In the ‘kingdom of conflict’ when a 12-year-old carves outthe ‘Kingdom of Dreams’ through her lucid imagination, it becomes a matter ofoverwhelm for a reader at the very outset of the read.
The courage of the little author Touyiba Binti Javaid inproducing fiction fantasy is laudable. When many kids of her age struggle toset the sentences straight, Touyiba goes ahead her time in knitting an imaginaryplot in her debut novella “Luna Spark and the Future Telling Clock” with a nicecommand of language.
The 129-page novella has 44 short chapters brewing withimaginary characters where humans are replaced by cats and all the charactersare related to the central character and the narrator of the story, Luna Sparkor Coco who’s also a cat. Coco lives in a city called Sparky kittens with herUncle Fur, working in Kitty police, her sister Chubby and her brother Cloudy.
The story is set round a search for a stolenfuture-telling-clock, taking the reader and characters searching for the clockfrom one astonishing place to another.
Keeping the reader hooked in curiosity through the course ofher 44 short chapters and with astounding brevity of sentences, the authordoesn’t stray while strolling through her imaginary dream land. Each chapterunfolds a little surprise which makes her work engrossing enough in addition tothe intelligent names she gives to her characters.
The book with its intelligent twists and turns also reflectsthe author’s knack for her developing sense of symbolism. In one of her chapters titled ‘The book wormsland’, the author talks of robots working as shopkeepers, police, drivers anddoctors while as she animates the books into walking and talking characters.
Amidst the growing culture of ‘middling café publishing’ in Kashmir where the standard of local literature is stooping low with random plots and basic structural inconsistencies, Touyiba’s work comes as a breakthrough, although there has been an unattended scope of more care on part of the publisher of the book. Surprisingly, J&K Academy of Art, Culture and Languages has also missed out on sifting some silly grammatical errors through a very fine text. It only goes on to reveal the casual approach of other publishers in Kashmir while leaving the texts replete with mistakes.
In addition, a careful designing of the book’s cover would also have substantiated the inquisitiveness flowing through the chapters within the book.
Though there is a scope of adding more creative colors andsurprises in the plot, it won’t be an exaggeration to say that the12-year-old’s text does remind one of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in the Wonderland.The talking Rose with her enormous petals, the flying Fairy, the Mermaid, theElves, the Unicorn with a colorful horn, the Fantasy-lake and many such surrealcharacters and settings lend diverse shades to the plot, rendering Luna Sparkadept enough to be adapted into an animation movie for kids. Besides, the workcould be added to the reading list of students in schools which would serve asa literary template for aspiring writers like Touyiba, the prodigious child ofconflict, with wonderful potential.