Pakistani writer Faiqa Mansab’s second novel The Sufi Storyteller is a South Asian take on stories about stories blended with a murder mystery. It opens with a murder in the library which doubles up as the office of the protagonist Layla, an expert on women and their role in storytelling traditions teaching at a university in Illinois. The naked dead body is that of a woman, has bruises on her throat, and is dressed in a red cloak. The problem is that this is the second dead body Layla has stumbled upon. As Layla searches her memory about the previous victim, she begins to realise that there is a pattern and perhaps some one is after her.

The story takes the readers through a labyrinthine world involving the Taliban, the CIA, and the secret group that guards stories from the tradition of Sufism. The twist is that “Sufi” here predates Islam. It applies to any storytelling that brings deeper reflections on life, people, and situations. The tradition includes Russian folktales, The Arabian Nights, Alice in Wonderland, Gilgamesh, The Shahnameh, Don Quixote and more. Sufi stories are not just stories: they include jokes and poetry too. They are layered with meanings revealing themselves to the readers slowly:

A Sufi story is apotropaic, a magic spell against the vagaries of life and human baseness. They guard us against the evil of untruths, even though most stories wear the garb of fiction to roam the earth.

They have talismanic powers, healing the listeners and speakers. A secret group of people, primarily women, have been guarding these stories to preserve them, adapt them to the changing contexts and times, and save them from censorship. The stories have secret codes known only to the few. Women pass the baton on to the next generations and Layla might be the next chosen one.

While the plot itself will tempt one to compare the novel with the works of Jostein Gaarder, the sacral mysteries of Dan Brown won’t be far too behind in the readers’ imagination. Mansab has brought two very different kinds of genres together without slipping into the sensational thanks to the feminine/feminist touch to the idea of storytelling itself. For instance, readers will come across a retelling of Red Riding Hood which is not about a girl who disobeyed her mother and trusted a stranger. Instead, it is about Red Riding Hood initiating herself into adulthood. In this “original” or guarded version, Red Riding Hood kills the Wolf with an axe and lets her grandmother emerge from the Wolf. The grandmother says to her:

You are more than you were before. You are now Keeper of the Truth. Within you lives the spirit of the wild wolf who is Woman. You have her ears, her eyes, her teeth, her snarl and her spirit. Use them well, Little Red adn don’t lose them because many will want you to kill it, lock it up, shun it and starve it, so that they can control your power.

The Sufi Storyteller debunks the idea that phrases or ideas such as “old wives’ tales” were invented to discredit women’s ways of speaking truth to power. A quick read likely to be credited with the foundation of a new genre that blends mysticism with gender and stories about stories.

Soni Wadhwa teaches Literature Studies at SRM University, Andhra Pradesh, India.