Every once in a while, a mail from Sujata will appear saying ‘We must have this book for the Library’, and reading about it I agree, ’We must’! Depending on our current ‘funds allotted to buy books’ we then either buy it or add it to our wish list. A few weeks ago, another such mail appeared with the book ‘The Red Tree’. I looked it up and I agreed…‘we must.’
The Book starts like this… ‘Sometimes the day begins with nothing to look forward to’.
This is a picture book. A children’s picture book. With one or two lines on each page. With uneven lines of words that falter towards the end. With drawings and illustrations that capture each hum of sadness and each drop of hopelessness. It is not bright and sparkly or even and clear. It is not optimistic and bubbly and full of adventure. It is sad, it is true, and it is genuine.
Books like these may not be in line with what an adult thinks a child ought to read but it is in line with what a child may need to read. It is for those who have hidden beneath tables and behind curtains, silent and quiet, who have experienced death and loss and faltered at the inability of adults to interact with that grief, for a child who has been abused, for a child who is unable to comprehend this world, and for the child who wakes up some mornings with nothing to look forward to.
Shaun Tan has in a surreal and magical combination of words and illustrations evoked through this book the exact feelings that many of us, and that many children too, will be going through at some point of life or the other. And have perhaps felt alone in their feelings and experience of it.
The purpose of a book is not always to create a world that ends with ‘happily ever after’, but to create a space in which one finds oneself and loses oneself in, at the same time. We need not have this in a novel of 200 pages or in complicated poetry and speech. A few words and images in a picture book are enough to touch and be touched.
Not long ago, I read the story ‘Bridge to Terabithia’ by Katherine Paterson, and as I neared the end I knew something frightening and terrible was going to happen, but I also knew it would be okay; everything would be okay. And sometimes it is just this realistic reassurance and empathy that we need in a book.
‘……..but suddenly there it is right in front of you bright and vivid, quietly waiting, just as you imagined it would be.’
Shaun Tan
The Red Tree