Free The Storyteller of Marrakesh by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya Page A

Mohand’s shack in the Berrima quarter, outside the walls of the medina. I was allowed to sleep in most mornings while he left for the souks. On other days we’d take shelter from the blazing sun by visiting the cool and shadowy palaces in the medina. He seemed to know all the attendants, who respected him as a learned man, and we were often – though not always – allowed to enter without having to pay the usual fees.
    The palaces contained many historical paintings and my father explained them to me with his usual patience. My favourites were the battle scenes, especially the spectacular painting in the Bahia Palace entitled The Moors Invading Spain . It depicted the Battle of Badajoz in which our Almoravid king, Youssef ben Tachfine, the founder of Marrakesh, routed the Christian forces. The painting, done in the European style, depicted the battle from the Spanish point of view. A brass plate at the bottom of the frame, translated into Arabic, explained that the painter had been influenced by someone called El Greco.
    I was fascinated by that painting because the Spaniards, who occupied the foreground, had peculiarly elongated bodies and heads. They looked like weaklings – decidedly effeminate – and it didn’t surprise me that they hadn’t been able to stand up to our tough Moorish troops, who formed a disappointingly amorphous black mass on the horizon.
    A few years later, when I was nine, I came across a tattered Spanish novel lying on the pavement in the Jemaa and the picture on the cover once again depicted a scandalously skinny Spanish knight charging some windmills. From that point on, for the rest of my childhood, I possessed a healthy contempt for Spaniards.
    My father was a traditional storyteller, well versed in folklore, but he was also unusually erudite for someone raised in a mountain village without any formal education. He knew several Berber dialects, he spoke classical Arabic fluently, and he even used a few words from French and other foreign languages in his stories when it suited his purpose. He had a keen eye for physical detail and peopled his tales with unforgettable characters. His best stories were composed of a series of episodes where the promised closure stretched out for weeks before the hair-raising ending.
    He was a tall man with close-cropped hair, courteous and reserved, but there was a dark energy about him. Every spring, with the melting of the snows, he would give in to black moods that would last for days during which we all kept away from him. It was rumoured that in his youth he had killed a woman who’d been unfaithful and that her spirit returned year after year to haunt him. One had only to be near him to sense the taut quality beneath his reticence, the knife edge of bitterness arising from that old betrayal. Looking back now, I realize that it was no wonder that his favourite theme was “longing”.
    Outside of his storytelling sessions, he wasn’t given to speaking much. Life’s vicissitudes had carved a permanent ridge between his eyes so that he always looked troubled and aggrieved. Sometimes I wondered if his bitterness was exaggerated – an outlet for some other, unknown, malady – but I did not hold it against him. It gave him character, and I respected him for it. He was kind to me and exercised great patience when we came down to Marrakesh from the mountains.

‌ Badajoz
    My uncle Mohand, who put us up in Marrakesh, was a day labourer, and the black sheep of the family, but he worshipped my father, who could do no wrong in his eyes. Although his ramshackle home comprised only two rooms, he would insist on sleeping outside and giving one of the rooms to his elder brother and nephew, a point of some considerable contention with his wife, who was a regular harridan. She resented the fact that her husband refused to take money from his brother for the duration of our stay, and berated him bitterly when Father