Tulika author Sandhya
Rao describes her experience of the Srinagar Bookaroo: Festival of Children’s Literature in a guest post.
Back in the day when
mention of Kashmir evoked filmy duets and romantic honeymoons, it was de
rigueur to go to Jehangir for the best description of its beauty: Gar
firdaus, ruhe zamin ast, hamin asto, hamin asto, hamin ast. (If there is heaven
on earth it is here, it is here, it is here.) It was also the done thing for girls to return from a holiday ‘up north’ with a
photograph of oneself fitted out as a Kashmir ki kali. Go to any of the tourist
spots, particularly the gardens even today, and you will find Kashmir ki Kali
corners. The studio has spread its wings. But now, though, everywhere, there
are also signs of siege. Military trucks, checkpoints, security forces… It’s a
way of life. As artist Nishwan Rasool, a native of Srinagar, pointed out:
There’s an Adnan Sami concert tomorrow, the roads will be blocked. Today is
Friday, the roads will be blocked. And we said: Bookaroo’s in town, the roads
will be blocked.
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| Students of DPS with mountains in the background |
Delhi Public School,
Athwajan, which hosted Bookaroo’s fourth outing in Srinagar on October 7 and 8,
is located on the outskirts of the city, and sprawls over vast grounds from the
back of which rise low mountains, now the site of pretty major quarrying. In
June this year, the school was the site of a 14-hour gun battle between the
CRPF and two terrorists who had run into the compound. It wasn’t very clear if
they had entered the school deliberately, in pursuit of their agenda to bring
education to a halt in the region, or if they were trying to hide from the
security forces. Luckily, this happened after school hours. The two men were
neutralised eventually, but in the bargain some parts of the school were
destroyed and its main building was pockmarked with bullet holes. However, the
management – the DP Dhar Memorial Trust – pulled out all stops to ensure that
signs of the ugly incident were quickly removed and their children were back in
school as soon as possible. The staff at all levels went all out to minimise
trauma. Sticking with Bookaroo as planned was part of this effort. Therefore,
all credit to the school and to Bookaroo’s organisers for standing tall. When
you consider that Principal Balasubramaniam Murali had taken charge barely six
months ago, you understand the enormity of the responsibility the school was
willing to shoulder. Bookaroo proved that the children, too, were equal to the
task.
My previous tryst with
Bookaroo Srinagar, back in 2011, had seen a more mela-like atmosphere in the
school, with children from other schools invited on one day, and parents
trailing their wards. This time around, it was restricted to students of this
school, from little ones right up to 13 and 14-year-olds. Children from the
higher classes were volunteer organisers, running up and down the huge campus
accompanying guests to their sessions, getting the little ones to behave, and
occasionally stealing secret glances at each other. Truly, the sweetness and
innocence of teenage is delicious to behold.
We were kept on our
toes – illustrators, animators, storytellers, writers, Bookarooers, all. While
back-to-back events may have been too much for the children to digest, there
was no option given the time constraints. I chose to preface Stories on the Sand with a physical
understanding of where we were located. I held my hands out sideways and said,
pointing to my head, “This is where we are, Jammu and Kashmir, the brains of
India, the dimaag.” The heart, the dil, is located around the heart-stomach
area, covering UP, Bihar, MP, and the surrounding states, with the states on
the east and west, and those in the south constituted the arms and legs. What
are we, I asked? Brains, heart, hands, legs… We are India. Oblivious to all the
excitement was this one little thing who was upset because she had had a fight
with her best friend. No amount of luring with pictures of green sand and black
sand and red sand would distract her. That’s friendship. The Dream Writer group was smaller and more
vociferous. Called upon to elaborate on their dreams, it was amazing how
bloodthirsty they all turned out to be, with each one churning out a story
scarier than the previous one!
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| Dastango Fawzia's session |
I was lucky I got to
attend one or two sessions by fellow participants. Fawzia is the only female
dastango in India. She and Firoze presented Dastaan-e-Gandhi:
a mesmerising hour of traditional dastangoi (Urdu storytelling) that brought
Mahatma Gandhi alive in the mind’s eye. This is her dream project, Fawzia says,
very close to her heart. As she explained to the children, she feels now more
than ever we need to heed Gandhi. It’s true that our children are getting
distanced from the real stories of our past, both in the course of
chronological progression and by virtue of political disenfranchisement and
lack of engagement. But we must carry on telling these stories because even one
seed can grow into a tree. Kamal Pruthi is Kabuliwala, storyteller, performer,
linguist. Although he was not entirely satisfied with his Mulla Nasruddin
session, I felt the excitement pulsating among the children as he wove in and
out of the concentric circle of children, provoking them, challenging them,
entertaining them, goading them. Even more special was the way he spontaneously
and generously undertook to introduce Dastan-e-Gandhi,
contextualising it, stressing its relevance, and requesting the children to
make an effort to listen even if they didn’t follow the language entirely.
Memories of Bookaroo Srinagar will be incomplete without mentioning the wonderful dinner at the Dhars’ beautiful, sprawling home where even the bathrooms are an aesthetic experience. The highlight was meeting Kashmir’s leading artist, Masood Hussain. He had lost everything in the floods save seven precious paintings. Still, he managed to rescue some 80-90 others who had been stranded during that natural calamity. What were those paintings you rescued, I asked, and got this story in response: Agha Shahid Ali was a leading Kashmiri-American poet. Some years ago, he had given Hussain seven couplets describing Kashmir, with a request that he render them as paintings. The couplets lay with the artist for a while, and then, finally paintings emerged. The floods came. These were the seven he retrieved.
Hussain shared thepoems and the paintings with me through an article in The Wire, and I know he will not
mind my sharing one couplet, entitled ‘A mind of winter for the vale’ by Agha
Shahid Ali:
Find the invincible summer in your heart when you, in the depths of winter, come to the slopes of the Vale where even gods have sought refuge…and then regard the frost and the pines crusted with snow.
When I
read this poem and saw the painting, I couldn’t stop my eyes from welling up.
How many Bookaroos will it take for the roads in Srinagar to be free-flowing, I
wondered, and for all children and their families and friends to listen to
stories without a care as it is the right of children anywhere in the world?
Everywhere in the world.
Sandhya Rao can’t thank her stars enough that there are
so many stories in this world and so many wonderful writers to bring them home
to us. She loves the sound of words in any language. Her current favourite word
is evet– yes, in Turkish! She is also a journalist and writer of
children’s books. She believes that if we let children play with books, they will read them.
Here are her books available on our website.
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