Book Review- 'Puu'

Written by CG Salamander

Illustrated by Samidha Gunjal

Published by Scholastic India

Age 5+ yrs

‘Puu’ the metaphor used here means ‘flowers’ in Tamil and is also a play on the word ‘Poo’. Tackling the very very difficult topic of manual scavenging, this is a book which is both difficult and important.

A daughter of manual scavengers is ostracized by everyone at school. Though bright and full of dreams and hardworking and capable, she finds herself isolated. She doesn’t seem to have any friends and the character is portrayed as one who ‘doesn’t care much what others think of her’.

One day a little puppy falls into a sewer and while the entire class is gathered and helpless, our chief protagonist is the only one who has the courage to rescue the dog. Even when the dog is rescued and well, her classmates still ignore her, for she is shown standing in the corner, while the other kids try to clean up the dog.

Even in her courage, she finds no acceptance. Not until she finds it from an unlikely source, whose life she saved from the very depths of a sewer. This is a hard read. The metaphor is all beautiful and glorified and that just shows the shallowness of humans.

This is sparsely written and there is a lot left to interpretation. The creative choice of using Flowers in place of actual excrement is very hard hitting. Some of the choices in character portrayal were unnecessary- like the child being perennially unkempt, covered in filth even when she comes to class, portrayed as a few shades darker than her classmates as so on.

All these issues notwithstanding, the fact that she doesn’t find acceptance right till the very end is a striking example of how we fail as a community everyday. No solutions here, just a reminder!