Story telling is an art dating back to the ancient days, may be a time soon after people learned to speak. The story teller may want to talk about an incident which he experienced first hand. It would have brought certain emotions to his mind and he wants to bring up the same emotions in his listeners. Now, that is a hard task and so, he resorts to all the tricks in his book (that is if he has one) and then supplements them with gestures, tones, facial expressions and actions. He may even mimic the voices of his characters.Well, a story teller can do it but a writer can't and so he has to make use of other methods. Adding details is one of them.
For example.....
This is not something that I know directly but something that I heard from Mr. Kulkarni, a friend of mine who was working as a supervisor in an orange farm in South Africa. Yes, of course they do have orange farms there. And apple farms, grape farms and extensive vegetable farms too. Even the Chinese government has taken a lot of land on lease to cultivate edible crops.
Now, where were we? Yes, the story told by Mr. Kulakarni. Yes, yes, he is a very intersting man. One of his daughters made it to the Harvard and that too in Astrophysics. Yes, right in Mr. Robert Sawyer's class. Wonderful fellow, this Robert Sawyer is. Heard him live on BBC once. He was talking about the afterlife of something.
OK, now this story. I will make it rather short. It is actually about a father and a son. The son's name was Herbert and they called him Herbie for short. His father's name was John Foulton. The boy had lost his wife in an accident while they were living in Nigeria. The father and his son had just gone out to the city when there occurred in their village a flash flood and a landslide. See, flash flood is bad enough and a landslide is even worse. The father and the son were in the city standing on a bridge watching this river swell up and a lot of muddy water, trees and debris getting washed downstream. The roads were blocked and there was no means of communication and they couldn't go back home the same day and had to stay in a hotel. They couldn't send a message to Herbie's mom. But there was no need. Their house and the houses of several people were washed away by the landslide and several people including Herbie's mother had gone missing. The father and son came to know about this only the next day when they reached the village.
They left the village in a week and came to another village in South Africa. Herbie had to join a new school there and he had to learn Swahli. It was was hard for him.
Herbie used to be a voracious reader and he had finished his home library before he was fourteen. Reading took him to new thoughts and ideas quite different from those of his father and some of his classmates'. When he was thirteen, he and his father moved to a new house near Herbie's school. Now, the father had to take two buses to reach the mine where he worked as the supervisor but his son could just walk to school. This gave the boy quite a lot of time to pursue his hobby which was reading. When he wasnt reading, he would still wander in the garden with a book in his hand.
Their garden was a large one and part of it was wooded and the woods continued to the neighbour's property which was totally wooded. It was an impenetrable forest with tall trees, creepers and all that. Snakes too.
Herbie's father had asked him not to venture into the thick forest beyond their own property and Herbie too was afraid of those creeping things hiding in the grass and among the dry leaves.
Their house and the neighgbouring house once belonged to a carpenter who had sold it to a local merchant who worked at a local department store. He went back to Florida where he got involved in Oyseter farming. The last thing the present owner heard about him was that his farm was prospering and he had a shop near the Kilpatric National Museum of Fine Arts.
Wagabe, the present owner of the house had rented it to Herbie's father for a small rent on condition that he would take good care of the garden. Mr. Foulton loved gardening and he took special care of the garden and it was a sight to see. Two years after they occupied it, the garden had become famous among the villagers there. It had the look of a picture postcard. Shrubs, flowers and some very tall trees. There was even a Venus Fly Trap which gave such pride to Herbert that he invited his whole class to see it one day. But when his classmates came, the plant had no intention to eat, much to Herbie's disappoinment. But his classmates still liked his big house and they played hide and seek there till Herbert's father came back.
Apart from the Venus Fly Trap, there were two more trees which intersted Herbert so much. These were two tall palm trees which always confused him. Only one of them bore fruits since the other one was a male tree. He used to bump into them when he was young and he used to tell his father that those trees always got on his way. His father only gave him an enigmatic smile as a response. Of course, as he grew up he knew what a foolish ideas it was to accuse a tree of getting in you way. You get in their way since you are the one who moves, right? But, wait a minute. How can you get in their way? Their way? Silly, where are they going? They simply don't have a way for you to get in.
These palms were the most precious ones in the garden. They were planted by the house owner's grand aunt who had been excommunicated from the church when they found that she had learned witchcraft from a local medicine man. This medicine man was arrested for the death of two of his rich neighgbours. He was hanged to death. The fact that this lady had learned witchcraft from him came out only after his death when his house was sold and his personal diary was made public by the man who bought his house.
This old lady also died in an accident. People say that it was not an accident but a suicide. Anyway, for some strange reason, the owner of the house had asked Mr. Foulton to take good care of the trees. He had once put a hedge around them and the house owner didn't like it and he had to remove it.
The tree was on the northern part of their house and it was close to the study room on the first floor. From there, the palm trees could be seen.
Only if they were allowed to use the study! That room was under lock and key. Herbert had the desire to look into it several times, but his father told him on all those occasions that he had given his word to the house owner and he was bound to keep it.
Herbert had shared his interst in those trees with a freind of his who was studying in the fourth grade.This boy was four years younger to Herbert and he had missed one year at school since he had whooping cough for almost a year. Even now he looked lean and weak. His name was Hussein and he was a Moslem.
Herbert had asked Hussein to keep it a secret whatever he had told him about the palms. There was no need since what Herbert had told him was not believable anyway.
He had told him that the trees did move. He said that there were days when both of them would change places. He had not noticed this at first since it was hard to tell between them. So, he marked them with a piece of chalk and they didn't move about for a few days. They resumed their movements only after it rained and the chalk marks were washed away.
Herbert tried other ways of marking them like tying strings around one and this too prevented them from moving about. So, he watched them from behind the bushes but never saw them actually moving. But he was sure that they do change places now and then when he was not around.
The first time when Herbert told his father about this was when he was too young and naturally his father didn't take him seriously. But later, years later, Herbet brought it up again when he returned from the city after finishing his Master Degree in Applied Mathematics at the Membua College.
This time his father couldn't deny his request to allow him to open the study room and watch the palms from there on a full moon night.
It was a really bright full moon and Herbert and his father were in the study room waiting to see any movement in the garden. The moon light shone brighly over every shrub and plant in the garden giving them an eerie look.
They didn't see anything for a long time. And then they saw something. The movement was not a subtle one. May be that is why they didn't notice it at first..
However after the initial confusion, they saw the palm trees sliding towards one another and with their palm fronds almost going around each other and slowly but rhythmically engaging themselves in a dance.
Two days later a botanist came and took a good look at the date palms in their garden.
See, that is what a story does to you. It is nothing but pure magic. It is the craft of the story teller or rather his witchcraft.
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