Ananya & the Scary Green Guy (2010), was created for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival program, "Asian Pacific Americans: Local Lives, Global Ties," which focused on the experiences of APAs in the Washington, D.C. area. Sushmita was invited to participate in the program and copies of her books were available at the Marketplace. Read more on the blog here.

From the book’s introduction:

I have created this storybook, Ananya & the Scary Green Guy, especially for children of Indian heritage growing up outside of India. I wanted to help parents and grandparents bring their children this story using the media I know best as a mother, artist, writer, storyteller, and educator—and most of all, as an Indian living outside India.

This story is based on real events from 2009. Maybe you will find that at some time you have felt like the characters in my story, or had questions like theirs. I hope this story answers some of your questions and resembles some things from your life.

Enjoy!

A note on Cultures and Languages:

Hindi is regarded as the national language of India but different people speak many different languages all over the country. In this story, Ananya’s grandparents came originally from the state of West Bengal in India, and they speak the language Bengali. In this language children call their father’s father thakurda, although Ananya says dadu, the word for mother’s father. Father is baba and older brother is dada. She calls her mother mumma, a mix of the English mummy and the Bengali ma, I guess. And she calls her father’s mother damma, short for dadiamma, the Hindi word for father’s mother.

Although many of the foreign words used in this book are from the Bengali language, they often sound similar to Hindi words. This is something that can help children from different Indian cultures understand each other.

About the Cover:

Everyone who celebrates Durga Pujo gets new clothes, and devotees offer new saris to the goddess Durga too. And so I decided to give my book new clothes—a cover, handmade from a traditional Bengali red-and-white cotton pujo sari. But, since this story takes place in the United States, where so many of us symbolize the coming together of many cultures, I attached the sari to the very American denim, to make a completely new entity: a lovely book cover and container for a very American experience!