Books: No Kid Stuff

A good book for children? Always welcome. Except Maneka Gandhi's latest effort falls into a twilight zone where the structure of each of the six stories is for a child, but content in most is rather adult.

Two stories are really enjoyable. In "Prince Boulababa", the first story, Gandhi narrates a lovely tale of a greedy prince who is really fat and has only one thing on his mind: food. And like all stories for children, there is a moral too. Makes you wonder why children's authors are so often compelled to include a moral at the end of a story. The story takes the roly-poly prince through many kingdoms in search of a suitable bride and his journey ends when he meets a girl who takes his obesity as a challenge and manages to trim him to size.

The other eminently readable story is the one the book is named after, "The Rainbow". It is about six princes and their sister, who bring sunshine and rain together to create the world's first rainbow. No moral here. In "Heads and Tales" there is a witch who collects papers and publications of environmental seminars, "a collection of little value". Now to think that children would know of the futility of environmental seminars is somewhat ambitious.

Laid out with one sketch for each story, the book is certainly not run of the mill. It looks different, reads different but the "enchanting collection of stories for children" might just be liked more by older people.

AUTHORSPEAK:Shauna Singh Baldwin
Continental Drifter
Three countries, many women and one sensibility

When I was growing up in India, authors were Foreigners. Indian writers, except perhaps Salman Rushdie, were writers. Today, that has changed. We too are authors." With the Friends of American Writers Award, the Canadian Authors Association Prize and the Writers' Union of Canada Prize tucked under her belt, Shauna Singh Baldwin should know. It took her two years to write English Lessons and Other Stories (being brought to India this summer by HarperCollins), a collection of short stories-ranging from 1919 to the present and interweaving the experiences of women in North America and India-which marked her debut into the new bestselling market of Indian writers, sorry authors, writing in English. The common thread lies in tying together the countries, whether through a white Canadian woman visiting India with her Sikh husband ("Nothing Must Spoil This Visit") or through an Indian woman newly emigrated to Canada ("Devika", "Montreal, 1962") or even through a little Sikh girl surviving the second Indo-Pakistani war ("Family Ties").

Baldwin, who was born in Montreal, grew up in India and now lives in Milwaukee in the United States, says she "is indebted to all her three countries". Writing about middle-class women, Baldwin feels they experience the same problems irrespective of which of these three countries they belong to. Partition, for example, is an issue not exclusive to India.

What really strikes you though is the thought that here is another author who has become a part of the booming market for Indian literary superstars that is a product of the '90s and was created by the likes of Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy-her simple, layman-friendly prose calling to mind another new author, Anjana Appachana, the fact that her books are bestsellers in western countries and her admission that "if it weren't for the Internet, I would have taken 12-14 years to finish instead of two years".

Now, with a radio show called Sunno in Canada and English Lessons behind her, Baldwin is all set to publish her first novel, What The Body Remembers, in September. Here too she will draw on her diverse cultural background to deal with the empowerment of women. Move over Rushdie.

-Manjari Chatterjee