Washington — Children’s author Uma Krishnaswami has depended on books her whole life. “My father was in the government,” said Krishnaswami, who was born in New Delhi, “and we moved every four years. I was a reader by necessity. Books became my friends. And I read voraciously during my childhood.”
Krishnaswami joined other prominent authors as a participant in the 2011 National Book Festival in Washington in September.
In a childhood that took her throughout India, living at different times in New Delhi, Jodhpur and Shimla, Krishnaswami found many dependable friends in books when a recent move had left her surrounded by strangers. But there was one character she didn’t find in those books. “I never thought I could be a writer,” she said, “because I never saw anybody in a book who looked like me.”
Although she wrote stories and poems as a child, publishing a poem at 13 in an Indian children’s magazine, she pursued what seemed like a more reasonable career in social work, coming to the United States to get a graduate degree at the University of Maryland. “I was a writer and I didn’t know I was for a long time,” she said. “And I was a very bad counselor. I was much more interested in the stories people had to tell and much less capable of doing anything about them. I always felt as if I were playacting doing these other jobs.”
Not until after the birth of her son in 1987 did she find a compelling reason to return to telling stories. And it was for the same reason that had discouraged her as a child: “Much as I realized I had not seen myself in a book years ago in India, I was not seeing him in books for children in America. I saw very few books available in the United States that showed Indian-American children or even anything much about India. And what there was was old. There was Jungle Book and all the wonderful stories from that. And of course [Rudyard] Kipling was brilliant, but he was of his time. I was looking for contemporary books and picture books, and they just weren’t there. I thought, ‘There’s a gap here, and maybe I could fill it.’ It seemed like an impossible thing to dream of, but I did.”
Almost 20 books later, Krishnaswami’s latest is The Grand Plan to Fix Everything, which tells the story of 11-year-old Dini, an Indian-American girl whose family relocates from Maryland to a village in southern India for two years. While Dini is at first not happy about the move, she harbors a dream of meeting her favorite Bollywood film star. A starred review in Publishers Weekly described the book as perfectly capturing “movie-star infatuation, best-friendship, geographical displacement, and youthful determination in this exuberant blend of American tween life [preadolescents 10 to 12 years old] and Indian village culture.”
Of course, Krishnaswami’s peripatetic childhood made her familiar with her main character’s plight. “At the time, when I was 4 or 9, it wasn’t so great. But I can see I gained a lot from all those moves. I lived in places that I never would have had a chance to see otherwise. We visited Dharamshala, and I had an audience with the Dalai Lama. I was 15, I thought I knew everything, and I was blown away.”
