The title caught my eye! So did the theme of the book when I read the blurb. Excitedly, I started the book. Written for fluent readers and young adolescents this has imagined stories and real-life events, brought to us by 15 authors, all carrying their own charm of storytelling.
This book is the outcome of a residency programme for playwrights in 2021 through a collaboration of ThinkArts, Parag and Eklavya. The unintended backdrop of this residency was the Covid 19 pandemic, so it is not surprising that the subject of these two plays has a sense of urgency to reimagine how our relationship to nature could be reordered.
These scenes take place in the opening chapters of The Treasure of the Khasi Hills, a story written by the renowned Bengali author, Hemendra Kumar Roy. It was first published in 1930 as Jawkher Dhawn meaning ‘The Yaksha’s Treasure’.
Aaah! Lizard’, was my expression when I saw one in the kitchen. But as I kept looking at it, I observed it looking at the fruit flies and that brought about a realization for me: It was there because of those fruit flies hanging around my food peels bin near the kitchen sink. After I ate my food, the flies had found their food and the lizard found its in turn.
Deepa Agarwal’s Traveller’s Ghost is the story of three teenagers—Kriti, Mohit and the journalist Neel Pargat. The story starts in the hilly town of Banari where the families have gone for a holiday.
Festival: the very word conjures up images of good food and new clothes. And yet, whose is the celebration? What does a festival mean to the dispossessed, the marginalized? Bama’s Pongal takes this head on, with the very first sentence, ‘Pongal after Pongal, Madasami would pay his respects to his landlord and do whatever he had to, as tradition demanded.