Books in Conversation with Other Books
bibliophile | ˈbiblēəˌfīl | noun a person who collects or has a great love of books
That would be me, from the tender age of four, when I received this book as a prize in the admittedly modest category of “Best Endeavour.” I loved that book. I “read” it over and over, upside down and sideways. I have it still, moth-eaten as it became through years of being forgotten, then moved around as my parents hauled it with them once I had left home, finally disinterred from the bottom of an old steel trunk when my father died and my mother decided to move out of their house.
3 Little Kittens managed to survive heat, dust, damp, dryness, neglect, and small chewing insects. It is a reminder of how early in my life I fell in love with the object that is the modern book. Descendant of the codex, distant relative to stone tablets, inked pottery, papyrus booklets, palm-leaf manuscripts, and oh, yes, cave paintings—tangible, physical surfaces. This love connects me to them all.
I suppose it was inevitable that I would write a book in praise of books and the people who love them. That was Book Uncle and Me, which led in time to Birds on the Brain and The Sunshine Project. The presence of Book Uncle, my kindly literacy advocate, naturally required the presence of books across the trilogy.
In the first book, I made up the book that Yasmin reads, the story of the king and the doves. But in Birds on the Brain, I decided to reference and honor a children’s book about Sálim Ali, India’s iconic ornithologist, by his niece Zai Whitaker: Salim Mamoo and Me. And in The Sunshine Project, when Anil walks away with an armload of books, one title rises to the top of the pile: Shorewalk, by an extraordinary naturalist, writer, and nature educator, Yuvan Aves. The book raises questions in Anil’s mind, reminds him of all he does not know, makes him look closely at the world around him, makes him more aware of his friend Reeni’s concerns. Books will do that—they connect us to them but they are also capable of connecting us to one another.
That scene in The Sunshine Project reads like this:
I browse. I browse and browse and browse. At first, all the titles and pages are a blur, but once I focus, I start to see them more clearly.
I leaf through a book about a boy who loved cameras. He wanted, more than anything, to take pictures of his city and the people who lived in it. He wanted everyone to see what he saw, for years and years.
I find a book about India and Pakistan and how the border was drawn between them. People thought they lived in a place that was all theirs. Then they suddenly found that they were wrong. Home wasn’t a place they knew anymore.
There’s one about a little girl who had to go on a walk that was simply too long for her. This happened when an invisible virus shut the country down. I do not expect a book to make me want to cry, but that one is so sad! It puts a lump in my throat.
The next one makes me smile. It is about a little boy who peed on a war. Yes, really. Ayyo! There he is, right on the page, su-suing over the wall on all the silly people fighting below.
Here are more of the books that I added to Book Uncle’s lending library so Anil could pick them up off the shelf of the little booth:
Mukand and Riaz by Nina Sabnani is a lovely child-centred rendering of the tragedy of Partition.
Jamlo Walks by Samina Mishra bears moving witness to the effects of the 2020 lockdowns in India. It’s one of those picture books that ought to be required reading for every politician.
Manneken Pis: A Simple Story of a Boy Who Peed on a War by Vladimir Radunsky is a book I have loved for years, whose relevance remains utterly irrefutable.
As for the book about a boy who loved cameras—I looked for one and came up empty. The great joy of writing fiction is that you can make stuff up. So that title in Anil’s pile is purely fictional. Maybe someday someone will write a book about a boy who loved cameras as much as he loved the city he lived in. Maybe that writer will remember having read about such a book in The Sunshine Project.
