Mofussil Men

Gorakhpur and the eccentric characters of small-town India come alive in Omair Ahmad's Tall Tales by a Small Dog

- Palash Krishna Mehrotra

TALL TALES BY A SMALL DOG

by Omair Ahmad

SPEAKING TIGER

This is a stylishly compact novel, a collection of taut time-traversing—and genuinely funny—stories linked by place, Gorakhpur, and the mysteriously alternating glint of the colours red and blue. The slim novel in India is as rare as a 90-minute film; our storytellers like to unspool in self-indulgent leisure.

Gorakhpur, we are told, has vitally touched the lives of Buddha, Mahavira, Gorakhnath, Nanak, Kabir and Akbar. The stories that follow are about less savoury characters.

The narrator is Kallu, a raconteuring street mongrel, also known as “kamina, harami, chor”—shades of Rushdie here? We meet a colourful cast of mofussil men: Bilal, the dog thrower of Chhote Quazipur; Jalali Sahib, “who went to his hanging and came back atop an elephant”; Knownto Sharma who picks a policeman’s pocket, then bribes him; an American hunter, Carnegie King: “He had the peculiar blocky solidity that some Americans have, as if they’ve been carved whole from an old oak”; quintessential opportunist Gangu Ram: “If you shake any tree in a fifty-mile radius, a Gangu Ram or two will fall from it”; Arun, who is hammered into a Deng Xiaoping lookalike; small-time gangster from D.A.V. college, Haggu Bumwaala; and “The Analysts” from Railway School led by Tharki: “India is a nation of analysts. One man will do the job and a hundred will stand around him, analysing”, whose father “was famously the greatest lecher State Bank of India has ever seen, either in the City Branch or in the one on Bank Road”.