Amie and the Chawl of Color (Chatura Rao)
The Burmese Box (Lila Majumdar)
The Yellow Bird (Lila Majumdar)
Eid stories
These are books for children and there are books for all. For me, these 5 books are for all ages, some recreating nostalgia and magic and others reminding us the eternal strengths of love and humanity.
Growing Up in Pandupur is an interesting work. Apparently seen as a collection of 13 stories are linked to each other. Its about a township growing up along the banks of the Dhun river and the river has its own song saying..
"..Of humans who came and cleared and farmed...
home to the native farmer...
then came the traders beady eyed man, to sell the farms,...
The Government said to build a dam...
.... and
with engineers came their families..."
This is the story of any township in India, growing and accomodating more and more people whereas the natives, the forests keep on getting pushed outside. Pandupur has railway station, schools, but then there are different kind of schools right?- One where the engineers will send their kids and another where the natives (read tribals) will send their children. One interesting story is warm and fuzzy which speaks about this. This is indeed a warm collection, which may make us ponder over our ideas of growth and development even through stories of a fictitious township.
Amie and the Chawl of color is almost like Dorothy and the wizard of oz, however here it is metaphorical. we know Amie too well and her chawl as well in the city named here Doombay(we know what in real the city is called right!!) Now suddenly Amie's chawl and particularly Amir faces a great crisis. The little bit of sun that managed to creep inside Amie's small pigeon hole of a room, faces threat from entering.due to the billboard set up and the prospects of many such billboards blocking and taking the hues out of their lives. (can we remember what is happening to the Mumbai chawls, the threat from builders..) Amie loves her mother and also the others in the chawl, the microcosm of the cosmopolitan Doombay and takes things to her hands to meet Shah of Vibgyor bring colors back.. part adventure and part magical.. this is a beautiful book.
The Burmese Box and The Yellow Bird.. by Lila Majumdar are lovely reads (the original read by me much earlier in Bangla) The gifted storyteller that she was.. Lila Majumdar has deftly woven treasure chests and detective stories with magic realism. The Scheming Podi-pishi dies lamenting for her lost jewellery box and then adventures cloud up around the box. Whereas Jhogru mixes imagination and myth into the yellow bird to attain the impossible.
Eid stories are my all time favorite. This is a collection of stories circling round the festival of Eid. Paro Anand's story speaks about taking a stand against bullying and weaving integrity and inclusivity in schools. My favorite is Sweets for Shankar by Aditi Rao- taking cues from an incident where a young Muslim boy met Gandhiji during his rounds of appeal for communal harmony to stop riots post partition. This young Muslim boy, puts his life on threat to pass on sweets for Eid as promised to his friend Shankar, something the poet fictitiously created as if was a re-assurance to the Father of the Nation to have faith in Humanity in those dark days of madness.
Highly recommended for all to read..
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