Out in the Moonlight

A little boy runs excitedly in the darkness, lit only by the light of a bright, bright moon. He is going with his mother and baby brother to the millet fields. The walk there is long, through a thorny forest, with the lurking fear of snakes. As his mother works, he makes the most of the moonlit night with his newfound friend, a stray dog, and his brother sleeps...

It takes an exceptional writer like Perumalmurugan to narrate this vignette from his own life, evocatively and unsentimentally. In doing so, it becomes a cameo that captures many realities, especially a different kind of childhood. Mood-filled illustrations bring the unfamiliar close to a young reader in a nightscape redolent with anticipation and danger, to frame the portrait of a mother for whom tending her family and fields is a way of life.