ONE
They were young. And they were lost.
Some stories about other worlds begin with 'Once upon a time', others with 'In the beginning'.
In this world the beginning is forgotten, and sometimes vaguely remembered, by the children and Elders as Khoya – that which was lost.
The elders in Khoya told tales of What-Once-Was - a fleeting whisper of the past. They spoke of a world not constructed and constrained. A world devoid of tall glass buildings. They spoke of other beings and half beings as fluid as water and as light as breath that they called spirit. They spoke of these spirits and life that existed beyond experiments in laboratories. They spoke of colour - strange hues and pigments that spread like honey across the earth. They spoke of other life: creatures with four legs and a will of their own, wild creatures with gossamer wings that danced in the gentle wind.
To the children of Khoya the idea of a will of their own seemed unimaginable. The possibility of a natural world not created by man seemed like a myth. To try and imagine spirit felt impossible. These stories were like a jigsaw puzzle of fantastical mumbo-jumbo muddled up in the elders' memories. And soon no one listened to these tales anymore.
There was no room for fantasy here. Only routine. And magic disrupted routine.
“And what's the point of a story if it isn't even real?” they said.
TWO.
However, if one is to try and rediscover What-Once-Was, if one is to attempt to pinpoint when Khoya was lost, it was possibly when the first glass box was created.
In those distant days man had lived in harmony with the spirit flowing through all things. He resonated with the spirit and recognised it in every rock, every river, every insect, every tree, every bird and every animal.
He was connected to the Great Spirit by a network of light - the Noor. The Noor was invisible to the eye but well known and seen only by the heart. And sometimes would appear to man as waves of gold dust. Other times, it would reveal itself in the sudden shimmer of a star or the shapes that clouds in the sky became. Sometimes one could see the Noor in a dancing leaf carried to it’s resting point by a curling wind. And mostly, it would reveal itself in Love.
Everyday on earth was a celebration of this love. And man's voice (strong and sweet then) was part of this great cosmic orchestra.
They would sing in crystal voices into the far reaches of space. They would spin round and round with the stars, whirling in ecstacy and complete abandon.
And yes, they were intoxicated by the Noor.
One day man and woman were inexplicably distracted while singing. He was looking up at the great expansive skies, his heart was connected by a hundred strands of gold to the Noor. When suddenly his eye caught something glimmering and hovering in the distance.
It was a firefly.
'Light that is worn by something apart from the stars', he thought. The idea of possessing light was interesting to him and he thought about it for days on end.
He wanted it. And then on, when he sang with the orchestra, it wasn't a celebration of love. It was a song of longing.
Having always lived by his need, this want was new and exciting to him. Seven days and seven nights later he saw fire again. One day when all the other creatures were asleep, he snuck up behind the firefly and trapped it in a little glass box.
He labeled this box and it gave him great pleasure that he could see it whenever he wished and it would never ever go away - it had no choice.
Soon he collected more creatures like this. He no longer sang in praise with the rest but instead arranged his collection meticulously in rows, categorically organized in terms of shape and colour.
When the other spirits approached him to ask him why he didn't sing and why he was trapping these creatures and plants he said, 'don't you see? I discovered them and so they are mine.'
The spirits didn't understand this logic at all.
But the truth is that before any Pandora's box was opened, it was first sealed up. And this incessant want to label and claim ownership over was called greed.
And thus was born the race known as the Laalach.
THREE
The men and women of Laalach were well known to be a rather tricky clan. They would, at any given opportunity, go to extreme measures to prove their might over the earth.
Some say these men and women had two faces but there is no historical record to prove this and so it remains just a metaphor in an old history book. Others say these people had an insatiable appetite, an unending desire to own more and more. However, this much is known, they slowly ate away at everything that the earth held within it and all that was left behind was the rotting refuse of an empire. This was the age of Want.
They were intoxicated by this greed and it is this addiction, this misguided intoxication and this blindness that gave birth to a dark powerful force with a life of its own - the Nasha.
The Nasha slowly engulfed man. It started as a small puff of smoke that enveloped his heart and wrapped its long vines around it. This gave him indifference.
It then spread to his chest that swelled up as his lungs were taken over by the Nasha. This gave him pride.
Next it spread to his throat and wound its vines around his neck nearly choking him. This gave him cold silence.
Then to his eyes dilating his pupils into blanks stares making him lose sight of the spirit.
And thus having wrapped itself around every nerve and entered every stream that ran through man's body it finally penetrated his mind. This brought him death. And not death of the spirit (for the spirit lives forever) or death of love (because love exists beyond that) but the death of his compassion. Which is the worst end of all.
FOUR
The spirits were chased out one by one. Poisonous gases were released into the world that punched holes into the layers of Noor that protected and enveloped the earth like a soft glowing blanket.
Homes were destroyed. Forests burnt down. The sky began to fall, the earth began to quake. Spirit fought back. The sky would cry for days, flooding the earth. His greed to control spirit brought terror. Gases that turned generations of children to dust. His greed to possess land brought wars. And soon it wasn't even land anymore. Soon it was oil, then water. and last but most tragically - The Battles of Breath.
With holes in his sky, with a hole where a heart once existed, surrounded by chaos the men of Laalach had to make a choice - either he embraced the spirit and restored it to a magnificence of its own, let go of his control and need to consume and lived in harmony. Or he could build more walls and banish the spirit forever.
And of course, he chose to banish.
So he created a glass globe around the earth to block out the clouds that became animals in the sky. He shut out the stars that looked down upon the earth like eyes.
He created large concrete bottlestoppers that stopped rivers from flowing. He scooped out all the multitudes of fish and life in the ocean and replaced it with plastic that he'd consumed and spat out.
Until nothing was left behind. The elements were divided, and were cursed to stay divided as layers atop the glass globe.
Remember poor Hansel and Gretel who got lost in their woods? The people of Khoya had got lost in their own miniature labyrinths and could find the kingdoms of love no more.
The world faded, diminished and disintegrated into smaller and smaller histories until finally becoming the one we know. Like a crystal prism that had been preserved for centuries to unleash a rainbow but had shattered into tiny fragments.
Cold, brittle and weak, the empires of man-made catastrophe eroded the soul like dirt off cliffs that drift in winds into beautiful tragedies of 'What-once-Was'.
Children were lined up in rows of gray, with glassy eyes of conformity gazing upon nothing. A vacant expression branded upon their faces with no decipherable features of beauty or ugliness. Their minds trained not to think, not to question. This was the age of mediocrity and these were the voices of a forgotten generation of zombies. Jaded and incomplete but told to feel otherwise, these children are laid to rest in an adult frame with the once beating heart of a child.
This was Khoya. A mistake. A generation of alienation. And where our story begins.
“Children love to relate to the characters within narratives in books; that is what captivates them,” said Shilo Shiv Suleman, an illustrator who is attempting to turn that fascination into an actual immersive experience by creating books that kids can “interact” with. A final-year student of animation from the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, the 21-year-old, who has also worked extensively as a freelance artist, will soon publish Khoya, a book which she wrote and designed. Khoya is a traditional fantasy story about a boy and a girl in a dystopian setting in which all the spirits of the natural world have been banished. Where it differs from other children’s books is that Khoya is an experiment in interactive storytelling incorporating a technology called Augmented Reality. “Khoya came about as an attempt to bring together two very distinct, yet similar, narrative experiences – that of animation and that of books,” said Suleman.
Suleman’s efforts are indicative of trends in the publishing world that expand the ways in which stories are told. Childrens’ books publishers Tulika recently introduced two of their popular titles as downloadable books that can be read on the iPhone and iPad. One of the titles they chose were Who Will Rule? ,by Meena Raghunathan, illustrated by Harsha Nagaraju, which is based loosely on an Australian aboriginal tale about what happens when a group of creatures decides that the largest sect amongst them should rule the world. The second title, Ekki Dokki, is a bilingual tale in Hindi and English written by Sandhya Rao, accompanied by Ranjan De’s illustrations, adapted from a Marathi folktale about two sisters named Ekkesvali and Dhonkesvali who meet an old woman living alone in a clearing in the middle of a forest. With the help of Fliplog, an e-book publishing framework designed and developed by Apptility Software, Tulika developed e-versions of the books with page-by-page audio (the text can be accompanied by audio, with multiple language options) and a feature where readers can record their own voices for dialogues and narration to accompany the story.
Renu Kaushal Singh, a pre-school teacher, is mother to ten-year-old Pranav, who uses his father’s iPad to read interactive books. She felt that the fact that the book was on a gadget was what got her son interested. Although she sees advantages to the format, especially while travelling, she maintained that she would “still love to read Amar Chitra Katha and Panchatantra for my children, and would push them to read physical books”.
