A number of schools like Akshara School, Malad, organise interactions with authors. At the same time, there are several online spaces and children’s lit fests - Bookaroo, Neev Lit Fest, Peek-a-Book or Funky Rainbow: The Travelling Children’s Bookshop’s online interaction, Book Bazaar - where children can find books on topics beyond the usual. But this is an exception to the general rule that equates children’s literature with Sudha Murty or Ruskin Bond. Storyteller Bookshop in Kolkata has a specially curated shelf of children’s books on physical disabilities. For instance, he wants to know why I am confined to bed with cramps on certain days of the month or why women dress differently from men in the DC Comics movies he watches.” As a result, he now recognises certain themes outside his lived experience and asks us questions about them. Jayshree Menon, mother of an 11-year-old studying in Sriram Millennium School, Noida, says, “I make it a point to buy books that acquaint my son with the larger world. READ: Diversity, joy and some good old silliness However, her school, which has a students’ counsellor, also holds regular discussions on these topics. She’s read a lot of books on body and mental health problems, but most of them are books for adults picked up from her father’s bookshelves. Having dealt with body and mental health issues herself, she has led campaigns in school on subjects such as gender sensitisation. Niyamat Kochhar, a 15-year-old student of Tagore International School, New Delhi, says her parents acquainted her with these topics at a young age.
Agastya Ghosh, a Class X student of Maxfort School, Dwarka, New Delhi, knows about homosexual relationships from TV series like God Friended Me or Supergirl although he can’t recall seeing any books on them in the school library. To my surprise, these weren’t big deal for the children. So, I spoke to children about books they’re reading, especially on topics that seem unwieldy even to grown-ups - body positivity, mental health, LGBTQIA+ issues. To hold them.” Because they undergo the same experience as adults, but unlike adults, cannot process them. A little bit of reading on Samina Mishra led me to a wonderful essay (‘Why we shouldn’t shield children from darkness’) by an award-winning children’s author, Matt de la Peña, who says, “Maybe instead of anxiously trying to protect our children from every little hurt and heartache, our job is to simply support them through such experiences. I wondered how children deal with these books which make me so sad. On the other hand, like every Indian, I have seen images of people walking to their faraway homes in the burning summer heat and tasted the fear of death, even while hiding in my house. But their language and settings do not speak to me: I don’t have golden locks, gingerbread is unfamiliar, as is a cottage in the woods owned by three bears. However, when it comes to difficult topics like sickness or death, children’s literature in English has always been upfront: think of nursery rhymes like ‘Ring-a-ring-a-rosies’, where people collapse probably because of the plague or ‘Jack and Jill’, about children tumbling down the hill.
The Secret Diary of the World’s Worst Cook (Penguin India) by Subhadra Sen Gupta, on mental health Kids wear recognisable uniforms and their families look like mine. I like the Indian stories the best because they resonate with me - they either talk about experiences I have lived through or the surroundings they illustrate are familiar.
In a few days, I’d become so addicted to children’s picture books that I joined a free online children’s library, Storyweaver, by Pratham Books. The previous day, I’d cried in a bookshop while reading Richa Jha’s Boo! When My Sister Died, about a girl angered by her sister’s death and Macher Jhol, also by Jha, about a blind boy who wants to make a fish curry for his sick father. Reliving the collective helplessness, I cried myself to sleep.ĪLSO READ: Children’s magazine ‘Thumbi’ brings out braille stories for visually-impaired readers in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka It dredged up memories of the peak pandemic days, when Facebook overflowed with obituaries, WhatsApp conversations brought only bad news, and television screens showed displaced people walking thousands of miles to reach home. It was factual and didn’t mention death once, but I cried and howled like I knew Jamlo personally.
I recently read a children’s picture book called Jamlo Walks by Samina Mishra , about a little Adivasi girl who died during the migration of workers following the 2020 lockdown.