IT took a pandemic — and my granddaughter — to nudge me into writing a book. Covid-19 disrupted lives in myriad ways. I lost my elder brother, who taught me to speak English without fear, and a dear nephew. Also, we had to cancel our trip to the US and were forced to celebrate the golden jubilee of our marriage on Zoom. We were home-bound in Bengaluru and so were our children in California, working from home with their kids confined to the house during the lockdown. In order to cheer up our six-year-old granddaughter Shruthi, who was missing her friends and visits to the park and the zoo, I decided to have daily riddle sessions with her on Skype. She would ask a couple of riddles she had learnt from her mother, and I would recast those I had read, heard and stacked away in memory over the years. When her interest in riddles started waning, I switched to storytelling to keep the interaction alive. The riddles revolved around familiar subjects — animals, birds, household items, nursery rhyme characters — but with a twist added by me. If the answer was “monkey”, for instance, I would say: “I love bananas, I live on trees, and I swing from branch to branch. I have in my name a monk who never prays and a key that opens no lock.” More often than not, she would guess the answer well before I had finished, leaving me both amused and mildly deflated. The stories were from an older world — oral tales narrated by my grandmother and elder sister, retold in the contemporary context. The honest woodcutter, for example, gave way to a little girl who loses her favourite pen, only to be tested by a fairy offering golden and silver ones before restoring her own and rewarding her honesty. What began as a simple attempt to engage a child soon became a daily ritual that both of us looked forward to. Watching all this, my wife made a practical suggestion: why not publish them and share them with other children? That suggestion led me into unfamiliar territory. I contacted a number of publishers who were appreciative but cautious, offering only self-publishing options. I had no intention of making money from the manuscript, but I was equally reluctant to spend from my own pocket. After several months of polite rejections and well-meaning advice, I began to suspect that writing a book was considerably easier than getting it published. I was about to abandon the effort when a publisher agreed to bring out the collection as an illustrated book. Titled “Ready for a Riddle?" and published on glossy pages, it was the outcome of those daily exchanges to keep a child engaged during difficult times. Looking back, the pandemic took much away, but it also gave something precious — a daily connection with a loved one across continents, the rediscovery of storytelling and the quiet satisfaction of creating something that may make children smile. The writer is a retired engineer based in Bengaluru
