Vetaal and Vikram: Riddles of the Undead

"Indian fairy tales are essential because they’re some of the earliest stories that we can track down. There’s a collection from the 11th century called Ocean of the Streams of Story , which includes some amazing, magical stories. One of them is about a king who has to carry a vetala , a corpse-occupying zombie, which tells riddles that he has to solve after each story. This book, Vetaal and Vikram, takes that segment as its center point. There are some really strange stories. There’s one about a princess who can have any husband she wants, but who rejects all possible lovers until she sees a thief who’s being taken to be executed. She decides he’s going to be her husband, and she throws herself onto the execution pyre and they burn together. Then they are brought back to life by the gods because of the power of their love. There’s a story of a man who saves a princess from a rampaging elephant and falls in love with her but can’t reach her because she’s in the palace. So he takes a special magical pill that turns him into a girl and he manages to get into the female quarters of the palace to find her. Like Basile’s stories, these tales capture a sense of the madness of the world, the strange choices that people make. Also, the idea that in order to get your happy ending you’re going to have to rely on an enormous amount of luck—and have a lot of help from the gods and other mythological beings who, in Indian culture, play the role of the fairies and other magical creatures of European fairy tales. Different ranks of deities play their role in helping people to get their wishes (or not, in some cases). “Indian fairy tales are essential because they’re some of the earliest stories that we can track down” In this novel, the Indian writer Gayathri Prabhu has taken these stories and framed them inside a story about Richard Burton, the 19th-century Victorian explorer, and his wife, Isabel. Burton translated some of these stories in the 19th century, but she focuses on Isabel. You see what it was like to be Burton’s wife travelling with him to India , Brazil, Trieste, parts of Africa and meeting different personalities of the period (like Jane Digby, who was a wonderful explorer). You get a sense of the 19th century and the protocols of a travelling life at the time, of Isabel eavesdropping on her own life or on Burton’s experiences, and then also the tales coming through. It’s an interwoven tapestry. The book is at its best when it’s capturing the tales. That’s because when you read these 900-year-old stories in the original as a Westerner, it takes a few readings. There is a lot to unpack to get them. Prabhu has captured the strangeness of the stories and the poetry of them, but they’re much more accessible. What I found so enjoyable about reading this book is that you could really get through to the heart of these stories and see how they connect up with us today. They feel very, very modern in many ways because a lot of them are just stories about people falling in love and the different ways that they find to meet up with their lovers or find that happy ending or get over the different obstacles of life. There are so many barriers that these characters have to overcome. You feel their determination to do anything they have to to get to their goals. It’s a more accessible way. Somadeva was a brilliant courtier poet of the 11th century. He was writing for the queen in Kashmir. He told these magical stories to soothe and entertain her because there was a lot of upheaval going on in Kashmir at the time. That’s the frame around which the Ocean of the Streams of Story unfolds. It’s a real celebration of storytelling, there are hundreds of stories in the collection. There’s a lovely line in this novel, Vetaal and Vikram , where Prabhu writes, “If stories are infectious, this is a pandemic that can mow down the entire human race.” That line has a particular resonance these days, but it’s a wonderful way of capturing that sense of a collection where stories just keep unfolding. One of the lovely things about the Ocean of the Streams of Story is that anybody can tell a story. You get stories told by kings and queens and government ministers and army generals, but you also get stories told by the guy selling the bedstead or even by the demons that are stuck in a pit under the ground. Everybody has a story; they’re constantly telling stories to each other. Then, in the middle of somebody telling a story, somebody else will tell a story and another story will unfold. That’s part of the charm of the medieval collection—and part of what makes it quite difficult to read. You can get a bit lost. Prabhu’s version condenses that and makes it that much more accessible."