Many writers and tellers, and others who may not actually have written or told stories, have often wondered about how a story might be conveyed through the eyes of another, often ‘minor’, character in the narrative. Indeed, several books have been written this way. [See ALTERNATIVE TELLINGS]
The alternative perspective has always fascinated me and when Monisha Mukundan, editor of ‘Namaste’ magazine invited contributions for this year’s Short Story Edition, a character who has been longing to have her part in a very famous story recounted invaded my consciousness. And … we all know what happens when you don’t tell the story …! [See WHY WE MUST TELL THE STORY]
So, here it is:
NAMED FOR GREATER THINGS
We were named for greater things. This we both knew.
My father lived out close to those first three years in shame, but the years that followed more than made up for it. When, as the wazir of this land, he gave my sister Sheherazad in marriage to Sultan Shahriar, our wider family first shunned him for what they saw as a noble yet simple-minded sacrifice. Surely his significant position in the court would have kept his daughters safe.
Of course you may have heard our story – who hasn’t?
Shahriar, so shocked by his beloved wife's infidelity, had her put to death. Believing all women to be equally unfaithful, he took a new virgin bride every night, and had her executed at dawn; this way, she wasn’t around long enough to cheat on him. This continued for some years and there were fewer and fewer young women left. What was to come next, everyone wondered; might the depraved and cruel ruler move on to the women who were already wives? Sheherazad, my beautiful, brilliant and daring elder sister, sickened by this, and sure she could change things, volunteered to become Shahriar's next wife.
My father, tired of being Shahriar’s trusted wazir, and therefore his reluctant and shame-filled procurer and executioner of the young women in this revolting drama, naturally refused at first, but my determined sister somehow convinced him that this was the best way; in fact, the only way.
My mother began at once to prepare her daughter’s shroud, darting glances of hatred at my father, but silently as always. Maybe that’s why she never gets a mention in any of the versions you read.
But when he went on to announce that I would accompany his beloved first-born to the palace to serve her, adding awkwardly that it was at the girl’s request, and even more awkwardly that I’d be away for a day or two at the most – that is, if the sultan did not have me executed along with Sheherazad, then even the hate left her eyes. It was replaced by a blank, empty stare that for those who knew, held in their secret depths every emotion a woman experienced in her entire lifetime, more than half of which remained unknown to mere men.
And you perhaps have read those accounts about Sheherazad which declared:”Her father had provided her with the best teachers in philosophy, medicine, history and the fine arts, and besides all this, her beauty excelled that of any girl in the kingdom.” About me, almost as an afterthought, they said: “Duniyazad had no particular gifts to distinguish her from other girls…”
Sheherazad seemed to know it was time to fulfill her name-destiny, after all, her name called for her to be the Saver of The City, Sheher-Azad. As for me, I wondered about when my time would come, and shivered in silent anticipation; Saver of The World, Duniya-Azad.
There was no time to dream of what might be, as my sister took me aside and said: “Little sister; I will need your help in a very important matter if we are both to stay alive for a long, long time, and not be killed after only one night like all the others. Father is going to take me to the palace to celebrate my marriage with the Sultan, and you are to go with me, and stay with me for as long as it takes for my plan to work. I shall beg the sultan as a last favour, to let you sleep nearby, so that I may have your company during the last night I am alive. If, as I hope, he grants me my wish, be sure that you wake us an hour before the dawn, and say loudly enough to me these words: "My beloved sister, if you are not asleep, I beg you, before the sun rises, to tell me one of your charming stories." Then I shall begin, and I hope in this way to eventually deliver our women from the terror that hangs over them."
I was never able to say no to her. Actually, I don’t think there ever was anyone who could, and I felt reasonably sure that the Sultan would be just like the rest of us in this matter.
Not knowing if her plan meant our stay would last for days or weeks or even years, I only asked that I might carry my loom with me and continue with my weaving, as that was my one and only talent.
When Sultan Shahriyar first met Sheherzad and ordered her to raise her veil, he was struck by her radiant beauty, and even his hardened heart could not miss the tears in her big, sad eyes. He asked her what the matter was. "My lord," replied Sheherazad, "I have a sister who loves me as tenderly as I love her. Grant me the favour of allowing her to sleep this night close by me on that couch, as it is the last time we shall be together." The sultan agreed, and I was ushered in.
Do you think I slept at all? They did, and soundly too, after a night of feasting and love-making. An hour before daybreak, still wide awake, I called her name, and as soon as I heard the sultan sit up and grumblingly ask her what was going on, I dutifully begged as I had been tutored, "Beloved sister, if you are not asleep, tell me I pray you, before the sun rises, one of your charming stories. It is the last time that I shall have the pleasure of hearing you."
Scheherazade did not answer me; she always knew what to do and how to do it. Instead, she turned to the Sultan and asked in the sweetest of tones, "Will your highness permit me to do as my sister asks?"
"Willingly," he answered. So Scheherazade began. And just as the sun rose, she brought the story to a point of incomplete conclusion. The sultan, as she had known, was irrevocably drawn in, and knowing he would hear the rest of the intriguing tale the next night, ordered the executioner away that morning. And so we lived another day.
Another night, another story to be continued, another day alive. And so it went on.
Scheherazade, of course, had her plan. In the few snatched moments we had alone together, my sister often reminded me, “Duniyazad, two years and 271 days is all it will take, I know. This I promise you.”
I counted off the days each new dawn, by tying another knot in a cord I wound around my waist. I passed the long days in anticipation of the night by weaving into my carpet my tears, my confusion, my relief each morning, my fears each night. Mixed in too was admiration of my sister, pain at the loss of my family, the clutching emptiness within me. Somewhere too the loom made space for my anger at the sultan, my sister, even at myself and at this strange unfathomable world.
Each night, night after night, it became our ritual, all three of us, for me to stay on in the anteroom of their enormous bedchamber and request a story. The sultan became so entranced by Sheherazad’s stories that he would long to hear the conclusion of each one; and night after night Sheherazad would work in a twist, a lead, a sub-plot, or a link, leaving him in suspense, thus earning for herself – and me - a further stay of execution.
Was this how I was to save the world while my sister saved the city? Night after lonely night spent on the narrow couch in the antechamber of the royal bedroom, getting some hours of fitful sleep only after the sun rose each morning? Day after day I wove the colours and shapes of my feelings into my carpet, while I grew thinner and sadder with each meaningless moment.
My sister, well, she seemed to grow even more beautiful with each passing day as she became more confident in the Sultan’s growing attention, if not his assured love and affection. And never was she lovelier than when she with child – three times in all of this time; three sons she now had to bargain with, in case her beguiling words turned out not to be sufficient to save our lives. We were never sure if his needs for her words would lead to his need for her.
Was it because I knew her best that when 990 days drew to a close I noticed there was an unfamiliar pallor to her skin, a vaguely haunted look about her eyes? Did the sultan notice as I did, that she spoke more slowly, more softly, sometimes more hesitantly? That her stories lacked the energy of earlier ones? That the transitions she ended each dawn with, were not nearly as exciting as before?
On the nine hundred and ninety first day she drew me aside, clutched me with a trembling hand, and hoarsely whispered, “I have no more.” She did not need to tell me what she meant. “What do you want me to do?” I stammered in panic. She only said, “Give me, find me, tell me more stories.”
What do you think I felt when I heard this? Me and stories? An impossible new job for Duniyazad, the unremarkable sister, whose role was only to ask for yet another story from her enchantress sister night after night, and to stay awake, to just sit and listen. The great sultan could not be seen to have such ordinary needs, so I filled out a seemingly trivial and insignificant yet invisibly huge and burdensome role, even as I just uttered one simple request each night. And listened. Night after night after night.
I, who had never left the palace, who had been trained to ask my question, then sit still and listen and hardly ever speak, made complicated plans to slip out of the harem each morning at great risk. I befriended, bribed or bullied the series of guards as I needed to, so I could move in and out of the palace, using a different route each time.
All night I stayed awake and asked and listened to make sure we lived, and now all day I wandered the streets and listened yet again to make sure we lived – but this time with passionate intent, this time not passively, this time with an eager hunger for the words and images I must take back.
Naked, I sought out the old women in hamams. Disguised, I made entry and sat in the chai-khanehs full of loud men. At street corners I pounced with the ragged children on the itinerant storytellers that traveled form city to city and savoured their delights as I would food and nourishment.
Then as I walked back to the palace I made the stories mine. No longer at my wooden loom, I still dexterously wove into the stories my new experiences, the rich strangeness of the sights and sounds, my own hopes and doubts and dreams as well as those of the many I engaged with. I began to feel that my encounters with real people and real places and all the joys and sorrows that went with this gave my stories more flesh and blood and smells and tastes than those my sister had learnt from her books. When I had finished, the stories remained essentially the same yet abidingly altered, as all great stories must be.
Each evening my sore feet, my aching head, my dry and heavy tongue passed on these stories to my pale and nervous sister. Each night she repeated them as if in a fever. Each night the sultan said, “This is the best story yet.” And I sighed in the shadows, trying desperately to stay awake.
The knots in the cord around my waist told me that 1001 nights were at an end, and when my sister finally asked for our lives to be spared, it wasn’t so much the stories as it was the presence of his children that made Shahriar relent. The written books tell you that he grew to love her, that her intelligence and beauty won him over. We knew it was the sons.
Maybe her children were the world I saved. Maybe we ourselves were the world I saved. Maybe the stories were the real world I saved. Duniya Azad at last.
"Stories never really end, Meggie, even if the books like to pretend they do.
Stories always go on. They don't end on the last page,
any more than they begin on the first page."
~ Silvertongue in Cornelia Funke’s INKSPELL
