For the girls who mess with boundaries

Books contain strange comforting improbable and impossible worlds within But it is only once a while that one comes across a young adult book written just so that its 20 female protagonists can ldquomess with the boundaries of the possible and the probablerdquo as Anita Roy editor of Young Zubaan puts itAn illustration by artist Priya Kuriyan part of the graphic story Swallow The Moon which is written by Australian writer Kate ConstableFor their latest book Eat The Sky Drink The Ocean 10 Indian and 10 Australian writers and graphic artists including Samhita Arni Amruta Patil Payal Dhar and Manjula Padmanabhan imagine different worlds as part of this feminist speculative fiction Between the pages lies time travel dystopia cyborgs pixies and thoughtprovoking stories What they do have in common is a girl at the centre of it all mdash either trying to make sense of her world or subverting itIn 2012 at a Delhi event Roy was in conversation with Melbournebased childrenrsquos writer Kirsty Murray whose writing largely explores Australian history They discussed the rape of a 23yearold physiotherapy student in Delhi and how many cities in India rose in protest Murray too recounted violent crimes against women in Australia that had taken place around the same timeAustralian writers Kirsty Murray and Isobelle Carmody and Anita Roy editor Young ZubaanldquoWe realised how badly we both wanted to write something feminist what young girls fear and what they hope for Feminism is not prescriptive mdash it makes you question the world and show you that lsquonormalityrsquo is as odd as anything We wanted to curate stories which could show young adults how different the lsquogivenrsquo can berdquo explains Roy ldquoA good book after all is one where you go for questions not answersrdquo she addsEat The Sky which is funded by the Australian Council for the Arts includes short stories graphic stories and even a play script The vast baffling world of young adults YA mdash girls and boys mdash is explored and questioned in the anthology by writers who vividly remember what it was like to be a teenager anywhere in the worldMurray who has coedited the book with Roy says Eat The Sky is more relevant today than ever especially because Indian literature mdash YA or adult mdash doesnrsquot reach Australia and vice versa ldquoAustralia has a two per cent Indian immigrant population but all we know of Indian literature is diasporic and all things Salman Rushdie On the other hand to most Indians Australia is all about MasterChef and cricketrdquo When it comes to literature Murray feels the US and UK have a cultural hegemony of sorts ldquoWe have so much in common and this gatekeeping is irrelevant Issues young women face mdash be it about their body image or human rights are universal And what better way to dive right into these things than speculative fiction which can throw up so much surprise We hope Eat The Sky gives readers in India and Australia a heightened sense of each otherrsquos culturerdquo says MurrayHer play script in the anthology The Blooming written with Manjula Padmanabhan came out of the duorsquos concern about reproductive technology a human rights concept Murray believes writers must not be squeamish to discussThrough her other story Mirror Perfect which is about a young girl who dislikes her body Murray says she wanted to look at how consumerism affects the way we see ourselvesRoy and Murray say they are thrilled at the sheer variety of ideas in the book something young boys and girls have not missed out on as the editors recently discovered on their ongoing threecity book tour ldquoThis book is as much for boys as it is for girls and I realised that young Indian boys are way more philosophical sensitised and politically aware than many in Australia are todayrdquo smiles MurrayAn appetite for everythingThe book includes Appetite a graphic story by Indiarsquos first graphic novelist Amruta Patil who received this ldquosweepingly openended briefrdquo from Young Zubaan Contemplate different futures and future worlds from female perspectives ldquoThere were many promising fragments that I sought to bring together here The first was the idea of an extended sisterhood mdash beings not related by blood mdash an idea that formed the core of my first graphic novel KariAn illustration from writer and artist Amruta Patilrsquos graphic story AppetiteThen there was the matter of appetite hunger for succulent things food or not Feminine beings in stories are generally denied a ravenous appetite There are few feminine equivalents of lsquoWolf Bellyrsquo Bheem and generally a convex form is given the green signal only in the case of pregnant women These things came together in the form of Appetitersquos protagonist Coral whose hungers are large and of a peculiarly ungreedy variety