“Ma’am, please sign this.” As one girl thrust a piece of paper into Janaki Sabesh’s hand, the group surrounding her also took up the cry. Janaki smiled, signed and, when she began to ease herself out, “ma’m, she cried listening to your story; you should sign hers,” a young boy took up cudgels on behalf of his classmate. “Ok then, last one,” said Janaki firmly.
A little distance away, a group of teenage boys are wondering whether to approach her. “Ghilli-la Vijay oda amma,” was the whisper that seemed to follow her through the two days of the Kovai Bookalatta.
So my first question to her was about the switch from cinema to storytelling. “I have not really moved,” she giggled. “I was always a drama queen: at home, in office, on the stage, in cinema and now in storytelling.” Storytelling has been a part of her life one way or the other. In 1995, she released an audio-cassette on making maths simpler using rhymes and did courses with Eric Miller and Geetha Ramanujam’s Kathalaya. “It’s about listening to yourself,” is how she puts it. “Storytelling is about going back to our roots and learning to listen. We’ve lost the art of listening because our attention spans have shortened. I have taken my experience in theatre and cinema and evolved my own style.”
Janaki’s initiative is called Golpo Tales Unlimited (Golpo means story in Bengali,” she explains). Initially her storytelling was confined to weekends — “I had a day job” — and she collaborated with book stores, libraries and publishers like Karadi Tales and Tulika Books. But soon she became a full-time storyteller. “I also conduct workshops for parents, teachers and corporates on how stories can be used productively.”
- Ask her about the stories she told at the festival and she highlighted two. “The first is an award-winning tale from Karadi, The Clever Tailor, about how a tailor in Jaipur recycles a safa (headgear) to make a dupatta, a kurta for his son, a doll for his daughter, a rose for the house... till the cloth cannot be used any more.”
- The second, which she interspersed with singing, is adapted from Zai Whitaker’s What Happened to the Reptiles. Janaki has converted the story into a song called Pambupattiyile; “my sister-in-law wrote the lyrics and husband set it to music. All my stories have songs,” she smiled. “I like to sing and am trained in Carnatic music, so this is a way of realising my own little dream.”
- Pambupattiyile tells the story of a young boy whose own village is gripped by religious tensions and goes to live in another village where everyone lives together happily. When he wonders about this, he hears the back story: how the makara raja or biggest crocodile slowly gets rid of the tortoises, snakes and lizards and the havoc that ensues till he realises that each one has a place in the ecosystem. “It’s a lovely way to teach togetherness and harmony,” said Janaki feelingly.
Whenever possible, Janaki finishes her session by showing the children the book she took the story from. “When they see it, they relate to what they heard. Some buy the book so that they can read the story again.” She compares it to mann vaasanai (aroma of mud); “paper has its own vaasanai (aroma) that our children don’t know about. You won’t get that from a Kindle or tablet.” This seemed like a good point to ask about her own preference. “Paper,” she said firmly. “I have to see and feel it. It’s like e-paper versus newspaper. Some things don’t move in the morning if I cannot handle a newspaper,” she laughed.
The Jungle Storytelling Festival by Janaki Sabesh
Her own book can be described as “listener’s choice” because the idea came from a little boy at one of her sessions who asked for a story about an ostrich. “Very confidently, I agreed. But when I hunted I couldn’t find a single story about an ostrich.” She sounded as despairing as she must have felt after her fruitless search. When the boy heard this, he gave her two characters — Ostroo the ostrich and a best friend — and invited her to finish the story. “The story I wrote was so different from the final book,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I realised how different it was from being a storyteller; extremely difficult”, drawing out the ‘extremely’ to make her point. A couple of workshops and tips from other writers later, she started refining her work and The Jungle Storytelling Festival was born. “Children and even adults — I have told the story at corporate workshops — feel for Ostroo.” A measure of her success as a storyteller, perhaps.