Uma Krishnaswami is the author of several children’s books including Monsoon and The Happiest Tree: A Yoga Story. She is on the faculty of the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults.

Four years ago, an uncle of mine, D.V. Sridharan, started the crazy, impossible, madcap project, of restoring a wasteland in a rural area near the city of Chennai in India, and turning it into a sustainable farm. The reason this has anything to do with my own crazy, impossible, madcap occupation, writing books for children, is that his endeavor too had to do with words.

Words like “swale”: Roll it on your tongue. How round and beautiful it is. How it creates a resonance in the air. Swale. A low tract of land, a swale follows the contour line, and can catch water when it rains. Holding the rush of a monsoon shower, the swale in turn recharges underground water sources so that in the dry season, wells can remain refreshed. Swale. The thing is as magical as its name.

The name of that restoration project is “point Return.” The capitals are intentionally placed, intentionally withheld. The point, Sridharan says, is to return. To come back again and again to the places and the ideas that give us sustenance and hope, that are generative and regenerative in nature, that keep us going, that lead to a larger sense of who “we” are.

Story does this too. Thinking of story as cyclical in nature rather than linear, with a beginning, middle and end, changes everything. It stops me from rushing after answers, grabbing the first one that comes along. It allows me instead to live with questions.

I am happy to say that I have managed to make a career out of living with questions.

Questions shaped two projects that have been dear to my heart for the last few years. The first is a picture book, Out of the Way! Out of the Way! published by Tulika Books in India and illustrated, most improbably, by my near-namesake, artist Uma Krishnaswamy.

Possibly this book was my way of returning to my early childhood in India, to a memory of planting a mango seed. I watched it sprout and then grow, its purple-green shoot and velvet leaves unfolding into the sunlight. Perhaps it was a return as well to another tree, one with spreading branches and curtains of roots descending to the ground. I used to climb that tree and sit in its branches. That was where I first read Winnie the Pooh. As a result I was convinced for years that the Hundred Acre Wood was thick with the aerial prop roots of epiphyte banyan trees.

Still, by 2008, the picture book story I was trying to write–about a boy, a tree, and a road–was going nowhere. It was receiving rejections from numerous editors in the U.S., mainly on the grounds that it simply wasn’t compelling enough; there wasn’t enough there. Maybe the child needed to be a stronger character. 

I tried. I kept on trying.

I sent the manuscript to Tulika Books in India, as much to get a fresh perspective as anything else. I wasn’t even sure it would ever find enough of a direction to merit publication.

A question from Tulika editors Sandhya Rao and Radhika Menon about that draft allowed me to see through my muddled sense of it into something deeper and truer. She asked, “Does it have to be the tree or the road? Can’t it be both?”

At once, the authorial, manipulative things I had been attempting to do with this story fell away. The child in the story, a boy whom I’d been trying to coax, nudge, push, argue into the center of the story took his place as a witness on its edge, the place he now occupies. The passage of time acquired prominence. The name I’d given the boy, a name that was useless at best, fell away. All the time, there had been something larger than this single character trying to making itself felt, and I couldn’t see it. Sandhya’s question returned me to the reasons that I wanted to tell this story at all. Those reasons had to do with memory—the memories of those trees, and the memory of my father’s voice, recounting stories to me in phone conversations over the last few years of his life.

Ursula Le Guin says it is the fiction writer’s task to “open your eyes; listen, listen.” Sometimes it takes a while to travel to a place where the winds are right, and you’re looking in the direction you need to face, and your mind isn’t distracted. Only then can you read your own words and see, hear what lies underneath them. Sometimes you have to return to find the swale.

“Why are there so few humorous multicultural books?” Gifted writers Cynthia and Greg Leitich Smith posed this question at the Reading the World conference in San Francisco in 2004. They presented compelling evidence to support their position. Moreover, they forced me to look at my own work, to think about what I had loved to read as a child and to ask myself why I wasn’t writing that kind of book. Had I come to a point in my writing life where I was in danger of being too earnest? Of taking myself too seriously? Why was I even writing in the first place? Where was the joy?

It was time to return to those essential questions. When I was around eleven, I discovered the books of P.G. Wodehouse. My grandfather had a collection of Herbert Jenkins hard cover volumes that he’d bought on visits to England. I zipped through them, then began saving my money and buying Penguin paperback editions whenever I could. The light-hearted airiness of the Wodehouse universe captivated me as it did so many Indians of my generation. Its goofy surprises, its sly asides seemed as much a commentary on my society as on the England that Plum spoofed.

I wasn’t thinking of either Wodehouse or of the question raised by Cynthia and Greg when I first began to write my story of an Indian-American girl and her favorite Bollywood star meeting up in a small hill town in south India. The story went through many iterations but it wasn’t until I remembered that question about humor that an eccentric, omniscient voice clicked into place.

That narrative voice opened up the scope of the story. I was no longer looking through a small window onto the friendship of two girls. Instead the girls and their bid to remain connected began to play across continents, from Takoma Park, Maryland, to the fictitious hill town of Swapnagiri, whose name means “Dream Mountain”. That shift allowed for the entry of a large array of zany characters, all coming and going in a place that exercised its own peculiar magic.

Now titled The Grand Plan to Fix Everything, this middle grade novel will be published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers in 2011, illustrated in marvelously quirky style by Abigail Halpin.

A note on memory. Cottages dot the Sunny Villa tea estate in The Grand Plan to Fix Everything. Dini, the young protagonist, lives with her family in one of them. My parents lived in a town in those same mountains, with the equally improbable name of Wellington. They lived in a house that really was named Sunny Villa, a house to which I returned as an adult, to revisit and take pictures. It really is painted red. It really does have funny looking attic windows with shutters that look like eyelashes. It really does look as if the house has eyes and is blinking at you. When reality offers up gifts like this, what can you do but accept them with gratitude?

My uncle’s project, point Return, has received such gifts as well. In January 2010 a young couple quit their techie jobs in Mumbai to come and work the land there. Nine months later, a third volunteer joined them. When he’s asked how he finds such people, Sridharan says, “You must so go about realizing your dream that they find you.”

That works for stories too. Go out looking for them and you end up with self-serving, pointless, gratuitous fare. But show up to the work over and over, seeking only to live with a few good questions, and there they are, unfolding their shoots, blinking their eye-lashed windows at you.

Posted October 2010