“YOU’VE come to a point where you’re compelled to write. After being a reader for so long, the words are just waiting to get out of you.” Tutu Dutta is recounting the tale of how storytelling came to be in her blood, and as one might expect of a professional storyteller, she’s doing a pretty good job of it.
“I’ve always loved stories ever since I was a little girl,” she recalls. “My mother read to me a lot and I remember years later, reading stories to my daughter.” Reading, she continues, remains her primary passion. “When you’ve read so much, you begin to think that you could come up with a story yourself!” she remarks, chuckling.
And come up with stories she did. Tutu is a writer of children’s and young adult books, including Timeless Tales Of Malaysia, Eight Treasures Of The Dragon and The Jugra Chronicles trilogy. In 2016, Marshall Cavendish decided to publish a new edition of Timeless Tales Of Malaysia, renamed as The Magic Urn and other Timeless Tales Of Malaysia. This was soon followed by Nights Of The Dark Moon a year later. In 2019This year, Nights Of The Dark Moon, a collection of 13 dark folk tales from Asia and Africa, was reprinted.
It’s an unusually warm and humid morning when I meet with Tutu. In person, she seems a little reticent, almost as if she prefers her books to speak for themselves. (Actually she does: “I would rather have the book be the main focus,” she wrote to me after acquiescing to an interview.)
Leading her over to the infinitely more convivial surroundings of Starbucks, where we order mugs of coffee (for her) and hot chocolate (for me), then decamping to a welcoming pair of sofa seats at a discreet corner of the bustling cafe, she gradually warms up; yet she takes her time to choose her words – as if there are all these words out there and not enough time to play with them all.
RAISED WITH STORIES
Tutu brims with stories. As in her books, the extraordinary and the everyday are equally significant. “I was born in India where everything has a story to it. There’s always some cultural festival with a story attached to it. There’s always a story being told to you. My mother weaved stories from her own hometown in Manipur, India.”
Born in Calcutta but raised in Malaysia, the journey from India to this part of the world might seem an unlikely path to tread for Tutu and her family. Her father, a doctor, was one of the first generations of Bengalis who moved to Malaysia at the behest of the armed forces to provide medical services pre-independence.
Growing up in Malaysia, her eye for a good prose began with old Bengali tales, and perennial fairy-tale favourites like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson. Yet, she laments that there seemed to be a dearth of local tales and mythologies. “Surprisingly, local stories weren’t as easily available or as well curated as those that came from the West,” she muses, adding: “Still, I did get my hands on some very simple Malay folk tales. That, and old P. Ramlee movies as well!”
Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm – to pick two of Tutu’s favourite childhood writers – didn’t set out to collect the stories that bear their name in order to entertain children. They were primarily collectors and philologists who assembled their tales as part of a life’s work that included massive volumes such as German legends, German grammar and ancient German law. Does Tutu see herself as such? I ask her.
A brief pause and she answers tentatively: “Perhaps... I wanted to introduce Asian folklore to the West, while also educating our children over here who tend to be more familiar with Western tales,” she insists. But being a children’s author holds a more personal meaning to the 62-year-old.
“The birth of my daughter (who’s now 26) was a life-changing moment for me,” she says simply. “I read every book my daughter read. From Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series, I read them all.” Reading, says Tutu, provided her with the opportunity to bond with her daughter. “… and it opened a window into a world of literacy that she was to embark into,” she adds, smiling. From storytelling at bedtime to actually reading the books her daughter read, it unlocked the desire to write her own books with a focus on Asian folklore which she was very fascinated with.
Travelling, she adds, opened her eyes to other cultures and kick-started a lifelong fascination with home-grown tales from the places she’d visited. Tutu, who holds a master’s degree in environmental science from Universiti Malaya, tells me that her stint at a summer school in Sophia University, Tokyo as an undergraduate was an eye-opening experience which instilled a love for Japanese folklore: “…in particular, the refined and melancholic tales of the ancient Noh theatre,” she recalls, smiling.
Years later, Tutu married a Malaysian diplomat and accompanied him on his diplomatic missions all over the world, consequentially setting up homes in different countries, including Singapore, Nigeria and the United States. While in New York, her lifelong passion for culture, folklore and children’s literature inspired her to write some of the stories in Twelve Treasures Of The East, which she co-authored with Peruvian Lucy Bedoya-Maire. It marked her first foray as a children’s author.
“I think it’s because most fairy tales, honed over the years, work so very well. They feel right. Structurally, they can be simple, but the ornamentation, the act of retelling, is often where the magic occurs. Like any form of narrative that is primarily oral in transmission, it’s all in the way you tell them,” elaborates Tutu.
TIMELESS STORIES
Once upon a time, back when animals spoke and rivers sang and every quest was worth going on, back when dragons still roared and maidens were beautiful and an honest young man with a good heart and a great deal of luck could always wind up with a princess and half the kingdom – back then, fairy tales were generally from the West – where Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and a host of familiar characters dominated children’s imagination, and story books.
“There’s an abundance of stories right here around the region that deserves to be told,” Tutu asserts. And tells it, she does, in her latest outing, Nights Of The Dark Moon. Told in a simple yet engaging style, this compilation is set out to thrill (and perhaps frighten) children with tales of restless spirits, vengeful demons, bloodthirsty shape shifters, monsters, zombies and every dark creature that lurks in the night.
Thirteen stories (in numerology, 13 is considered to be an irregular number and is also the number of witches you need to form a coven!) comprise The Haunted Bridge Of Agi (Japan), The Curse Of Miryang (China), The Shapeshifter Of Co Lao (Vietnam), The Temple Of Rara Joggrang (Indonesia), Hang Nadam (Singapore), The Seven Princesses Of Ulek Mayang (Malaysia), The Strange Tale Of Chief Naam (Malaysia), Princess Of The Bamboo (Malaysia and Sumatra), King Vikram And Betaal The Vampire (India), The Weeping Lady (India), The Witchman (Nigeria) and The Curse Of The Iroko Tree (West Africa).
Nights Of The Dark Moon has about it the air of timeless stories premised on archetypes from a much earlier age. “I believe that some of the strongest stories we can have begin with very simple archetypes,” explains Tutu. Like many tales with roots in an oral tradition, these tales come in a small and deceptively simple package — a simple story with a punchy narrative that can be easily adapted to different locales, cultures and times. “For example, the popular folktale Bawang Putih, Bawang Merah has similar versions in other parts of the world like Thailand and Vietnam,” she elaborates.
While to an older adult these stories may not exactly keep them awake at nights, they are nevertheless riveting and guaranteed to keep you turning the pages. After all, who doesn’t love a good story well-told? Yet, authors like Tutu who stand out in the Malaysian literary scene, is slow to permeate the mainstream consciousness locally. “We need Malaysians to be more aware and take some pride in knowing that their own local writers are coming up with some actually great books,” remarks Tutu.
Malaysian literature, she laments, are more often than not, being reduced to the standard romance trope that has flooded even our primetime drama slots. “It’s a shame, really,” she says mournfully, adding: “If you support writers, you can actually determine the sort of books that will be written, and in doing that, shape our national culture for the better.”
For Tutu, it’s all about getting children in the habit of reading. “After all, scary books have that intrinsic appeal of getting young children into reading!” she says, chuckling.
Some of my favourite books when I was 13 or so were horror stories. Stephen King, Bram Stoker, James Herbert... all the names you’d expect to see on the list. I used to sneak into second-hand bookshops and buy anthologies of vampire stories, smuggling them home in my schoolbag because my mother didn’t approve. “They’ll scare you,” she always said. And she was right — they did. But that was the point. And Tutu agrees wholeheartedly. “It got you reading, didn’t it?” she asks pointedly.
Nights Of The Dark Moon is a beautifully bound book; creamy pages abound with fascinating tales and lovely illustrations etched by Tutu herself. “You can draw too?” I ask incredulously. “I was forced to, in the beginning when I couldn’t afford an illustrator!” she replies, chuckling. But in the case of her latest book, Tutu’s remarkable sketching depict the stories beautifully.
But the real gems within the pages are the stories retold in crisp, beautifully written prose. Ancient myths and timeless stories – these are stories to be read again and again. In reading books that frighten us, we have the choice of whether to explore our fears... or not. But if we do, we come away either knowing that the monsters can be defeated, that the forest doesn’t go on forever and that the darkness can be driven back or – at the very least – we find ourselves one step closer to the light.
In the preface of her book, Tutu writes: “Some of the stories can be empowering and make us realise that grit and presence of mind can save the day. To quote Neil Gaiman: ‘Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.’”
Nights Of The Dark Moon: Gothic Folktales From Asia And Africa
Author: Tutu Dutta
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish International (Asia) Pte Ltd
192 pages