Dear Reader,Now that the Booker Prize Foundation has launched the inaugural Children’s Booker Prize, we can start paying more attention to some of the amazing children’s books that come out of India. One of the latest to hit the shelves is Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s The Weavers and the Elephant, a slim collection of three stories with beautiful illustrations by Proiti Roy. What I found endearing about the stories was their old-world charm—a harking back to a time when values such honesty, courage, loyalty, friendship still held good and were inculcated as desirable qualities in children. In this, they reminded me of my favourite children’s author in Bengali, Leela Majumdar. In Majumdar’s stories, as in Hansda’s, there is a simplicity that warms the cockles of the heart. This is the kind of stories we turn to when the contemporary world—where children, for instance, are expected to be snazzy first and everything else later—gets too much with us.Those familiar with Hansda’s work would know that food and food habits feature prominently in it. The first story (“They eat meat!”) in his award-winning collection, The Adivasi Will Not Dance (2015), is about a family from Jharkhand getting their first major culture shock in Vadodara, Gujarat, on being told that their meat-eating habits might attract the wrong kind of attention there. In “Tina Quito and Tara Musca”, the last story in The Weavers and the Elephant, Tina, a young mosquito with an overwhelming fondness for sugar syrup, finds herself in danger of being branded a pariah for her food choice by her blood-sucking ilk. She feels isolated till she finds a friend in a housefly, Tara Musca, with a similar partiality for sugar syrup. While there is nothing unusual about houseflies drinking sugar syrup, Tara is an outcast in her own way: “With her nearly roundish, blob-like like look, Ms Tara Musca defied the chief beauty and body standard laid down in the canon of houseflies. She was stout, not slender.”And so, the two become fast friends, laughing together, gossiping, sharing their passion for sugar syrup, even saving each other from life-threatening situations. “Coat-button daisies, sunlight, fights, and patch-ups, their togetherness despite their differences, and one other thing they couldn’t live without: sugar syrup. All kinds of sugar syrup.”Easy, it seems. Difficult, when you replace the insects with human characters. As “They eat meat!” from The Adivasi Will Not Dance showed, humans are not so keen on bonding “despite their differences”. If food choices unite insects in “Tina Quito and Tara Musca”, in “They eat meat!” they divide humans.The eponymous first story in The Weavers and the Elephant pivots on a weaver who goes from being very poor to very rich but doesn’t lose her simplicity in the process. In this, she stands out from the greedy villagers around her. Even when she becomes the richest, “she donates clothes to those who are unable to buy... The business is managed by her sister and they have several weavers and tailors working for them. But she prefers to live in her small cottage with two extra rooms in her village.” In this story, Proiti Roy’s illustrations go a long way in creating the sense of the idyll from where no one can displace the weaver because it is inbuilt in her. Roy’s quaint depictions of village life would remind readers of Nandalal Bose’s illustrations for the Bengali primer, Sahaj Path, written by Rabindranath Tagore. Nandalal’s images created the archetypes of rural Bengal—palmyra palm (taal) trees, mud houses, potters, bullock carts, women cooking on chulhas—that are embedded in the minds of generations that grew up learning Bengali from Sahaj Path. The fact that Roy has studied fine arts in Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, is evident in her evocative drawings.My favourite story from the collection is the middle one: “The Khikri-kata Bhoot”. Bhoot is Bengali for ghost and, as I have said in earlier newsletters, I feel a special affinity with them. Hansda’s story is deliciously chilling. Vaguely reminiscent of the Red Riding Hood story, “The Khikri-kata Bhoot” is however entirely desi, in its location, characters, and sensibility. Excited on reading it, I asked Handa why children should read ghost stories. Pat came the answer: “Because ghosts are real and everyone should know the reality.”Hansda’s works for adults strike hard because they are uncompromising in their realism. Perhaps because humankind cannot bear very much reality, Hansda had faced backlash for The Adivasi Will Not Dance, with the Jharkhand government banning it briefly in 2017. Ever since, Hansda has mostly brought out children’s books, apart from the memoir-ish My Father’s Garden, and a translation.In an interview with Frontline, he was asked whether the ban has imposed any creative constraint on him (“I started self-censoring myself: Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar”, Sept 28, 2025). He said, “I am not sure how to say this, but I think I started self-censoring myself. I started looking for sober, non-forceful ways to put across my words. I started developing this thing called lihaaj. Even if I ask questions, I think before asking questions.” We can see this process at work in The Weavers and the Elephant, which shows how things should be in an ideal world, while lightly hinting at how they really are—people are inordinately jealous of others’ success (“The Weavers and the Elephant”); a teenage girl alone in the house can face all kinds of dangers, ghosts being the least among them (“The Khikri-kata Bhoot”); people are usually intolerant of difference (“Tina Quito and Tara Musca”). While The Weavers and the Elephant gains nuances because of the things left unsaid, I also fervently hope that one day the conditions would be such that Hansda can revert to writing about reality without being compelled to couch it in fantasy. That will do justice to his talent and his wide experience of human behaviour as a practising doctor.I will return soon with more book-talk. Till then,Anusua Mukherjee Deputy Editor, FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS