Ghosts on the Roof of the World - NWfC Feature

Twelve-year-old Deepa’s school is situated at the edge of a winding hill road in Uttarakhand. It is surrounded by apple, apricot and peach orchards, and has a view of the snow-capped mountains. A poet could sit here and wax eloquent all year round. But Deepa is not a poet. She is a student who gets up early to help her parents with work in the orchard. Then she and her siblings walk down to the stream to fetch water, and after that she runs across to school, up and down the valley, avoiding leeches and other creepy crawlies along the way. After school she and her friends graze the goats. It was the sight of Deepa and her friends giggling and trying to get a couple of goats to get down from the branches of a rhododendron tree that gave me a glimpse of what life in the mountains could be like for a child — tough, challenging, unexpected. This inspired the opening for my picture book, How to Solve a Problem Like Himani, set in a tiny school in the hills of Uttarakhand. A few years later, I went on to write Up the Mountains of India, a much longer book covering fascinating facets of the eight major mountain ranges of India — the Trans-Himalayas, the Great Himalayas, the North-East mountains, the Aravallis, the Vindhyas, the Satpuras, the Eastern Ghats and the Western Ghats.

Not a mountaineer or trekker by any stretch of imagination, I owe it to writers like Ruskin Bond for instilling in me a love and respect for the mountains. From Dust on the Mountain, published in 1990, to the recently released Old Mountains, New Echoes, Bond writes with so much affection for the mountains that it is impossible not to fall in love with them yourself. Another author who lived in the hills and wrote about them was the naturalist E R C Davidar. His love for the Nilgiris comes through in his vividly illustrated book The Adventures of a Wildlife Warden.

Then there are books about or by mountaineers. The story of Arunima Sinha, India’s first female amputee to scale Mount Everest, is part of a lovely set called ‘Learning TO BE’ brought out by AdiDev Press. The Girl Who Climbed Mountains, part of the Dreamers series written and illustrated by Lavanya Karthik, is about Bachendri Pal, the first Indian woman to summit Mount Everest. Tine and the Faraway Mountain is based on the life of Tine Mena, a mountaineer from Arunachal Pradesh, while Arjun Vajpai’s On Top of the World: My Everest Adventure (co-written with Anu Kumar) captures how he became the youngest Indian to conquer Mount Everest in 2010.

The mountains are teeming with wildlife and many books zoom into creatures great and small inhabiting these landscapes. Sujatha Padmanabhan’s The Ghost of the Mountains about a snow leopard that wanders into the village of Ang in Ladakh. Illustrated by Madhuvanti Anantharajan, this is an important book to understand the complexities of human-animal conflict. Deepak Dalal’s Snow Leopard Adventure is another thrilling tale of this majestic big cat synonymous with icy mountain peaks.

Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2012, the Western Ghats are a biodiversity hotspot. Many environmentalists have written books set in this region, such as Janaki Lenin’s A King Cobra’s Summer and Karthik Shanker’s The Adventures of Philautus Frog, both of which have beautiful and detailed illustrations by Maya Ramaswamy. The Cat in the Ghat by Ambika Rao and Ruchi Shah is inspired by the real-life expedition of naturalist Sandesh Kadur, who went looking for the elusive Pogeyan cat in the Western Ghats. Deepak Dalal’s Sahyadri Adventure books take readers on a thrilling adventure up and down the windswept ranges of this region.

Nothing beats folktales and mythology when it comes to imparting a message in a fun way. Three for Free, a folktale from Taiwan, retold by Greystroke and illustrated by P G Dinesh, is a tantalising tale of an old man who comes to sell dumplings in a little village by a mountain. Alice McLerran’s The Mountain that Loved a Bird, illustrated by Stephen Aitken, is an allegorical tale of death, friendship, love and rebirth, as witnessed by a mountain. In The Tale of the Naughty Flying Mountains, Anand Neelkantan hilariously recreates a myth about Himavan, the lord of the mountains, who happens to have a wing under his snowy cloak! Flying mountains also feature in Kaveri Chatterji’s Free Mountain, illustrated by Shweta Mohapatra. Shaguna and Prarthana Gahilote put together a compelling collection of Himalayan folktales and myths in their book Curious Tales from the Himalayas.

Like all landscapes, the mountains too face the threat of climate change. Uddalak Gupta and Ruhani Kaur’s The Grass Seeker depicts this through the story of a Gaddi shepherd’s journey across the mighty Himalayas to graze his flock of 300 goats and sheep: For hundreds of years, nomadic Gaddis have responded to the changing seasons, heading up in summer and turning back from the high grasslands before the freezing winter. For the last 40 years, Room Singh has followed in their footsteps… There was a time when no rock could be seen on the mountains… because they were always covered by snow. Now, with temperatures rising because of climate change, the glaciers are melting and grassy pastures have become rare. He worries that if it stops snowing, the rivers will run dry and the world will come to an end.

The undulating mountains are an important landscape, and there is a wide-ranging body of Indian children’s literature covering their rich and diverse features. So, let’s climb our mountains, read about them, and do our bit to conserve them.

Bibliography

How to Solve a Problem Like Himani (Pratham)
Up the Mountains of India (Hachette)
Dust on the Mountain (Penguin)
Old Mountains, New Echoes (Rupa)
The Adventures of a Wildlife Warden (National Book Trust)
Adaptability with Arunima Sinha (AdiDev)
The Girl Who Climbed Mountains (Duckbill)
Tine and the Faraway Mountain (Pratham)
On Top of the World: My Everest Adventure (Penguin)
The Ghost of the Mountains (Kalpavriksh)
Snow Leopard Adventure (Penguin)
A King Cobra’s Summer (Pratham)
The Adventures of Philautus Frog (Pratham)
The Cat in the Ghat (Pratham)
Sahyadri Adventure: Anirudh’s Dream (Penguin)
Sahyadri Adventure: Koleshwar’s Secret (Penguin)
Three for Free (Pratham)
The Mountain that Loved a Bird (Tulika)
The Tale of the Naughty Flying Mountains (Penguin)
Free Mountain (Katha)
Curious Tales from the Himalayas (Penguin)
The Grass Seeker (Pratham)
Gulla and the Hangul (Tulika)
The King and the Kiang (Tulika)
Caravan to Tibet (Penguin)
Journey to the Forbidden City (Penguin)
Searching for the Songbird (Young Zubaan)
This Truck has got to be Special (Tara)
Tales from the Himalayas (Rupa)

Photo credit: Ogin Nayam/Tine and the Faraway Mountain (Pratham)