Excerpt-
Like Martini, Shenaaz Nanji started writing children’s books to fill what she perceived to be a gap in the canon. Instead of an imagined world, though, Nanji’s work mines the reality of her background and family history.
Nanji recalls the day in 1983, two years after she immigrated to Canada, when her four-year-old son, Astrum, came home and asked, “Mom, are we Indians?” Nanji understood her son’s confusion. He lived in Canada but was born in Kenya into a family with Indian roots. The boy scarcely knew who, or what, he was. Nanji searched the children’s section of the public library for a book that addressed issues of immigrant identity, but she found nothing. “The books were all about Dick and Harry, but none with our names. None about our community.” So Nanji decided to write her own stories for her children, Astrum and Shaira, and named the characters in her books after them.
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Ismailimail 