BENGALURU: Maggi, khosla, jhaadu... These are just a few of the many names Divya Anand grew up hearing. Like many others with curly hair, Anand too recalls barely seeing any character in pop culture with her kind of hair. And now, thanks to her new picture book for children, titled I Hate My Curly Hair, youngsters today may not face the same reality that she did. “It wasn’t until Hermione Granger that I actually read of a character with curly hair. Even the animated film, Brave, where Merida is a bold curly-haired girl, came out when I was in my 20s,” says the 34-year-old city-based product manager, who also moonlights as a writer.
Though this is Anand’s second book, it was written well before her first –Dare Eat That, which was a guide to bizarre food around the world. Finding a publisher, however, was a challenge. “While children’s books on this topic do exist, most were US-based, and written for African American girls. So the context was different here,” she explains. Eventually, Penguin India came on board and Anand polished the manuscript last year. Due to the ongoing lockdown, the book was unable to hit stores on March 25, but saw its Kindle release in the first week of April.
Told in verse following a rhyme scheme, the story carries over 32 pages, over the course of which the protagonist eventually learns to accept and love her hair. The same journey took Anand almost two decades, with her finding comfort in her curls only after the teenage years. “Maybe if I read a book like this, I would have accepted it better,” she says, adding that the work was therapeutic for her as well. “I made a list of things that make curly hair cool and doing that helped. The story came naturally but what kept me going is that I know how I felt and I know that youngsters still feel the same today as well,” she points out. While the book may look specifically at the struggles of a curly-haired person, the ultimate message could be for anyone. Says Anand, “The things you don’t like about yourself could also actually be cool. It’s better to not care about what other people think.”