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Young World
Life in a fish tank
PAROMITA PAIN
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Where can you meet Kattabomman, Forgot the fish, and their sundry friends? In the Underwater Friends series of course!
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Recently the Hippocampus activity centre had some very special guests. Kattabomman the turtle, his friends from the tank he lived in and Forgot the fish were in with their creators to give the enthusiastic audience assembled, an evening of stories, fishy and otherwise.
Kattabomman’s trick is author Sowmya Rajendran’s first book and she is as excited as Niveditha Subramanium, the illustrator, who got together to create this lively story of a mischievous turtle who has oodles of personality and doesn’t like being called a ‘tortoise’ simply because he wasn’t one.
“The series is about a bunch of characters who live in a fish tank — a crab, a prawn, a turtle, a swordfish, a goldfish, and a fish who is so forgetful he doesn’t even know what fish he is. I’ve so far written six stories, three on the forgetful fish called Forgot and three on Kattabomman, the turtle,” says Sowmya.
As the reading progressed, the enthusiastic audience came up with their reasons for loving the tales. Nitya Menon, from Bambino, just loved the way the cat tried to catch Forgot in the Forgot, the Fish tale. “I liked the Indian names given to the characters especially Kattabomman the Turtle,” she said.
Friends forever
Friends Niveditha and Sowmya studied together in Stella Maris College. “We discovered that we both have similar tastes in children’s literature — stories that are fun to read and are placed in an Indian context. We decided to write and illustrate a bunch of stories just for the sake of it. The characters in the stories are based on our friends, so we had a lot of fun working on them. The icing on the cake was when we found a willing publisher to launch our work,” she grins. Kavin , from Vidya Mandir School , liked the glossy pictures, the “touch ‘n’ feel part” given to the main characters in the book but what thrilled him the most was to possess a book autographed not just by the author but also by the illustrator.
“Sowmya had started writing these when we were in our third year so I had plenty of time to think how the characters would look. I would doodle and show her till we both felt that the drawings complemented the characters in the way we wanted them to. Knowing each other well helped because through the course of writing these stories, Sowmya who knew and liked the style in which I drew began to visualise the characters in this way too,” says illustrator, Niveditha. And they together have obviously hit the mark.
As Neha Suresh of Sishya said, “I liked the crab, mermaid, fish and the use of colours in words. For example, the word brown was printed in brown colour.” But Sanjula Shankar, Krishnamurthy International foundation School, has the last word — “Nice, happy story, with great pictures. But the best thing is the word ‘smiled’ printed in just like a smiling face.”
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