Wearing a diaper did not bother Nanju very much. Though he was ten years old, it was as normal for him as pulling on a pair of socks or lacing up one’s sneakers was for other kids.
It is said that good writing makes the ordinary extraordinary. But sometimes it does the opposite.
Zainab Sulaiman’s ‘Simply Nanju’ begins in an almost deceptively simple fashion: as a story about classroom politics. Nanju (Nanjegowda), his friends Mahesh, Aradhana, Sangeetha, Pratik and his arch enemy Ronit are all students in Standard Five at United Integrated School. Like all children, they squabble and make up, argue and jeer at each other, hide from teachers, fight for the best seats on the bus, avoid the impatient ayah and jealously guard their secrets. Each of them has a specific disability but while the writer describes their disabilities in ways that a child can understand, she doesn’t dwell on them. What she’s really interested in is everyday happenings at home and in school.
Published by Duckbill, the book is written in Indian English using that special dialect of primary schools where words and sometimes entire phrases are omitted. Yet the prose rarely sounds forced suggesting that the writer has a good ear for language and has spent considerable time in the classroom. Her tone is matter-of-fact but never insensitive. ‘Disability is a fact of life,’ she seems to say, ‘and people learn to live with it.’
Nanju is anxious that he will accidentally pee in public because his spine doesn’t work the way it should but he is equally worried that his father will pack him off to a hostel if he doesn’t do well in school. He wants to be popular with the cleverest girl in class and he’s keen to avoid getting bullied if he can help it. He’s not above hiding a test paper with poor marks or feigning fever when he wants to bunk school.
The school prefects swagger like prefects everywhere, drunk on power and eager to use it on their subordinates. And the teachers are like teachers in any school: some strict and unrelenting and others indulgent and easy to manipulate. There are moments of kindness and empathy like the time when Nanju refuses to join the others in laughing at Asha Miss’s slip of tongue or when Mahesh offers Nanju bubble gum after he gets scolded.
Yet hidden within the ordinariness of the book are serious and sensitive issues: poverty, child abuse, theft and bullying. And the story reminds us that sometimes the victims are sitting right next to us though we fail to see them. If all this seems like too much realism for a children’s novel, think again. Simply Nanju is also a whodunit with Nanju and his best friend trying very diligently to solve the mystery of the missing notebooks. And they end up finding out a lot more than they set out to uncover.
Read the story of how the book came into being in Zainab Suliaman’s own words here.
1 thought on “Simply Nanju: A Deceptively Simple Book About Complex Issues”