Instead, equipped with a fertile imagination, I literally started making up stories for them.
In the beginning, these were built around how my twin brother and I, and my younger brother, when we were children, used to have fun. We had lived all around the country .. Gujarat, Uttaranchal, Tamilnadu .. and I could easily invent some stories around how we used to have a blast together.
But slowly, as the days went by, new characters were born. Abhishek: our partner in all our escapades: was a boy our age. He used to live next door. A few others were created, and discarded, after one or two stories. Some animal pets were created too: a dog (we never had one when we were children), but my kids have two now.
But suddenly, the thought came up.
What if we, as children, went to school, not in a boring school bus, or in an auto rikshaw, but in a camel cart?
What if the name of the camel was Pappu?
And what if Pappu the Camel was absolutely the most amazing camel ever? Intutive, communicative, and very very mischievous?
And thus the first of the Pappu the Camel stories was born. New, more enduring characters came to life: Pappu's best camel friend (Sayyam), Pappu's father (the stern and imposing Raja), and Pappu's mother (the strict but loving Rani). Pappu's camel cart-driver (Ahmed uncle).
And along with these characters, new ones cropped up in each story. A group of thieves. Bad treasure hunters. Bullies in school. A pack of wild dogs.
And in every one of the stories, Pappu, Sayyam, Raja, Rani, Ahmed Uncle, and Girish and Suresh (my brothers), Abhishek and I battled against ferocious odds and came up trumps, every time. Specially Pappu ... with almost supercamel strength and supercamel intelligence (and an ability to "mumble" in English to us children), Pappu became the hero of every story.
I realized that my children loved these stories so much that they were actually sharing them with their friends at school. And the other children used to pester my daughter to tell them more stories.
This is my attempt to capture some of these stories ... the text is mine, but the drawings you see are the ones from my daughter and my son.
I hope you find them interesting.
And oh, by the way? Feel free to modify, add, edit, mangle ... anything to these stories: as long as you tell them to your children.
