Storytelling by Michele Koh (USA/S’pore)

When I was a student at Goldsmiths, I would often attend these guest speaker seminars at Russell Square on Friday nights. Not because I was particularly diligent or ambitious, but because my social life was lacking. My parents often rolled their eyes when we discussed the course of study I had opted to take.  Comparative Literature. “Send you all the way to London to read story books!” my mother would complain. According to my father, I should have been an economics major. Books on politics, business or history, those are real books for smart people, my father would say. As for Shakespeare, Steinbeck and Seth, they were for airheads who had too much free time on their hands and will probably never take life seriously or make a decent buck. As for me, the plan was to get my degree then embark on my career as Singapore’s own Stephen King. However, I was beginning to think that my dad might be right about fiction. I was considering aborting my author aspirations, but was saved by a lecture I attended one winter.

The guest speaker was an unknown Indian author who was the head of the Creative Writing Department for some obscure university in Middlesex. There were a paltry eleven people in the auditorium that night. Half of them looked like they were there to kill time before hitting the clubs. Our lecturer for the evening was a  big man with a turban, thick glasses and a green and purple Barney T-shirt. He sat comfortably slouched in the swivel chair at the bottom front of the auditorium. On the white board behind him were the words: THE HEART OF NARRATIVE in thick red upper case. He introduced himself as Professor Amanvir Singh and had an odd habit of adjusting his turban, and a nervous mouth that would twitch between sentences under a stringy white beard.

“I have been living in Britain for more than forty years. And this place has plenty of stories. But many of the stories are the same. Crime, insanity, family dysfunction. People are addicted to their own drama. As the Americans put it ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’ Everything must have the shock factor. There is an overkill of sexual intrigue and violence in stories today. It’s as if the storytellers are writing for the movies or television. They have forgotten how to tell a simple story, so they resort to some gimmick to get your attention.

In the name of entertainment, we’ve learnt to depend on the constant occurrence of trauma and scandal. We’ve rendered ourselves to the mercy of farcical happenstance. We’re obsessed with our own peculiar perversions. In our eagerness to please our readers, we try too hard. But might it not be, that what we think are universal truths are merely the inward ramblings generated by our own narcissism? Amusing only to us and no one else. The need to be so very special always gets in the way of the telling doesn’t it? We think, that the thoughts we have and the lives we’ve lived are so exquisitely unique. We think, ‘Oh, no one could possibly dream up the things that I’ve been through. No one can understand my complex emotional states!’ I see some of you laughing. Yes.”

I found myself wide-eyed and nodding as the professor spoke. He was spot on about the need to be so very special. How often had I been stuck on an essay, not because I did not have the facts, but simply because I wanted to sound good? Waylaid by my need to impress my tutors with syntactic acrobatics and enlighten them with insightful observations.

The professor stood akimbo and addressed the small audience as if it were the Roman senate. “We don’t need to live reckless lives to create good stories. We don’t even need to think so much! We just need to look, shut up and listen. Those with talent don’t need a large or eventful existence. They are just more mindful of the little things around them. And that awareness magnifies their experiences. With curiosity, untrammeled imagination and immense empathy, a simple life is sufficient to produce good, even brilliant work. With enough empathy you can tap into the theater of humanity; that place where joy and sorrow meet. The G-spot of narrative fiction. Be interested in people around you, because that’s where the best stories are to be found. Listen hard to your fellow man and woman. Hear what they do not, or cannot articulate. Some practical folk think that fiction is drivel. Contrary! Nothing reveals the human condition more authentically than good, creative storytelling. Of course, nothing is literal in literature, and you must remember, there is more than one way to tell the truth!

When I was a boy in India, I used to walk pass the temple on the way to the market. On the steps of the temple I saw an old woman. Half of her face looked like melted wax. Her right ear was hanging off her jowl, and she had a hole for an eye on that side. Her right arm ended at the elbow, where it was a smooth pinkish stump. If someone came close enough, she would walk up to that person, stick her neck out like a crane, thrusting her good eye in their face, and say, ‘Good day kind sir. No, no, I don’t want your money. The temple feeds me. But can you sit with me for a while? I want to tell you about my life.’

One day, she stopped me and asked me to listen to her tale. At first I was frightened by her appearance, but I was also curious to learn how she ended up looking like that. So I sat down and listened.

‘Before I was born, when I was just a seed in my mother’s womb, my father thought he saw my mother under a Neem tree with another man. This made him mad with anger. He made some poison from the leaves and bark of the oleander tree and mixed it into the dal that she cooked every morning. But my mother was strong and the poison did not kill her. But it went from her blood into me, and when I was born my mother screamed and my father chased her out of our village. So my mother and I moved from village to village. When we arrived at a new village, my mother would go straight to the temple to pray. But the holy men did not want me inside the temple, for they thought I would scare the devout. So my mother would go into the temple while I sat outside waiting for her. To entertain myself, I think up stories.’

Each time I walked pass the temple, I would stop, hoping to hear more of the old woman’s tale. The second time I sat with her, this was what she told me.

‘I came from Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, where I lived with my husband and five children. We are dalits, the untouchable and when a nearby family lost three goats in a week, they blamed us for witchcraft. One night, twelve men came into our home. They were kshatriyas, the warrior caste. They had knives and axes and I saw my children being cut into half. They tore off my clothes and chopped off my arm and when my husband came to pull them away, they put an axe in his head. Then they made a fire, they grabbed me by the hair and tried to burn me alive. They pushed my face, this side, into the flames, but I got away and I ran…’

I met her again when I went back to India to visit my parents. This time all her teeth were gone. I sat down with her and asked her if she remembered me. ‘I can tell you yes and make you happy. But the truth is, no. I don’t remember. But good sir, can you sit with me for a while? I want to tell you about my life.

‘Forty years ago, I was working at the ticketing booth at the train station in Bangalore, Karnataka. I was engaged to a lawyer who was going to take me to San Francisco with him. He came from a rich Punjabi family and he had picked me out of all the girls in the photographs. I heard that in San Francisco, the girls wear flowers in their hair. So I would put some Jasmines in my hair before I went to work every morning. One night, two weeks before I go to San Francisco, I saw four boys running along the tracks. One of the boys, the smallest got his foot stuck in the track. I heard the train coming and I ran to pull the boy away. The train was a few feet away and I still had time to get off the track, but the boy looked into my eyes. Suddenly, I could see his father and his mother who waited anxiously for him. I could see him in the schoolroom, putting his hand up. He was a very clever boy and would become a doctor and save lives. I saw a beggar that he gave his lunch to the day before. I wanted to run and leave the boy. But I saw all these things in his eyes as they pleaded with me not to go. To help him. It was as if I was under a spell. I could not move.’

Professor Amanvir Singh leaned back in his chair. He fingered his turban as if he were wiping imaginary sweat off his brow. An eerie grin formed on his twitching mouth. “Now people, I tell you honestly, I have never met such a woman in my life! But on the way here, I did see on the corner of Goodge Street, a drunkard with an eye patch, no shoes, and a limp, shouting to the air: ‘Listen to me! For God’s sake… someone listen to me please!’”

Michele Koh was born in Singapore in 1978. She began working in television as a children’s show host at age 11, and began her career as a journalist at 18. She received an honours degree in journalism from London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, where she was also editor of the LCC News. During her time in London, she was approached by Chipmunka Publishing who published her collection of short stories and poems titled “Rotten Jellybeans”. Michele returned to Singapore and was editor for Where Singapore and associate editor for I-S (In Singapore) Magazine. She is currently living in Boston as a freelance writer.

Send article as PDF to