Uma Krishnaswami’s first recollection of expressive storytelling was at the tender age of six: “My grandfather bought me a box of crayons, and I took this beautiful green crayon – in my mind I was telling some kind of story – and I wrote on the wall,” she recalls. “I have a tactile memory of the crayon in my hand. I have a memory of drawing something, maybe it was a duck.”

A thumbnail-sized edition of the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishnaswami recalls, was the first book that completely enchanted her, but the wanting or even understanding that she could be a writer didn’t come until well into adulthood. “When I was pregnant, it occurred to me that I had loved books as a child and that I was fascinated by children’s books. I thought maybe I could do this because as a child I was a writer – I just didn’t know that’s what I was doing, or that’s who I was,” she says. “I used to write stories all the time. I would read books, and then I would write stories in little diaries. I also had a very shallow connection with boundaries and truth: I would make stuff up and get into trouble. I think I was actually playing with all of this as a child and not realizing it.”

Krishnaswami, who was born and raised in India, says the motherland deeply informs her writing, though, it was coming to terms with being an immigrant that led her to draw upon her Indian heritage and the stories that came with it. 

On a trip to India, Krishnaswami spotted a little girl sitting on the sidewalk – with the bricks out of alignment – reading a book, oblivious to the people streaming past, the buses driving on the street, barely a foot away, and the bustling tea stall at the corner. “It was total mayhem, and she was reading in the middle of this, and I thought, ‘Oh, there’s a story there. I wonder what it is,’” she recalls. “It turned out there was an election going on at the time, too, so I took lots of pictures of these big pennants hanging over the street and little vans with loudspeakers blaring messages. And I thought, ‘I wonder if there’s a way to put those two things together and make a story.’” That’s how Yasmin, the protagonist in Book Uncle and Me, the predecessor to Birds on the Brain (both published by Groundwood Books), was born.

Illustration: Julianna Swaney.

Yasmin is one in a triad of friends that includes Reeni and Anil. It was important to Krishnaswami that the triad be two girls and a boy, each from a different religious background. “As India has grown and changed and morphed, sometimes in ways that are deeply saddening, I have felt more committed to this vision of [diversity] that in many parts of the country, in reality, no longer exists.”

Krishnaswami never intended for there to be a sequel to the bestselling Book Uncle and Me in which Yasmin lobbies to save the neighbourhood book stand. The idea was sparked at a virtual classroom visit for the North Vancouver Library system during the pandemic. “When we got to the Q & A, I was talking about Book Uncle, and someone asked, ‘Is there going to be a sequel?’ I, very offhandedly, said, ‘I don’t know. Should there be?’” Krishnaswami recalls. “The children started chatting, and they said, ‘Yes, there’s three kids. You could write a story for each of them.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s brilliant.’” Unable to shake off the idea, she reread Book Uncle very carefully. It was immediately obvious to her that she couldn’t just write a sequel. It had to be a trilogy.

Birds on the Brain (out now) continues the central theme of activism of its predecessor. For Reeni, the protagonist in Birds on the Brain, this means advocating for her community to participate in Bird Count India, part of an international event, which has been cancelled because the dwindling bird numbers would cast the country in a poor light on the world stage. Looking back, Krishnaswami wonders if the deep sense of doing what’s right in Reeni, Yasmin, and Anil was influenced by the climate strikes going on as she was thinking about children speaking truth to the world. “It has always seemed to me that children can be very clear-eyed about things because their minds are not busied up with all the things that we [adults] know and all the experiences we have had,” she says. “They haven’t had a chance to prioritize and say, ‘Well, I can’t make a difference about that, so I just won’t bother.’ They have a built-in sense of what is fair and what is not. You see that in all kinds of childhood conflicts: a deep sense of justice and wanting justice. So I think I’m trying to channel all of those things.”

Perspectives change and shift, Krishnaswami says, and they should: being stuck in one way is not good for any individual or the world. “It’s one of the reasons I tried to make the adult characters in this book well-meaning, sometimes stuck, but, in the end, willing to change,” she says. “And I see the kids as being very much the forces of change.”