And thereby hangs a tale

When you hear Vikram Sridhar tell a story, you don’t just sit back and listen. You help him tell the story, adding to his narrative your fantasies, your ambitions and even the hawkers’ calls that you heard in your mother tongue as a child. He’ll tell you when; he’ll draw you out, and you will watch your own words, spoken in your own voice, add rhythm and structure to a folk tale passed down through generations.

For Sridhar, this part of his craft isn’t always easy. “In terms of energy, in terms of interaction, every audience is different,” he says, “Sometimes, you’re a closed audience. You just want to sit back, but that isn’t my style. That’s not how storytelling happened back in the day.”

There’s a reason Sridhar prefers this. “No art form ever opens you up as an audience. Even in theatre, if you do it, it becomes a particular form of theatre,” he explains, “You hardly know who you’re sitting next to; you just sit, watch and go home. I want to create a setting in which you’re comfortable enough to just turn and say, ‘Hey, can I have your number?’”

This opening up — the shedding of inhibitions by an audience member — is clearly a priority for Sridhar. It is a process he observes with intrigue, and considers a form of feedback. He calls himself “a sit-down storyteller”, explaining, “I want every emotion to be tapped into. You will laugh; but you will also have a sense of empathy, a sense of sadness...”

As a case in point, he recalls sitting between a man and a woman, and telling a tale of two sisters. It was a short, simple tale, and didn’t have much substance on the surface. He wrapped up the story and turned to the man seated to his right, who looked supremely unimpressed. “It’s a childish story,” Sridhar was told. But then he turned to his left, and saw that the woman sitting beside him was entirely in tears. She had caught the undercurrents in the tale that Sridhar had left open-ended, felt it resonate with her own life, and was moved to a degree that he could never have imagined.

This led to a lively discussion in the group, on the hidden depths of stories. A number of people recalled being unmoved by little tales on their first reading or hearing, only to unexpectedly hark back to them years later, and realise what they really meant.

For Sridhar — whose memories of storytelling hark all the way back to his own childhood, when he was told that if he didn’t finish his food, a squirrel would come and eat it instead — it’s conversations like these that make it all worth it. That is why, he says, “Whenever I hear a story, I look it up. I trace it back as far as I can, and see the different ways in which it was told,” because it drives home the ability of the simplest of tales to resonate with the strongest and most varied of causes.

He explains this by telling a story that played a strong role during the rise of black consciousness in Sudan: the story of how a bat hangs upside down. In the very beginning, the land animals went to land, the water animals went to the water and the birds took the sky. “But the bat wasn’t invited anywhere. The moment it went up, they said ‘No, you can’t lay eggs’. The moment it went down, they said, ‘No, you can’t walk’. The moment it went to water, they said, ‘No, you can’t swim.’ So it went to a lonely place and started crying. When it finally opened its eyes, it saw hundreds and thousands of bats just like it, each of them with eyes closed, crying by itself,” says Sridhar.

“That was when the bats decided three things: they would only live where nobody else lives; they would always move together in groups; and they would only hunt at night.” As he concludes, he points out the sheer scope of this tale of exclusion, and the number of people and situations it can resonate with.