There's always a rainbow

This is a layered story about an anxiety-ridden boy.

Though the book, The Boy In The Dark Hole, written by Vaishali Shroff, comes under the category of a chapter book, its relevant for all age groups. Once I stopped admiring the cover, I started reading the book. The story begins with a father and his 10-year-old son SP, chasing a rainbow to find the pot of gold. This scene conjured up such a powerful visual that I badly wanted to see a rainbow myself.

The illustration that followed the first page, a black-and-white visual of a father and son, with buildings in the background, the only colour in the form of a rainbow, is a good precursor to both the sweet story and the wonderful illustrations that follow. At the end of the first chapter, the reader gets a peek into SP’s brain, the aforementioned scene being the work of his imagination while he was sitting at his desk in a gloomy mood.

Weighed down

Over the next few pages, the reader sees SP being weighed down by his parental expectations. It constantly pushes the small boy down a dark hole. The dark hole of sadness, of not living up to his parents’ expectations of him, of not being good enough... Shroff reveals bits and pieces of crucial information in each chapter, like she is peeling the layers of an onion. She makes SP forge an instant bond with the readers. My heart ached for the lanky, bespectacled, anxiety-prone boy, who wanted to be left alone with his sketchbook, to read poems and slurp Maggi noodles, but had to play football to keep his father happy.

I did wonder after a few chapters why the boy was called SP and not by his first name and when Shroff revealed the reason, I couldn’t stop smiling. SP’s two friends, the food-loving Lobo and the smart Kuhu, the girl who plays football better than the boys, are friends everyone wants.

As the story unfurls, readers realise that SP has a plethora of memories that depress him, plunging him, again and again, into the tunnel of sadness, which like an evil monster, pulls him deeper and deeper inside. A confession in the bus to his best friend Lobo, which the bullies Chandu and Bandu overhear, leads to a nasty nickname in school. His teacher’s constant focus on punctuation dries up the joy that poems gave SP. His dad avoiding the football field so that he doesn’t witness his son’s pathetic skills and his drawing being dismissed by his father, keep him inside the dark tunnel of sadness. The more depressed SP feels, the more wriggly his drawing gets, like a tangle of threads, like a tangle of thoughts.

Shroff has tackled an important issue that adults often ignore. Children are prone to sadness and insensitive comments hurt them deeply, probably scarring them for life. And this feeling must be handled delicately by adults, both parents and teachers. Kudos to Shroff for ensuring that SP’s parents aren’t painted as villains. Samidha Gunjal’s illustrations wonderfully complement the story. Where Shroff’s words end, Gunjal’s art picks up the thread, showing the reader what exactly is happening inside SP’s head.

The hollow brown tube SP constantly plays with, is a metaphor for the dark tunnel in which he finds himself in, whenever he accosts sadness or a sad memory enters his mind. But, there is always light at the end of tunnels, and in SP’s case, it comes in the form of Kuhu and Lobo. I won’t reveal more. You must meet SP yourself through his endearing story.