I suppose many of us had a ‘lockdown project’. I know we were very fortunate in being able to work from home, relatively safe, and at least together as an immediate family, even as we were separated from our wider family. Those days, before the vaccines, before we really knew how Covid spread, are strange to look back on; both still relatively recent, their impact reverberating for many, and yet fast-fading as the world roars on and the children grow.
Many of us, I imagine, had projects that we started at that time, and some of them will have grown, and some will have faded away as other things took their place. This blog was a project that began in the quiet of lockdown, and faded away as the world opened up again. But I missed it, missed thinking and writing and sharing those thoughts. Missed the clarity that drafting and editing these posts required, searching for the best way to convey what I meant. Missed the excitement of sharing a book-ish anecdote. So the blog is back, and I hope revitalised, and (for my sake, at least) better organised.
Our other lockdown project, and one that has been simmering along in the background, was that my husband and I wrote a children’s book together. Let me provide some context. My husband, Sunil – yes, that’s him on the guest contributors page – is an academic, a historian, and back in 2013, he published a book with Harvard University Press called Crossing the Bay of Bengal: the Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. It’s all about the huge movement of people around and between south India and SE Asia, particularly in the C19th and C20th. He did the research for the book before we had children, and so I travelled with him whenever I could; to Myanmar, and around south India, and to Malaysia and Singapore and Thailand in connection with his book. Our first child, our son, was born soon after the book came out.
We’d had it in our heads for a while that we’d like to make Sunil’s research more accessible to the children. However, Sunil’s book wove together an enormous array of sources and stories, so it didn’t seem possible to write a history book or a biography, as there wasn’t enough information about a single individual, and certainly not about ordinary children at that time. So we decided to write historical fiction, and to use three stories to illustrate some of the themes of the book, while also hopefully making them fun to read. I do a little writing myself, but Sunil had never tried writing fiction, so we decided to work on it together. Sunil searched through his research material for inspiration; we discussed plot points and character development in the kitchen; Sunil added historical detail to the descriptions, and wrote a non-fiction section to explain some of the big ideas and set the stories in context. As we talked to our own children about it, our son was quite certain that the main characters all needed to meet at some point, and so we developed a way to interlink the three stories.
It might have stayed there, on the laptop, discussed only over the dinner table, except Sunil was acquainted with V. Geetha, the Editorial Director at Tara Books, an independent publisher based in Chennai, India, whose books we had admired for a while. (Sunil reviewed their The Great Race a while ago.) Tara’s books are really beautiful; the paper is thick and tactile; they work with local artists to produce gorgeously illustrated books, and they publish on a wide range of topics. With the origins of our stories in south India and SE Asia, Tara seemed like the perfect publisher, and we were thrilled when they responded enthusiastically to our suggestion.
Working with Tara Books has been delightful; Geetha helped us with the framing and the epilogue, saying she needed to know how Lily’s story ended. Tara brought in Matthew Frame to illustrate the book, and we were amazed by the vivid drawings that he produced in response to our text. The book’s designer, Ragini Siruguri, came up with the pastel colour scheme, evoking the ‘paper ephemera’ of the C20th; she used a font ‘Gill Sans’ from the 1920s for the captions, and placed the portraits in oval frames to suit the period.
To our amazement and delight, our ‘lockdown project’ is now a real book! We’ve seen the advance copies, but it’s not due to be released until late December. More updates to follow!!
P.S. What I’m reading. I’m making good progress through Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child for book group and I’m enjoying it very much. There’s a touch of fairytale, which I always love in a book, a little hint of the otherworldly, but, set in Alaska where the author is from, it’s also deep-rooted in the land, and quite beautifully written. I must look up what else she has published.
Books for Our Children 