Once upon a time, in a city full of computers, computer-people, and increasingly people-like computer programs, there was a writer who lost his sleep over a manuscript.
He had been running so fast to meet the deadline that sleeping felt like a waste of time, a chore to be finished as shortly as possible. He started staying up till 1 in the morning at first, pushed it up to 3 a few weeks later, and started going to bed at 5 finally. Only, he realised, going to bed is not always the same thing as going to sleep. For some time he made do with the few minutes of shut-eye he got each morning, but it made him feel as sluggish as a zombie and turned watery-vapid the words he needed to finish up his work.
Fortunately, the writer had someone clever around him. Fortunately, also he took her advice when she suggested replacing their bedtime reading with audiobook versions of their favourite books.
Each night for the next couple of months, the two of them shared a pair of airpods and listened to Stephen Fry’s narration of the Harry Potter books. The writer soon got back into Sandman’s good graces; the blessed oblivion of sleep started to stake its nightly claim upon him again. The manuscript was finished, edited, published, and he no longer faced any problems in going to sleep, but the audiobook habit stuck with him. Legends say (backed by data from the Audible app, of course) that in the last 11 months, audiobooks have played on his smartphone for about 165 hours, which is just 3 hours shy of a full week.
What has he been listening to since the Harry Potter books? All manner of things, really, quite different from each other, except for the fact that they have all been read by him already.
There was the PG Wodehouse collection (also narrated excellently by Stephen Fry) that never failed to put him to sleep in under 20 minutes. Also, Marty Ross’ Arabian Nights, Jingo by Terry Pratchett, and Devdutt Pattnaik’s Mahabharata. There was Susanna Clarke’s lovely tome, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell, that made him remember how much he had forgotten since he last read it, and whose narration kept him company during a stormy night in the Himalayas. Also, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and Norwegian Folktales of Asbjornsen and Moe that he picked up because Neil Gaiman had praised it somewhere. Many others besides.
Most notably, however, there was Michael Chabon’s Moonglow. It was, in fact, the one that made him think about audiobooks long enough and hard enough that he was compelled to write this little thing.
The writer’s earliest memories of bedtime stories came not from his own grandfather, his Baba, a miserly former postman quite unsuitable for storytelling, but from his grandfather’s brother-in-law, whom they called Bulandshahr Waale Baba (because he lived in Bulandshahr), and who looked like black Santa Claus.
Every year without fail, he would visit the writer’s family in Haridwar on the way to Kanwar pilgrimage. He came late in the morning usually, when the writer and his sisters were at school. In the evening, the writer’s youngest sister helped Bulandshahr Waale Baba decorate his kanwar with little silver bells, fairy lights, and tinsel. Once they were satisfied with it looking better than any other devotee’s Kanwar, Baba would take out the batisha he brought for them from Bulandshahr and the family would devour it without caring about the etiquette that requires people to have dessert after their dinner.
The real treat, however, was delivered only after the dinner, when the siblings gathered around the old man’s cot with the kind of anticipation one usually associates with drug addicts.
He began talking while concocting a mixture of bhaang that he would take with him on his hike to Neelkanth Temple the next day, and he told them again the only rule of his storytelling sessions. Bhaiya sab log haan-hun karte rehna, he would say as he tied up the green-black lump of bhaang in a perforated cloth and twisted the knot to filter out extra water. The children would assure him that yes, they would keep responding throughout his narration to indicate that they were listening with rapt attention, not dozing off.
Hunkaari bharna, saying “haan! hmm!” at regular intervals, is an age-old tradition of oral storytelling in the subcontinent, after all.
Listen now. Remember the writer who lost his sleep over a manuscript and developed a taste for audiobooks? Remember the 165 hours these audiobooks played on his phone? Well, here’s a little secret: he was asleep for most of these hours.
Can’t blame him either, can you? Sleeping was the whole point of it for him, after all. That’s why he was listening to books he had read already. He was treating them like the bedtime stories his Bulandshehr Waale Baba told him all those years ago.
Only the app, unlike his Baba, didn’t require him to keep saying haan-haan all the time.
Maybe someone will soon develop an app that does it, but people will still lose stuff while listening to stories. There’s no getting around that. Harold Bloom, despite getting a little too enthusiastic when criticising audiobooks, did get it right when he talked about deep reading requiring both the inner ear and the outer ear. This writer, the one with his 165+ listening hours, would fall asleep within the hour most nights. The stories kept dripping into his ear, colouring his dreams with their auditory afterimages, until he turned or tossed and the airpod (you can’t put in both if you sleep on your side) tumbled out of his ear. The stories kept going on still until they ended or his phone ran out of battery.
So, yes, some things are always lost when listened to, but the assumption that losing things in stories is necessarily a bad thing deserves some inspection. Especially when talking about bedtime stories (which are not always told to children, or loved only by children).
Think of Scheherazade telling bedtime stories to her murderous husband night after night.
Did she want to complete her stories? Would not she have left out some of the important parts to keep the husband wanting more? Could she have chosen the written form to tell her stories? One struggles to imagine her passing them page by page to the man. He would have gotten bored the first night, and we would have ended up with just one story instead of the thousand and one we have today. Arguably, it would be a story preserved perfectly and recalled through the ages without any lapses of memory or changes made by minstrels and narrators. Fidelity versus evolution, oral versus written. What happens when you pluck a story out of thin air and pin it to paper? Butterfly-catchers would know.
When we read books, we want to squeeze out all their pleasure, savour to the fullest extent the peeling of a plot’s layers, the specific arrangement of words, lengths of sentences, sizes of paragraphs. We read again the lines we particularly liked and the ones we didn’t understand the first time around. Reading is very much a linear progression, a travel from point A (the first page) to point B (the last page). In comparison, oral stories are much more ephemeral, words spoken vanish without trace, what matters with them is not so much the travel from point A to point B, as the very fact of someone telling a story and someone listening to a story. Especially so for bedtime stories. Especially so for stories we listen to again and again.
Take the story that got our writer thinking about all this in the first place. Moonglow, Michael Chabon’s “fictional biography” of his grandfather, which he first read in 2021, and then listened to just about every night in September 2024.
Words-images-sounds jumped out at him from memories of the last reading; the story was sometimes a stranger, sometimes a long-lost friend. Interestingly enough, Moonglow itself is a play on memories, the story is stitched together from conversations between Chabon and his partly-fictional grandfather, who is talking from his deathbed. It is also, therefore, a deathbed(time) or a (death)bedtime story. The generally laconic, rather secretive, grandfather has had his tongue loosened by strong painkillers, and there are things that he wants to get off his chest before he dies. There are gaps in the old man’s stories due to his less-than-perfect memory and his commitment to keeping other people’s secrets safe, especially those of his late wife, who may have been haunted by a skinless horse, who may have been a witch, who may not have been crazy, who may have only been pretending to be a Holocaust survivor.
Every night when our writer went back to Moonglow, he felt like he had missed a few minutes of the narration. It was almost impossible to pinpoint the precise moment when he went to sleep, making it impossible to resume listening from the precise place where he had stopped listening the night before. Sometimes he listened to entire chapters again, sometimes he let the gaps in his memory meld with the gaps in the (partly fictional) grandfather’s recollections. He remembered an old Sahir Ludhianvi-Mohammed Rafi song and took advice from one of its couplets:
He thought also about how the old man telling Chabon his stories was not Chabon’s actual grandfather, but his mother’s stepfather (apart from his partly fictional existence, of course). The writer, listening to Moonglow, was reminded of those long ago nights when he listened to the stories told by Bulandshahr Waale Baba, his own not-actual-grandfather. He thought also about how little he remembered of these stories, and how little that mattered. The memories of Baba’s little rituals and diktats around his storytelling, the suspension of bedtime curfew by his parents, the excitement of sitting around with his sisters around the cot, mattered more than the stories themselves. This was why, he reasoned, these things had managed to hop over the gaps in his memory safely, while so many plots-characters-narratives had fallen through, were lost forever.
In his city of computers, computer-people, and increasingly people-like computer programs, this unreliability of oral storytelling makes for a nice change. In a culture obsessed with endless organising, tracking, categorising, segmenting, using audiobooks as bedtime stories, and being okay with losing stuff every so often feels like a tiny act of comfortable rebellion.
While entering October, this writer has finally said goodbye to Moonglow and doesn’t quite remember how it ends. He is now listening to Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, and he is falling asleep just as the dark carnival comes to town with calliope music announcing its arrival.
AM Gautam’s debut non-fiction work, Indian Millennials, was published in August 2024.