I have always enjoyed stories—from books, elders, fellow travellers, workers, friends and children. I love the communion, the shared understanding, the bonding that happens just magically. Storytelling brings out the innocence in us and keeps us childlike at heart.

My first tryst as a storyteller was as a mother. I raised my son and daughter on a robust diet of stories, some from books I had read and others from mythology. By a quirk of fate, I ended up getting a job as a librarian at Hyderabad Public School (HPS), where my children studied. I was thrilled when the principal told me, “I don’t want someone to only track and collect the books. I want you to transfer your love and enthusiasm for books and reading to the kids.”

I worked at HPS for 13 years. The library was located between the two wings of the boarding school. After class, the children would head for the library. They were lonely and homesick and talking about it made them feel better. I was fascinated by their descriptions of life in their villages and towns.

At this time, I chanced upon the autobiographical The Tribal World of Verrier Elvin, which radically changed the way I looked at my students, sensitising me to another culture, making me aware of a world I had never known. For the students, the library became an island of contentment.

In school, I told or read out stories during the library class. When Mother Teresa died, I told the kids about her work. When Nigerian environmental activist ‘Ken’ Beeson Saro-Wiwa died, I told them about his work with his people. I told the kids about the Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace ship that was sunk off the coast of Auckland, New Zealand. As a librarian, I asked very little of the kids—it gave them the freedom to talk to me and tell me things. I realised the truth of Wordsworth’s words: kids do come “trailing clouds of glory”. When I gave them stories, it was like food for their little souls!

During my tenure at HPS, I decided to train students to compere the annual concert. They would come in pairs and talk about the items. Every line had been picked up from stories I had told them or read to them. Many years later, a boy from Class XII stopped me on my way home, saluted me, recited the lines he had learnt for that show five years earlier, saluted again with a big grin and carried on!

In the late 1990s, my daughter Nayantara went to the US for higher studies. In Southern California, I met Jodie Hoelle, an amazing storyteller, with whom I attended storytelling sessions at a local school. We did this for nearly five weeks. She would tell a story and I would tell a correlated one, sometimes from India.

In 2010, my daughter came back and started ‘Our Sacred Space’, an open space for performing arts here in Secunderabad, where I live. I have been holding storytelling sessions there for the past four years even though the numbers in my audience have never gone beyond five or six.

What I really love about storytelling is the bond created through sharing. What’s more, everyone has stories to share—in trains, at parties and at social gatherings. And when you tell a story to a child, you are enriching yourself as much as you are enriching the youngster.

—Nalini Nanda Kumar, Secunderabad

Photo: Shyamola Khanna
Featured in Harmony — Celebrate Age Magazine
September 2016