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Thursday, Dec 22, 2005

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Of a young boy and the sea

Vani Doraisamy

German award for apocalypse narrative

CHENNAI: Seen from a child-sized perspective, nothing can ever outlive the horror of memories brought on by last year's killer waves along the Indian coast.

"I'm not brave. I only know the sea. The sea is my friend. At least, I thought the sea was my friend," the pint-sized protagonist of Sandhya Rao's book My Friend, the Sea, could have been any one of the little boys in any Tamil Nadu coastal town who watched the dance of death last December.

The book, a movingly and simply told narrative of a little boy whose small world was blown apart by the waves, has won the prize for the best book at the Berlin Children and Youth Literature Festival under the Ambitious Children's Book Project category. The prize also came with an add-on joy for Ms. Rao, a former sub-editor with Frontline: it will be translated into German too, something which the publisher, Chennai-based Tulika, hopes will take the little boy's loss across cultures to a global audience.

The award is instituted by the Kreuzberger Kinderstiftung Foundation, which will also publish the German translation.

"The story is sketched out from the perspective of the young boy... his enthusiasm for the sea to the fear that it suddenly brought about, and of the hope — in spite of all the odds - that he slowly builds up again... .We also find it a classic example of how books can create associations/connections across borders," the citation said.

The book eschews visceral photographs of the horror and looks for strands of hope amidst despair, of the Hemingway-ian `Man can be destroyed but never defeated' kind, only this time it is a child who has lost home, hearth and father to the waves who declares, quite simply: "I want to ride the waves with my friends... My brother has promised to make me a new kattumaram."

As they say, where there is hope, there is life.

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