Shona Ramaya

I have always thought of myself as a storyteller, rather than a writer.  Perhaps this stems from my cultural background, from a childhood filled with stories told to me by various people: captivating, enchanting stories that transported me to magical realms.  Storytelling is a part of life in India. It happens at bedtime; it happens in gatherings; it happens as food is being cooked in the kitchen. Social and cultural knowledge weaves around narrative in India even today. Stories are used almost as a template for thinking and reasoning; and they create specific mental and emotional states in both its tellers and its listeners.  

 

Someone is telling a story, and someone else is listening, engaged and alert.  Conrad’s Marlow sits down cross-legged to tell yet another of his tales, says the narrator.  Everyone is held spellbound. Entering a story is like stepping into a sacred circle, falling under the spell of the storyteller’s voice, wondering whose story is it really? And what should one believe? There are stories inside stories; quests inside quests; one world opens into countless others immersing the listener in their enchanted realms.

 

The teller invites the reader to experience with all senses.  For me, the experience is also a very visual one.  Before I start writing I see the entire story streaming before my eyes, scene by scene, event by event, from beginning to end. It’s all laid out, very visually.  Like a spread of tarot cards on a table.  Like a natal chart on a sheet of paper. Symbolic and vibrantly visual, astrology and tarot tell stories as well, in the language of archetypes and metaphor.

 

I’m instinctively drawn to language systems that are imagistic and archetypal. Tarot spread tells a story with its images, about a question, about a situation. Indeed, in Calvino’s, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, the characters marooned in a strange castle, having lost their power of speech, use the cards to tell their own stories.  The images become a charged language that illustrates destinies. Picture a medieval tapestry hanging in a great hall.  It almost always tells a story – of a hunt or a battle, a duel, a journey, a victorious procession, an ill-fated romance.  Words on a page can be like images in a tapestry; words that make one see, smell, hear, touch, taste and feel.  This is how words come alive for me.

 

When I started reading books myself, I adored feeling completely immersed in unknown, foreign lands, walking alongside people I’d never met before, fascinated by their experiences and adventures.  The process of reading, of listening, that enveloping experience of a voice leading you on a journey, never left me.  So, when I write, it is this voice, the one whose echoes still reverberate in my imagination, that I try to capture. It is little wonder that so many people all over the world, “listen” to books now—it recreates that same experience of being told a tale. They might say, “oh, I don’t have time to sit down and read!”  Books on Audible are a testament to an age-old oral tradition reemerging under the guise of technology. In similar ways, I strive to create an immersive experience for my readers. I ask in return only a willing suspension of disbelief.Indeed, sitting wide-eyed on a veranda on a rainy evening in Calcutta and listening to some impossible ghost story or heroic tale presupposes a suspension of disbelief.

 

Different “stories” get intertwined inextricably: gods and demons are intricately woven into everyday struggles of ordinary people and into ancient cultural beliefs.  The language of fairy tales, folk tales and epics mixes osmotically with that of astrology. Growing up in India, you breathe in and out feats of epic heroes and machinations of planetary deities who create problems and offer solutions. Gods and goddesses, monkeys, bears and majestic birds come to one’s aid as one hunts for food or seeks shelter from thunderstorms.  It all happens on the same plane; no one bats an eyelid; it’s a layered experience, like looking at a palimpsest. It’s all part of the same drama called destiny.

 

I think in all my work, unconsciously at least, there has been a pattern of Karmic unfolding in the stories: illusion, delusion, disillusion, disruption/upheaval/destruction, followed by often painful self-realization. Perhaps I have always been trying to make sense of these patterns in my own life by writing about all that I have in fact written. Writing, or telling stories, can be a metaphor for some kind of cathartic realization, a kind of an archetypal dance, a ritual manifestation.

 

Perhaps for the same reason, my characters inhabit liminal spaces, struggling with lingering questions of home and family, trying to find footholds in slippery landscapes. Once you move from one country to go live in another, the sense of place has an uncertain, flexible quality about it. It becomes, to use an astrological term, ‘mutable,’ not ‘fixed.’ Language, too, becomes a site where the familiar and the unfamiliar become fused, best expressed in these lines from a Gustavo Perez Firmat poem:

 

                                                                I

                                                                don’t belong to English

                                                                though I belong nowhere else

 

Immigrants and emigrants are inside as well as outside, straddling different worlds, always migrant, trying to find stillness and stability These days, with the global displacement we see all around us and that we are a part of, are we not often outside the established borders, wondering where home is and what constitutes family in an alien landscape? Ancient, enduring themes persist in movie series like X-Men, narratives about superheroes, vampires, werewolves, aliens of all sorts. Outcasts, exiles, all existing side by side with what we think of as culturally normal.Indeed, writers, poets, astrologers, shamans, traveling troubadours, living outside the castle walls, exiles many, have often been the best storytellers.  And I have thrived on stories told to me by a multitude of such voices and continue to do so.

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Shona Ramaya

September 2025