THE TRICKSTER BIRD

Poverty is often a concept many of us find ourselves uncomfortable discussing. We get discomfited by them and react with varying combinations of indifference, irritation or pity, and seek to forget them as soon as possible. We distance ourselves by imagining the poor as some sort of separate being—either idealizing them or villainizing them, but inevitably making caricatures who do not resemble ‘people’ we can identify with. Rinchin and Manjari Chakravarti’s The Trickster Bird is a beautiful and very important story which narrows the chasm between ‘us’ an ‘them’ and presents a small cross-section of the life of a little rag picker girl who lives in the city and ekes out a living with her family. The story introduces convalescent Renchu, a little girl who could not help her mother and sisters as she usually does as she was running a fever. Restless, she cajoles a story out of her grandmother, who tells a story of her grandfather in the time when they were respected members of a village who made their living of the bounty of the forest where they used to live.