Haroun and the Sea of Stories (2 page)

The Senguptas lived upstairs. Mr Sengupta was a clerk at the offices of the City Corporation and he was as sticky-thin and whiny-voiced and mingy as his wife Oneeta was generous and loud and wobbly-fat. They had no children at all, and as a result Oneeta Sengupta paid more attention to Haroun than he really cared for. She brought him sweetmeats (which was fine), and ruffled his hair (which wasn’t), and when she hugged him the great cascades of her flesh seemed to surround him completely, to his considerable alarm.

Mr Sengupta ignored Haroun, but was always talking to Soraya, which Haroun didn’t like, particularly as the fellow would launch into criticisms of Rashid the storyteller whenever he thought Haroun wasn’t listening. ‘That husband of yours, excuse me if I mention,’ he would start in his thin whiny voice. ‘He’s got his head stuck in the air and his feet off the ground. What are all these stories? Life is not a storybook or joke shop. All this fun will come to no good. What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?’

Haroun, listening hard outside the window, decided he did not care for Mr Sengupta, this man who hated stories and storytellers: he didn’t care for him one little bit.

What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?
Haroun couldn’t get the terrible question out of his head. However, there were people who thought Rashid’s stories were useful. In those days it was almost election time, and the Grand Panjandrums of various political parties all came to Rashid, smiling their fat-cat smiles, to beg him to tell his stories at their rallies and nobody else’s. It was well known that if you could get Rashid’s magic tongue on your side then your troubles were over. Nobody ever believed anything a politico said, even though they pretended as hard as they could that they were telling the truth. (In fact, this was how everyone knew they were lying.) But everyone had complete faith in Rashid, because he always admitted that everything he told them was completely untrue and made up out of his own head. So the politicos needed Rashid to help them win the people’s votes. They lined up outside his door with their shiny faces and fake smiles and bags of hard cash. Rashid could pick and choose.

~ ~ ~

On the day that everything went wrong, Haroun was on his way home from school when he was caught in the first downpour of the rainy season.

Now, when the rains came to the sad city, life became a little easier to bear. There were delicious pomfret in the sea at that time of year, so people could have a break from the glumfish; and the air was cool and clean, because the rain washed away most of the black smoke billowing out of the sadness factories. Haroun Khalifa loved the feeling of getting soaked to the skin in the first rain of the year, so he skipped about and got a wonderful warm drenching, and opened his mouth to let the raindrops plop on to his tongue. He arrived home looking as wet and shiny as a pomfret in the sea.

Miss Oneeta was standing on her upstairs balcony, shaking like a jelly; and if it hadn’t been raining, Haroun might have noticed that she was crying. He went indoors and found Rashid the storyteller looking as if he’d stuck his face out of the window, because his eyes and cheeks were soaking wet, even though his clothes were dry.

Haroun’s mother, Soraya, had run off with Mr Sengupta.

At eleven a.m. precisely, she had sent Rashid into Haroun’s room, telling him to search for some missing socks. A few seconds later, while he was busy with the hunt (Haroun was good at losing socks), Rashid heard the front door slam, and, an instant later, the sound of a car in the lane. He returned to the living room to find his wife gone, and a taxi speeding away around the corner. ‘She must have planned it all very carefully,’ he thought. The clock still stood at eleven o’clock exactly. Rashid picked up a hammer and smashed the clock to bits. Then he broke every other clock in the house, including the one on Haroun’s bedside table.

The first thing Haroun said on hearing the news of his mother’s departure was, ‘What did you have to break my clock for?’

Soraya had left a note full of all the nasty things Mr Sengupta used to say about Rashid: ‘You are only interested in pleasure, but a proper man would know that life is a serious business. Your brain is full of make-believe, so there is no room in it for facts. Mr Sengupta has no imagination at all. This is okay by me.’ There was a postscript. ‘Tell Haroun I love him, but I can’t help it, I have to do this now.’

Rainwater dripped on to the note from Haroun’s hair. ‘What to do, son,’ Rashid pleaded piteously. ‘Storytelling is the only work I know.’

When he heard his father sounding so pathetic, Haroun lost his temper and shouted: ‘What’s the point of it?
What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?’

Rashid hid his face in his hands and wept.

Haroun wanted to get those words back, to pull them out of his father’s ears and shove them back into his own mouth; but of course he couldn’t do that. And that was why he blamed himself when, soon afterwards and in the most embarrassing circumstances imaginable, an Unthinkable Thing happened:

Rashid Khalifa, the legendary Ocean of Notions, the fabled Shah of Blah, stood up in front of a huge audience, opened his mouth, and found that he had run out of stories to tell.

~ ~ ~

After his mother left home, Haroun found that he couldn’t keep his mind on anything for very long, or, to be precise, for more than eleven minutes at a time. Rashid took him to a movie to cheer him up, but after exactly eleven minutes Haroun’s attention wandered, and when the film ended he had no idea how it all turned out, and had to ask Rashid if the good guys won in the end. The next day Haroun was playing goalie in a neighbourhood game of street hockey, and after pulling off a string of brilliant saves in the first eleven minutes he began to let in the softest, most foolish and most humiliating of goals. And so it went on: his mind was always wandering off somewhere and leaving his body behind. This created certain difficulties, because many interesting and some important things take longer than eleven minutes: meals, for example, and also mathematics examinations.

It was Oneeta Sengupta who put her finger on the trouble. She had started coming downstairs even more often than before, for instance to announce defiantly: ‘No more Mrs Sengupta for me! From today, call me Miss Oneeta only!’—after which she smacked her forehead violently, and wailed: ‘O! O! What is to become?’

When Rashid told Miss Oneeta about Haroun’s wandering attention, however, she spoke firmly and with certainty. ‘Eleven o’clock when his mother exited,’ she declared. ‘Now comes this problem of eleven minutes. Cause is located in his pussy-collar-jee.’ It took Rashid and Haroun a few moments to work out that she meant
psychology
. ‘Owing to pussy-collar-jeecal sadness,’ Miss Oneeta continued, ‘the young master is stuck fast on his eleven number and cannot get to twelve.’

‘That’s not true,’ Haroun protested; but in his heart he feared it might be. Was he stuck in time like a broken clock? Maybe the problem would never be solved unless and until Soraya returned to start the clocks up once again.

~ ~ ~

Some days later Rashid Khalifa was invited to perform by politicos from the Town of G and the nearby Valley of K, which nestled in the Mountains of M. (I should explain that in the country of Alifbay many places were named after letters of the Alphabet. This led to much confusion, because there were only a limited number of letters and an almost unlimited number of places in need of names. As a result many places were obliged to share a single name. This meant that people’s letters were always going to the wrong address. Such difficulties were made even worse by the way in which certain places, such as the sad city, forgot their names entirely. The employees of the national mail service had a lot to put up with, as you can imagine, so they could get a little excitable on occasion.)

‘We should go,’ Rashid said to Haroun, putting a brave face on things. ‘In the Town of G and the Valley of K, the weather is still fine; whereas here the air is too weepy for words.’

It was true that it was raining so hard in the sad city that you could almost drown just by breathing in. Miss Oneeta, who just happened to have dropped in from upstairs, agreed sadly with Rashid. ‘Tip-top plan,’ she said. ‘Yes, both of you, go; it will be like a little holiday, and no need to worry about me, sitting sitting all by myself.’

~ ~ ~

‘The Town of G is not so special,’ Rashid told Haroun as the train carried them towards that very place. ‘But the Valley of K! Now that is different. There are fields of gold and mountains of silver and in the middle of the Valley there is a beautiful Lake whose name, by the way, is Dull.’

‘If it’s so beautiful, why isn’t it called Interesting?’ Haroun argued; and Rashid, making a huge effort to be in a good mood, tried to put on his old witchy-fingers act. ‘Ah—now—the
Interesting
Lake,’ he said in his most mysterious voice. ‘Now that’s something else again. That’s a Lake of Many Names, yes, sir, so it is.’

Rashid went on trying to sound happy. He told Haroun about the Luxury Class Houseboat waiting for them on the Dull Lake. He talked about the ruined fairy castle in the silver mountains, and about the pleasure gardens built by the ancient Emperors, which came right down to the edge of the Dull Lake: gardens with fountains and terraces and pavilions of pleasure, where the spirits of the ancient kings still flew about in the guise of hoopoe birds. But after exactly eleven minutes Haroun stopped listening; and Rashid stopped talking, too, and they stared silently out of the window of the railway carriage at the unfolding boredom of the plains.

They were met at the Railway Station in the Town of G by two unsmiling men wearing gigantic mustachios and loud yellow check pants. ‘They look like villains to me,’ Haroun thought, but he kept his opinion to himself. The two men drove Rashid and Haroun straight to the political rally. They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees. There were great bushes of children and rows of ladies arranged in lines, like flowers in a giant flower-bed. Rashid was deep in his own thoughts, and was nodding sadly to himself.

Then the thing happened, the Unthinkable Thing. Rashid went out on to the stage in front of that vast jungle of a crowd, and Haroun watched him from the wings—and the poor storyteller opened his mouth, and the crowd squealed in excitement—and now Rashid Khalifa, standing there with his mouth hanging open, found that it was as empty as his heart.

‘Ark.’ That was all that came out. The Shah of Blah sounded like a stupid crow. ‘Ark, ark, ark.’

~ ~ ~

After that they were shut up in a steaming hot office while the two men with the mustachios and loud yellow check pants shouted at Rashid and accused him of having taken a bribe from their rivals, and suggested that they might cut off his tongue and other items also. —And Rashid, close to tears, kept repeating that he couldn’t understand why he had dried up, and promising to make it up to them. ‘In the Valley of K, I will be terrifico, magnifique,’ he vowed.

‘Better you are,’ the mustachioed men shouted back. ‘Or else, out comes that tongue from your lying throat.’

‘So when does the plane leave for K?’ Haroun butted in, hoping to calm things down. (The train, he knew, didn’t go into the mountains.) The shouting men began to shout even more loudly. ‘Plane?
Plane?
His papa’s stories won’t take off but the brat wants to fly! —No plane for you, mister and sonny. Catch a blasted bus.’

‘My fault again,’ Haroun thought wretchedly. ‘I started all this off.
What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true
. I asked that question and it broke my father’s heart. So it’s up to me to put things right. Something has to be done.’

The only trouble was, he couldn’t think of a single thing.

Chapter 2

The Mail Coach

The two shouting men shoved Rashid and Haroun into the back seat of a beaten-up car with torn scarlet seats, and even though the car’s cheap radio was playing movie music at top volume, the shouting men went on shouting about the unreliability of storytellers all the way to the rusting iron gates of the Bus Depot. Here Haroun and Rashid were dumped out of the car without ceremony or farewell.

‘Expenses of the journey?’ Rashid hopefully inquired, but the shouting men shouted, ‘More cash demands! Cheek! Cheek of the chappie!’ and drove away at high speed, forcing dogs and cows and women with baskets of fruit on their heads to dive out of the way. Loud music and rude words continued to pour out of the car as it zigzagged away into the distance.

Rashid didn’t even bother to shake his fist. Haroun followed him towards the Ticket Office across a dusty courtyard with walls covered in strange warnings:

IF YOU TRY TO RUSH OR ZOOM
YOU ARE SURE TO MEET YOUR DOOM