An Absence Of Squirrels
The best kind of children’s book is one you can read at any age. Writing for children doesn’t have to mean resorting to simplification: instead, it could mean leaning into the openness and curiosity that we associate with childhood; not shying away from the complexity and ambiguity that is part of our everyday lives; and creating work that can grow with readers across their lives.
Some of my favourite books I’ve read recently have not just been children’s books I’ve revisited from my childhood, but new ones that I’ve only had the chance to read as an adult — and they’ve fast become titles I would happily give to any 10-year-old I meet. Two of my favourite chapter books from India recently have been Shreya Ramachandran’s Rain Holiday and Aparna Kapur’s An Absence of Squirrels.
In Rain Holiday, we meet 11-year-old Rekha. Rekha lives in an “old, rundown building” in Bombay, two roads away from her best friend, Latisha. In their spare time, Rekha and Latisha make up stories about a tall, friendly giant named Mighty, who was born from children’s laughter and can navigate the busy city in easy steps. One day, when it’s raining heavily enough for the school to declare a holiday, Rekha is excited to meet Latisha — only to find out that her best friend refuses to leave her bedroom.
What follows is a gentle, sweet journey, in which Rekha tries to unravel what’s going on with Latisha, while also negotiating the hundreds of new things vying for her attention: the reappearance of her father, the new classmates she befriends to solve the mystery of Latisha, and the secret inner lives of the adults that orbit her life.
Rekha is a delightful character to accompany through these pages: confused, but well-meaning; imaginative and playful; and above all, a really good friend. She is trying her best to keep her anger in check, and she writes down ‘feeling-words’ her psychiatrist mother encourages her to use in her diary. The adults that populate these pages are three-dimensional and imperfect, and part of Rekha’s journey is seeing them for who they are: not black-and-white cut-outs but people with lives and hopes and dreams that really have nothing at all to do with her. There’s a lovely gentleness with which Rain Holiday (and Rekha herself) approach the complexity and confusion of sadness and anxiety, and the realisation that the world is much, much bigger than our narrow worldviews. Rain Holiday feels like a hug, a reminder that in cloudy times, you can weather the storm together.
Aparna Kapur’s An Absence of Squirrels is a touch more fantastical. It takes place on the (fictional) tooth-shaped island of Thutta, which is divided into sectors connected lengthwise by a train track. On this island lives Katli, a 13-year-old who decides, one day, to follow a cat off a train instead of going to school. And then she’s on the road to an adventure like no other: the discovery of secret meetings, mind-wiping devices, and a conspiracy that stretches all the way back through Thutta’s history. And at the centre of it all is a small animal that Katli has never heard of: something called… a “squirrel”?
An Absence of Squirrels is one of those wonderful books that manages to both tackle illuminating and important themes, and be an undeniably fun, funny adventure to read. Katli’s journey leads her to a healthy questioning of what is taken for granted, a new understanding of how histories are written, and a stronger sense of self.
Katli’s sense of self is one of my favourite things about An Absence of Squirrels. She creates versions of herself to respond to what the day asks of her: Katli One is happy and carefree; Katli Five is curious; Katli Seven is a risk-taker. Across the book, Katli learns to navigate these personas, learning what it means to be one single Katli.
I can’t imagine what it would’ve been like to read Squirrels and Rain Holiday when I was 10, but I can do the next best thing: enjoy them as an adult, and recommend them freely to kids looking for new reads.
The reviewer is a writer and illustrator. Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.