Desi Children's Bookstore

A Mirror, Window, and Door.

- Anupama R. Oza, Mangla Oza, and Raj Oza

In the past:

When my parents (and co-au-thors, Mangla and Rajesh) were young parents, they desperately looked for books about India and Indians for my brother (Siddhartha) and me to read. Not finding suitable titles, desperation resulted in their making up bedtime stories featuring two brown kids (Dhanu and Diddhu), relying on a handful of books published in the West with one of them being Marcia Brown’s Caldecottwinning Once a Mouse, and reading the ever-reliable Amar Chitra Katha comic book series which featured a re-telling of Indian history and mythology.Since these oral and written stories were in English, we were introduced to literary India through a language-altering lens.

My parents constructed homemade scrapbooks that introduced the Devanagari script, and Siddhartha and I gamely attended Chinmaya Bala Vihar Hindi language classes. Later, I continued my study of Hindi at the university level. But the admirable bookshelves in our California homes, at our brick-and-mortar bookstores, and throughout our public libraries were sadly empty when it came to encouraging young children to learn and love Hindi.

Fast-forward decades, and into the void arrives hope by way of KitaabWorld, an online bookstore, which has made its way into local libraries and into the hearts of young parents. As a teacher of nonfiction studies, I also hope that it soon makes its way into classrooms where educators can convey to their students that books are indeed mirrors, windows, and doors.

“Mirror books” enable a reader to see herself in the text. Seeing this reflection of herself, the young reader is likely to experience what education professors Drs. Claude and Dorothy Steele call identity safety, and thus entertain a life-long love of reading, of seeing herself in literature.