This weekend was Bookaroo, one of Delhi’s most popular children’s literature festivals, and my personal favourite. Like festivals for adults, Bookaroo has multiple stages hosting a variety of authors, illustrators, and storytellers. Bookaroo’s stages, however, are a bit different than the ones frequented by grownups.
There is, for example, the Crafty Corner, a sea of plastic scissors, card paper, and white table cloths spread out behind a sign reading, “Children Only Beyond This Point.”
There is the Think Tank, a pink stone amphitheatre where storytellers ask listeners to laugh, clap, and sometimes even dance along. There is the Scroll-a-Thon, where visitors sit side-by-side on the ground colouring murals inked by children’s book illustrators. Children and adults alike emerge from these stages with fingers sticky with finger paint and fevicol, bubbling with giggles and squeals and all the other wonderful sounds of imaginations running free.
Herein lies the fundamental difference between lit fests for children and adults: at lit fests for grownups, attendees are expected to listen; at lit fests for young people, attendees are expected to create.
On Sunday morning at Bookaroo, several dozen teenagers slouched into the auditorium, the echoey, sun-drenched room where my workshop was scheduled to take place. Still wiping the sleep from their eyes, they collapsed into cross-legged clumps on the soft gray carpet, groggily pulling graffiti-covered notebooks and chewed pencils out of their book bags.
“Everyone awake?” I asked.
After receiving a few noncommittal grunts, I added, “Good. Because today, we’re going to write.”
My book, I explained to them, was an example of epistolary fiction, meaning that the story was told in a series of letters. Today, they were going to attempt some epistolary fiction of their own.
“Why do people write letters?” I asked.
The answers came like microwave popcorn: slow at first, then quick and loud.
“To express emotions.”
“To tell secrets.”
“To add a more personal touch.”
I put the ideas up on a piece of chart paper, writing so fast that I streaked my palms with blue ink.
“Now let’s think like writers,” I said. “Why would an author choose to write a book in letters?”
This time, there was no hesitation.
“With letters, you get to be inside the character’s head.”
“It’s in the present tense, so you feel like you’re there while the story is happening.”
“It feels like the author is talking directly to you.”
“Okay, great,” I said. “Your job today is to start a book. Write a letter between two characters talking about a conflict.”
“Can one of the characters be a non-living object?”
“Can one of the characters be a time, like the future?”
“Can both of the characters be the same person, just different sides of them?”
In creative writing workshops, the answers to questions such as these are always yes, yes, and yes.
For the next 15 minutes, the room was filled with the sounds of pens scratching paper. Some participants wrote just a few lines, while others turned page after page of their notebooks. The silence was only interrupted with young people turning to each other to whisper questions and ask advice. Then it was time to share.
There was a letter from a dead body to a coffin saying that it wanted to be burned, not buried. There was a letter from a little boy asking a tree if he could cut it down to make a boat. There was a letter from Sita demanding answers from Ram. There was a letter from a teenage girl to the paint splattered baseball cap she wore every day. The room filled with characters, conflicts, tension, humour, and suspense.
“How did it feel to write in a letter form?” I asked.
“It felt good,” one student said, “like I could be personal. I could be free.”
It’s my favourite moment in every workshop: the moment when teenagers stop seeing themselves as kids, and start seeing themselves as writers.
For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a novelist. While other girls dreamt about weddings, I dreamt of launch parties. I pictured smoky literary salons where well-dressed adults sipped wine and used words like ‘sophisticated’ and ‘complex’ to describe my writing.
Since I don’t write for adults, I never got my launch party. Instead, I got so much more.
Specifically, I got the opportunity to make art alongside young adults. Every workshop I do reminds me why I turned to writing in the first place: to answer my most secret questions; to heal my deepest wounds; to celebrate the endlessness of imagination; and, most fundamentally, to have fun. No matter how old we get, festivals like Bookaroo remind us that we are, all of us writers, artists, storytellers, and creators. Every now and then, we just need to give ourselves the space to be a little bit wild.
Mathangi Subramanian is the author of three books for children and young adults