New-age monsters

They didn’t exist in the past. An excerpt from ‘Kungfu Aunty vs Garbage Monsters’ by Shweta Taneja

The tower rose up into the grey haze above, becoming invisible. I gulped, wondering if I should follow my hero Wild Wuss and just give up. Want to live longer? Stay out of trouble. The dogroach snarled. I hurried towards the stairway and started to climb up. The stairs circled around the tower. 

It reeked. Like hundreds of unflushed toilet bowls stacked together. The stench leaked even through the protective oxysuit, making me nauseous. I gagged, but kept climbing. The walls and the stairs were dangerous. Things stuck out of them. A broken table’s leg. A smashed TV. Twisted and blackened mesh of steel. Weathered wall of a bedroom. My heart skipped a beat as I walked around a carcass of a deer. 

My oxysuit had become hot inside. My palms were sweaty. Wild Wuss would have never come to Puke Peak. No matter what. He would have stayed out of trouble. But what choice did I have? 

‘Focus,’ I said to myself. I had to save Dad. After climbing up and up for what seemed like hours, I reached a landing which smelled of vomit-flavoured ice-cream. A massive fountain covered a whole wall. Rotten treacle dripped from its ceiling towards a collecting pool below. Millions of worms and tiny slugs wriggled in it, building ridges and caverns, swimming. 

This definitely looked like the Mantle of Mottled Molasses. I located a door beside it, nodded to another dogroach who stood guard there and stepped in. 

A dark, damp tunnel that looked like an intestine led me deep into the palace. This was fast becoming a bad, bad idea. 

The far end of the dank corridor opened into a cavern, with roughly carved walls made of debris, cement, steel, bricks and bits of broken buildings. The high walls ended jagged, steel rods rising up in the skies. A heavy population of Particulators and Virulators swam above in the skies, blocking the sun. 

In the middle of the cavern was a ridge of squelchy stuff, like a giant worm of rotten food. A colossal, gooey collation of all kinds of refuse. I started to walk around it, trying to locate Mayor Junkfan. 

‘Mayor?’ I called, my voice trembling. The mound moved. Up and down. Breathed. It was a creature. Alive. Sprawled across the vast floor of the cavern, tentacles erupting from it. 

In between the circle of tentacles, was a giant mouth, with fat lips. At first, I didn’t recognise it. Trash Rajah had changed so much since I’d last seen him — a year ago, on his last birthday. He had deformed, and expanded into a giant worm. 

We had been taught that to protect humans, Trash Rajah had started to consume the trash we created. But there was so much trash, that he couldn’t do it alone and so garbage monsters were born. 

I looked at the giant before me and could not find a trace of anything human — a face or eyes or legs. All I could see was a big, round, black hole of a mouth. A bottomless pit, held together by greyed lips. The mouth was the size of two trucks side to side. He opened his mouth. A black tongue wriggled out of it. 

From my left emerged Mayor Junkfan who signalled eight monsterquitoes that dragged a plate upto Trash Rajah’s vast mouth. Rajah’s lips gobbled the plate, the food and the eight monsterquitoes. The lips closed, before opening again. 

‘More,’ he rumbled. His blackened tongue slobbered. 

‘This is all there is today, Your Highness of Terrible Trash.’ 

‘Does Pretty City want us to starve?’ hollered Trash Rajah. The floor shook, the patched-up walls rattled with displeasure. I moved quickly as monsterquitoes and fatflies flew out of the cavern into the tunnel, trying to escape their king’s wrath. 

Extracted from ‘Kungfu Aunty versus Garbage Monsters’ by Shweta Taneja. Published by Talking Cub (the children’s imprint of Speaking Tiger Books), 2023. The book is priced at Rs 299 and is available online. 

In conversation with the author

1. What inspired ‘Kungfu Aunty vs Garbage Monsters’?

One monsoon evening, while playing Lego blocks with my nephew — who was nine years old at the time — we wanted to create monsters. What is the most urgent challenge of our times, we asked ourselves? And the first thing both of us came up with was pollution and trash. Those two things are the modern-day monsters! We ended up creating all kinds of garbage monsters with the blocks that evening — from giant-sized mosquitoes, dog-sized lethal roaches with a fatal bite to plastic-fed crocodiles who loved to eat kids. Now that we had monsters, we needed a superhero to fight them all. So was born Kungfu Aunty — a martial-arts movie loving-cleaning robot who is a pacifist at heart.

2. What can readers expect from the book?

You can expect to be thoroughly entertained. The book is a laugh-out-loud, action-filled adventure where siblings Lila and Kabir fight garbage monsters that rule their city. At nine, Kabir is older and a wuss at heart. At seven, Lila is a rebel. Even though they’re so different, Lila and Kabir fight garbage monsters with the help of their mom’s robot, Kungfu Aunty. You’re going to laugh your way through this book. And at the end of it feel determined to face the climate challenges around you. It’s an optimistic, ecopunk story.

3. What are your top three book recommendations for young readers?

‘History Mystery’ series by Natasha Sharma; ‘Beauty is Missing’ by Priya Kuriyan; ‘Matilda’ by Roald Dahl