed without Iswaran recounting some storypacked with adventure, horror and suspense. Whether the storywas credible or not, Mahendra enjoyed listening to it becauseof the inimitable way in which it was told. Iswaran seemed tomore than make up for the absence of a TV in Mahendra’sliving quarters
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