Every now and then, a message from a reader puts a smile on my face.
“Am so sleepy :) Was waiting to tell this to someone. Who else but you?” This text is from a new friend whom I discovered online when she reached out to say she had loved reading my books to her son – he’s in college now.
A photo of a four-year-old girl. She’s lying on a bed, curly hair tumbling over the pages of a book and through her ringlets I can see the familiar images of a sleepy elephant. “She’s been poring over the book all day,” says her father. “She adores elephants.”
A video of a five-year-old in the US. He’s reading out one of my stories to his mother. He patiently explains to her what a mud-pit is and changes his voice for each character in the story. Then he jumps up in exasperated excitement when she pretends to forget the ending – he appeals to his father, who calls out the next sentence from another room.
And then, a few days ago, I met a couple at a party who exclaimed when they heard my name and insisted on a selfie. I felt like a rock star! Their kids had named their dogs after characters in my books. I gazed at pics of a golden Mallipoo and a regal black-and-white Shanmugam. Their daughter (now a teenager) insists the next pet will be a Kamini.
When I wrote my first book, I’m So Sleepy, I had never imagined that it would be a source of such unexpected joy. Then, all I could think of was getting my little fellow to sleep. A bright-eyed insomniac, he suffered from FOMO long before that term had been coined. And to get him to settle down, I told him a tale of an elephant who’d forgotten how to sleep. I’d hoped that the constant repetition of the word ‘sleepy’, the eeee-s getting longer and longer with each successive ‘sleeeeeepy’, would have a soporific effect.
I can’t believe that was 20 years ago. Since then, there have been five more books in the Baby Bahadur series: the last one came out a couple of years ago. All the books have had multiple reprints and Sleepy is in its 10th reprint now. I recently found out that the cumulative sales of the series are about to cross 2,00,000 copies, across more than 10 languages, including Chinese, and soon Dutch.
I hadn’t planned a series when I wrote Sleepy. But Bahadur and his gang firmly ensconced themselves in my head and wouldn’t budge. What began with a polite little baby elephant segued to a lion who wouldn’t stop snoring, a chameleon suffering from performance anxiety, runaway piggies, a horse whose scolds were missed, a monkey who loved eating jamun. There were others too: rebel teenage elephants, a camel who wanders in and out of the drama, a villainous lion, a fastidious rabbit, a sporty crocodile.
As I told my son this morning – who’d ‘a’ thunk it?! That a toddler’s refusal to sleep would result in a series of books with many thousands and thousands of children reading them across the world. That, 20 years later, a new generation of little ones would be immersed in the stories, that college students still remembered them with fondness, that their parents would greet me with affection that lingers years after they had stopped the bedtime reading ritual. Maybe my earliest readers will, one day, read these out to their children. How amazing that would be!
None of this would have been possible without the magical team at Tulika. How chuffed I felt when Radhika Menon called me, back in 2003, to tell me she found the story a “delightful, contemporary tale”. She said, “You should write some more” – and that gave me the confidence to write Snoring Shanmugam, the second in the series.
Deeya Nayar – first editor, now dear friend. One of the most delicious experiences in this journey has been the editing sessions with Deeya. Anyone who thinks children’s books are “easy-peasy, just 600 words”, should eavesdrop on our conversations. Grammar is parsed, gerunds are debated, sentences are weighed for balance, for poetry and simplicity. Deeya’s steady yet light touch has taught me much about writing for children.
And by lucky happenstance, I was paired with the talented Priya Kuriyan, illustrator extraordinaire. This was Priya’s first book, something I like to boast about. When I saw Priya’s first artwork of Bahadur I was filled with a sense of wonderment. It seemed as though she had reached into my mind, seen my dream of that forgetful baby elephant and apparated him onto the page, all spiky-haired and cross-eyed with sleep.
“Which one are you going to write about next?” is the question I get asked these days. Well, maybe Kamalnayan will tell me his story, or perhaps it’ll be Chandu.
All I know is that Bahadur will be in it. He may have been born 20 years ago, but he’ll always be a baby to me.
Check out the Baby Bahadur series on our website!
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