Passage through India

"My Aunt Anna came back from India With stories of places to which she had been To warm me through winter, she sewed me a quilt With pictures of all the things she had seen."

--- and so begins ``Excuse Me, Is This India?'', an absurd and fantastic story of travel through a child's imagination.

lllustrated with ``exquisite textile art'' by Swiss-German textile artist Anita Leutwiler, it is Tara Publishing's latest offering, and in nonsense verse, for the seven-year-old.

Released last Saturday at Good Books book store, publisher Gita Wolf introduced it to the enthusiastic gathering as a ``special book''.

A few minutes later, it was its author Anushka Ravishankar's turn to hold the stage with a reading-performance of the verse. The children were tuned in right through and eventually flocked around her to get their books signed.

This is how the story behind the book began:

``Anita Leutwiler was on a visit to India when Gita Wolf met her and asked her to record her impressions of the country in a quilt format, '' says Anushka. The next step was to use it as material for a book.

``I have done this before ... writing stories around pictures. After mulling over it, I thought it would be best to stay with the concept of it being about a journey and a fantasy.

``This book is slightly different from what I have done, being a bit sophisticated. But, the process of writing is the same with the verse matching the idea,'' says the mathematics graduate. ``It is also a four-colour book, which is rarely brought out.

``I enjoy writing verse and the nonsense is incidental. In nonsense verse, the logical sequence is important and I guess that this is where my mathematical connection works.''

Leutwiler, she adds finally, was encouraging, her favourite line in the book being ``It doesn't matter where you are

But where you want to go.''

``Excuse Me, Is This India?'' has also been co-published by Australia's Spinifax.

MURALI N. KRISHNASWAMY

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