Who reads books these days?” The idiot box addicts have often asked me. “A lot more read (and you could perhaps add write too) than ever before!”, is the only answer. Our millennium children have changed the very face of publishing. At least if you were to go by this collection of 17-year-old Zuni Chopra’s short stories. Indeed, they are extraordinary tales told in extraordinary times: You have a little matchstick girl looking for a companion; an otter waiting to gobble up fish thinks about the human race and its way of life; a gnome finds himself setting out with a merchant on an adventure to deal with an impending war and there’s the island that awakens to a hovering storm and untold dangers lurking on the horizon. With nary a care, she boldly experiments with theme and form.
She makes the unbelievable credible; approximating the remote and making the impossible possible. There is a stunning buffet on the table. It’s a veritable feast—prose, poetry, fiction—flung together with merry abandon range at you. The aroma, the taste and flavours come back to haunt you long after you have had your fill. Right ab initio, you’re not left with any doubt that this book is about turning images upside down: ‘They’ve got it wrong,’ she says shifting the normal paradigm.
But then, after all is said and done, at the end of the road you find out that ‘Jack was foolish, Red disobedient, Punzie naive, Ella stubborn, Aladddin a thief, Goldy indecisive, Puss a rotten crook and Beauty in love with the castle than a prince…. Between you and I, Granny’s house burnt down long ago.’ At the end of the lane is the drunk in the pub who we are told: ‘He walksh and he walksh, but he never reaches it. And so he thinksh he’ll turn round and go home... but he can’t!’ ‘Stories matter,’ the writer interjects, adding: ‘Stories can hold you more than you know. There’s a reason you come back to hear these stories. Even from a drunk.’
As she fumbles with her key on reaching her doorstep, she turns her head to discover that indeed there’s something at the end of the road. ‘Something ivory, shimmering with moonlight, giving gusts of chill. It twisted towards me, moving so slowly I could have almost imagined it.’ Should you, dear Reader like tales with a twist or like Alice in Wonderland feel like dropping into a world full of magic and wonder, then this book is just perfect for you. And by the by, just in case you’ve forgotten, the author is in her teens. And the Zumi Chopra show has begun... as they say: ‘The ride has just begun. You ain’t seen nothing yet!’