Paro Anand’s website has an answer to that perennial question asked of authors—Where do you get your ideas from?—in the form of a lovely little poem. “Sometimes you have to chase a story,” it begins, and lists the ways of hanging on to it: hunt it down, trick it, tickle it, trap it… and goes on to talk of what happens when a story chases you down or lingers just out of reach.
So I rephrase my question: what led you to become a writer? Her reply: “A very special skill. I was and remain an excellent liar.” Polite people call it imagination, she continues, but it’s actually about making your lies believable.
The other reason has to do with her time as a drama teacher. “There were only very archaic or Western scripts for performance. I couldn’t find the kind of plays I wanted to do with today’s Indian children, so I started writing them and then found there weren’t many storybooks that fitted my brief either. So I started writing those.”
Heard prejudices
Early in June, Anand had written about how two of her books— Like Smoke (an updated version of Wild Child and No Guns at my Son’s Funeral )—“have been taken off reading lists. In one school, teachers decided that they were ‘inappropriate’; in another, parents apparently objected to their children being made to read such ‘improper’ children’s books… I am now being invited to talk in schools on the condition that I don’t bring up these titles under any circumstances. I am told that I should stick to some of my ‘safe’ ones.”
Later the same month, Anand was awarded the Bal Sahitya Puraskar by Sahitya Akademi for Wild Child , first published in 2011. Not surprisingly, Anand feels vindicated. “I wonder if the schools that fought shy of the book earlier may reconsider somewhere down the line. I am so pleased that children’s literature is being recognised and being given a place in the sun. It has been a long time coming.”
Much of the controversy over Anand’s books has to do with the topics she chooses for her books: communal hatred, terrorism, failure, being different, sexual abuse, among others. But it’s not as if youngsters don’t know about all this. “Young people read and hear about and even witness violence, suicide, domestic abuse, sexual violence, gender inequality, caste divides but a story that helps them grapple with them is considered taboo. This makes no sense.
‘In fact, there is a great need for good material like this to be made available so that they can, may be, start to find a way out of the darkness,” says Anand.
That said, India is in a good space as far as children’s writing in English is concerned. She points out that publishers “have tried to push boundaries”. “The kind of subjects—sexual orientation, violence, terrorism—being published today would not have been remotely possible some years ago.” She also acknowledges that many schools discuss the subjects openly. “This kind of dialogue is positive and healthy.” Stories, she feels, are the best way to make children aware of what’s going on around them.
Stories also help create a forum to question and re-examine beliefs and ‘heard prejudice’. “I want them to ask themselves how valid this hate or hurt or whatever is, rather than just take what is being said at home or by peers.”
And how does she approach writing a story? “I just jump in and write,” she replies. “I don’t decide that, if it is for a certain group, then there should be a certain length of sentence and paragraph. I am confident that young readers don’t need these silly rules. Look at Harry Potter, which broke every single rule.”
‘A bit of a weird writer’
The mention of Harry Potter brings us to age appropriateness, which Anand pooh-poohs. Why is it that we look at age for books when we don’t do the same for music, she asks. “This over-administration of literature is not a good idea. If they don’t understand a book, they’ll drop it or come back to it later.”
Ask her about the lack of reading culture among kids, she counters, “How much are adults reading?” and goes on to point out that youngsters are attending and engaging with writers at many lit fests across the country. She is not too worried about the influx of technology.
“Just as it doesn’t matter whether you write by hand or on a computer, it doesn’t matter how you read it. I have done some reading online, but personally, because I am tech-challenged, I prefer a regular book.”
She’s got quite a bit going in terms of future projects. She calls herself “a bit of a weird writer” because she does at least two books at a time. She’s got a short story collection for Young Adults, a book about a naughty bear, a collaboration with a Bhutanese writer and “a novel that is proving quite stubborn at the moment.”
