When they first considered the idea, Duckbill’s Sayoni Basu and Anushka Ravishankar were talking about how children’s stories travel. “In our generation, as children we mostly read foreign books. Indian kids read international books much more than in other parts of, say, Europe. We thought that one of the ways books can travel is if authors read in both countries come together,” says Sayoni.
That first idea, almost two years ago, led to Duckbill’s latest book, “The Sherlock Connection”, a collaboration between two Indian and two Swedish authors. The book, connected by a common framework and a few common symbols, has four stories by Anushka Ravishankar, Bikram Ghosh, Martin Widmark and Katarina Genar. “Anushka and I knew very little about Swedish writers. We knew Astrid Lindgren, and we knew Martin Widmark. And we definitely knew that we wanted Martin to be part of this project.
With his books translated in over 30 languages and a detective series that has been immensely popular, Martin is a literary name to reckon with. He says that the Duckbill’s project attracted him immediately. “They asked me if I wanted to participate and I said yes immediately. I just love collaborations over nationalities and countries. It is so giving for me as a person.”
Both Sayoni and Anushka left the task of bringing a second Swedish author on board entirely up to Martin. “I was asked to bring one of my colleagues from Sweden, which was a very nice situation. I could pick anyone. I picked Katarina because I had just read her lovely book, “The Magic Coat” and fallen in love with her way of telling a story. I asked her and she said yes.”
While Sherlock Holmes is not as popular in Sweden as it is in India, it was Martin who first suggested the idea of using Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detective as inspiration. “You can blame the Sherlock idea on me. I was thinking on the airplane down about what could combine us and while Sherlock Holmes is not that big in Sweden, he is a symbol for deductive thinking and solving crimes everywhere. He’s more about using the brain rather than hands and fists. That’s also a good message to the kids. And that is what I have done in my books before. For me it was a natural choice to suggest to the others to work around that.”
Almost immediately, the group unanimously agreed to Martin’s suggestion, and the book began to take shape. Katarina adds that together, they picked objects and figures that would be common to every story, and pull it together. “We thought of ingredients like the magnifying glass, a Miss Watson. These had to appear in every story, but that was all the instruction we got.”
While the idea of collaborating was exciting, Martin also adds that the authors were worried. “We were all a bit uneasy in the beginning. Did these mean that now the four of us would be forced into a certain shape of working? We saw the anxiety in each other’s eyes, and so, we said that while we would stick to the common objects, we would go back home and work on our own stories.”
What emerged, then, was a book with four distinctive voices, four entirely different settings of time and place, and a common framework that tied everything together. “We were relying on our editor, Sayoni, to bring everything together”, says Katarina, adding that the authors didn’t really ask for Skype meetings, email chats and other communications while writing and only read each other’s stories when they were complete.
What the stories also do is bring together one another’s settings in their stories in playful ways. “For example,” adds Sayoni, “The Royal Library of Stockholm is a very central part of Martin’s story, and Anushka’s story ends there in a way too. And when you read Katarina’s story, one of the characters has travelled to Australia and India.”
Martin speaks of this overlap too. “I ended my story with the main character crying on his father’s chest, and he’s dressed in pyjamas. Anushka took this up and her character wears pyjamas in the first scene. Then there is a glass bottle rolling on the floor in the end of her story and Katarina’s story starts with a glass bottle.” To round things off, Martin’s story begins with Christmas and Bikram’s ends with it.”
For Katarina, who began to write notes for her story on her phone while on her way back to Sweden, it was working with the ingredients that were important. “I knew about Sherlock Holmes, and I did some research too.” Both Martin and Katarina make references to original Holmes stories — “The Hound of Baskerville” and “The Empty House”, while Bikram mentions “The Study in Scarlet” in his.
While their stories were worked on individually, another point of collaboration was the common framework that connected each story. “They had broadly agreed on the framework. It doesn’t have one author. A first draft was written, I won’t say by whom, and then we went back and forth on it on emails.
While this collaboration is Katarina’s first, Martin has worked with authors and illustrators from other countries before. “I feel that this is very important to meet people from different situations, see how writers work under different conditions in different countries. I remember meeting my Chinese illustrator, and that was the first time she was meeting the writer of the book she was illustrating. It is not a common practice there, to meet the author. She was really surprised when I told her that in Sweden we share the income fifty-fifty with the illustrators.”
He adds that collaborations are also important for the authors themselves, and their art. “I think in a philosophical way, it’s very interesting to try to adjust to something and at the same time keep your voice. That is what must happen in the future in society.” Hopefully this book is an example of that balance.
