Bookshelves are windows into family histories – which books find a home on the shelves, how the stacks are organised, which books are well-worn, and unopened, the ideas contained in the inscriptions. Family bonds form in different ways and for book-lovers, the web of stories that spreads out across their bookshelves is one way. In my bookshelves, there are many webs and one is a messy web that started to take shape as I began my role in child-rearing, a role that comes to a sort of end this year. I will always be a parent but Imran, my son, is no longer a child. At 16, he is about to embark on one of his first completely independent journeys – finishing high school far away from home, weaving webs that will grow on his independent book-shelves.
There is a line that Marquez wrote in one of my favourite books, Love in the Time of Cholera: She discovered with great delight that one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them. The idea of a parent as a friend is a debatable one but it is true that, like all relationships, the parent-child relationship too needs friendliness, a feeling of warmth, an ease of communication and dare I say, even comradeship. As I look back at these 16 years, I realize that one of the ways in which Imran and I found friendliness was through a love for stories. Aristotle’s idea of the Friendship of Virtue is based on character, and don’t the stories we love and share reflect and shape our character? And so, here is my journey in child-rearing, my journey in bringing up Imran, through ten books that we shared and loved.
The first, Line and Circle, was well before he could read, perhaps when he was three, a picture book published by Tulika in its bi-lingual series. The book has simple line drawings of objects made by lines and circles. Sometimes, we’d read it in English and sometimes in Hindi. There’s a line in the book, Gol ludka/Circle rolled. It was one of his favourite lines and the way he would repeat it in his toddlerspeak is indelibly imprinted on the soundtrack of our shared lives. This was an important book because it made the existence of multiple languages a very natural part of his world. And it encouraged him to actively choose what was to be a part of his world by asking for the language he wanted it read out in. It was one of the earliest ways in which he formed and exercised opinion. Line and Circle was also an important milestone for us because just as he was discovering how sounds formed words and shapes formed objects, I was discovering how being a parent means looking at the world with a new sense of wonder, sharing the world just like one shares a book one has loved with a friend.
Then there was the first book he read all on his own – Big Dog and Little Dog, a story about friendship, about difference. Big Dog and Little Dog will always remain special because it was responsible for that magical moment when your child reads a complete narrative for the first time. A narrative with very few words but a narrative nonetheless. I watched in amazement as he formed the words fluently and Imran looked up with pride as Big Dog and Little Dog curled up together on the last page, friends forever. Books come to us in different ways and this one was an inherited one, from the outgrown bookshelf of an older child. It brought with it the joy of second-hand books and the idea that new, shiny things are not the only source of pleasure.
Big Dog and Little Dog was also the book that introduced Imran to Dav Pilkey, writer-illustrator who would be a part of our lives for some years to come with his Captain Underpants series. While it was an early experience in mainstream merchandising and spin-offs in the entertainment industry, Captain Underpants was also Imran’s first introduction at how irreverence is generally treated. There would be disapproving eye-rolls and head-shakes by grown-ups, some beloved, who couldn’t understand why I would even bother to buy him a book about toilets, wedgies and bodily waste. But Captain Underpants taught us both how important it is to hold on to irreverence, to make a place for what lies beneath or in this case inside.
Ek tha Nanha – The classic first line of countless stories is how this small, not-so-well-produced illustrated book in Hindi began. Nanha is the story of a little boy full of questions and no friends his age. Among the many questions, he asks his harried mother is who lives in the mosque near his house and his mother says Allah Mian. So one day when the older kids in the neighbourhood don’t include him in their games and the azaan rings out, he asks her if he can go play in the mosque – with Allah Mian – leaving his mother speechless. Imran loved the book for the boy’s character, the kinds of questions he asked, the new word gumbad that he learnt. And I loved it for how it doesn’t tell us if Nanha is Muslim or not, for how the term Allah Mian is used in a commonplace way. It was important for me that a boy with a name like Imran Alexander Batra had access to a book like this, growing up at a time when the fluidity of shared cultural spaces was disappearing and religious identity was becoming a hardened thing.
When Imran started school, part of our weekly routine was the children’s section of the British Council Library, sadly no longer in existence. It was a charming space with a carpet and beanbags, and the most fantastic collection of children’s books. Here we found a wonderful picture book called Turn Turn Turn, based on the song by Pete Seeger. The book was a well-worn copy and it was supposed to have a CD, long-lost by the time we found it. I played the song from my collection and Imran turned, turned, turned the pages to find all sorts of ideas of what being human can mean. It was an experience in how images tell a story and of finding your own understanding of those images. The importance of picture books for children is well established but they are valuable for people of all ages. I think Imran learnt this in those leisurely hours spent at the library. He wrote a picture-book review as a pre-teen: People might argue and say that picture books are only for babies and children who are in pre-school. Well, I say that they are wrong!
Another milestone was Fantastic Mr Fox, the first chapter book he read. It was on a long road trip to the hills. He lay in the back seat and by the time we reached Karnal, Fantastic Mr Fox had been devoured. I knew then that Imran had become a reader. He had stepped into that wonderland where it doesn’t matter who you’re with or where you are, you can always find a friend. As parents, we want to pass on to our children things that we love, some more than others. That is our legacy. My delight at that moment in the parking lot of Savoy Greens, Karnal was much more than when people told me he looked exactly like me.
And then came Harry Potter. Imran’s love affair with superheroes must have begun with the magic of JK Rowling. He and his friends formed a Harry Potter club and raced each other through the thick tomes. Baths and teeth brushing were forgotten through the summer holidays and I have a photograph somewhere of a pair of boys sitting up in bed, side by side, faces full of concentration, a fat book in each pair of hands. Spells would ring out, plotlines discussed, good and evil debated. In the magic that pervaded my home that summer was also the idea of a young child making his way into the world, equal to the adults, sometimes superior. Perhaps, the battles that await Imran will be a little more familiar, a little less scary because of Rowling’s magic.
The Village by the Sea was a book Imran wrote one of his earliest reviews of. This is what he said: “I liked the book because everybody is not totally good or bad. For example, there is Biju who is usually a show-off but helps his village when it is in need. And then there is Hari’s father who is drunk almost all the time but stops drinking when his wife goes to the hospital.” Good fiction allows us to absorb ideas subliminally and Anita Desai’s nuanced writing made a 10-year old boy begin to understand the important life lesson of ambiguity. For me, this book was important because it let him love Indian children’s books as much as what he was reading from the West. Indian children’s writers occupied a small shelf in most bookstores in those years, and were not always easy to find, though Anita Desai was, of course, another story. The one place in Delhi that could be relied upon and where we bought The Village by the Sea was a tiny shop called Eureka run by a pair of mavericks in a neighbourhood market. The jaws of global capitalism chewed up and spat Eureka out but the spirit of independent bookstores encouraging children to read Indian writers is still alive. I hope Imran will hold on to this spirit that was enshrined in his very own Eureka loyalty card.
A book and a writer we discovered together was Framed by Frank Cottrell Boyce, a book set in a poor mining town in Wales about a mysterious stack of paintings that are stored for a while in an abandoned mine. One by one the famous paintings, including Renoir’s The Umbrellas and Van Gogh’s Sunflowers are exposed to the public and transform this down-at-the-heels town, brightening up the lives of 10-year old Dylan, and his family and friends. Framed opens up the important idea of how art can change people’s lives, and the need for art to be part of the commons and not hidden away in private or difficult-to-reach collections. Imran’s review of the book from that time resonates this idea: “I like it because it is told by a boy named Dylan, who is part of the Hughes’ family. They live in a small town named Manod and he is the only boy there because people are moving out. They are doing this because there aren’t enough jobs in Manod. This keeps happening until his dad leaves as well because his garage isn’t getting enough business. Then the paintings come and start changing the people’s lives and in the end, the father comes back… What I really like about the book is how the paintings change the people’s lives. First they see a painting and it reminds them of Manod in the olden days and then they try to make Manod better.” I think Framed set Imran upon a path to seek a world full of beauty, a world that is better because people are together.
I end this journey with Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of a Lane, another book Imran and I read around the same time and loved as much. We both loved the idea of magic in the everyday, that surreal quality that can turn an everyday incident into something other-worldly, depending on how you look at it. Some mysteries can never be solved and that is what makes the everyday magical. To remember this is to remember the child in you for whom everyday, the magic of the world unfurled.
One mystery that all artists get asked (and Neil Gaiman has a lovely answer to this on youtube) is where do ideas come from. We don’t really know. We know the influences but the idea itself – how is it born in that moment that it is born? We absorb, we observe, and we make our own – just like a child growing-up.
As we walk on, Imran and I, equals now on our own paths, I like to think that we will both carry the ideas from these books we have loved together, ideas that will continue to shine even if we now follow different stars.
Featured Books
Line and Circle
Radhika Menon and Trotsky Marudu / Tulika Books
Big Dog and Little Dog
Dav Pilkey / Red Wagon Books
Captain Underpants (Series)
Dav Pilkey / Scholastic
Nanha
Rajesh Utsahi / Samyukta Rashtra Bal Kosh, Lucknow for UNICEF
Turn Turn Turn
Pete Seeger and Wendy Anderson Halperin / Simon and Schuster Children’s Publishing
Fantastic Mr Fox
Roald Dahl / Penguin
Harry Potter (Series)
JK Rowling / Bloomsbury
The Village by the Sea
Anita Desai / Heinemann
Framed
Frank Cottrell Boyce / Harper Collins
Ocean at the End of a Lane
Neil Gaiman / William Morrow and Company