Introducing Sri Lanka’s culture and landmarks to children along with a suitable language while teaching them the local knowledge isn’t an easy task for a first-time writer.
But Ruvani Chandrasekera’s debut publication manages to do exactly that in a most thrilling and beautiful look-and-find activity book titled, “Uma and Amal’s Adventures Around Sri Lanka” illustrated attractively by Supuni Suriyarachchi and published by The Jam Fruit Tree Publications.
Ruvani herself never grew up in Sri Lanka. Instead she spent her childhood and was schooled in Zambia and later moved to The United States. Her husband is from India and they ultimately settled in Singapore with their children. However Ruvani has visited Sri Lanka many times since her childhood and fondly recalls how her grandfather used to buy her maalu paan and kibula banis during her time spent here.
Ruvani has two children of her own, a five year old and a three year old. “Since my children are growing up in different places, I want to let them know more about their roots and where they came from. They are my inspiration and motivation to start this,” she said. Part of the reason Ruvani moved to Singapore with her family is because they could be near countries like Sri Lanka and India where their origins are.
Cultural aspects
She believes that reading books to children would make them more aware of the world around them and encourages them to ask a lot of questions.
A similar book titled, “Eye Spy Singapore” is what gave Ruvani the idea to create a look-and-find book for Sri Lanka so that she could introduce and showcase the country to her own children.
“There were not many books for children that touch on the cultural aspects of Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is such a diverse place and I wanted to show this diversity in terms of culture, history and religion intentionally in an inclusive and interesting manner,” the author said.
Ruvani knows that she’s not the only parent who had children who grew up away from Sri Lanka and wanted to introduce the country to them and have them appreciate it.
“Especially when you have multicultural families like ours, you want to show your children what their homelands are and teach them about it,” she said. By being inclusive and representative in her book, she hopes that the children who read it would feel an identity and closeness to Sri Lanka.
Ruvani has incorporated many local terms and included aspects of all parts of Sri Lanka to make children get familiarised with the country and develop a sense of knowledge about the local background. Including aspects such as the civil war and talking about it in the Jaffna chapter was also something she had to do subtly and carefully as well.
Favourite chapters
The author adores nature and her favourite chapters of her book are Trincomalee and Yala. She explained how it took huge amounts of time for her to research information for accuracy. “Throughout the process of creating this book, I was learning a lot about Sri Lanka myself, such as the meaning behind the Perahera. Therefore I hope this book would help parents learn new things as well,” Ruvani said.
Being an author was something completely outside Ruvani’s element. She works in public health and coming out of that to do something creative initially felt scary for her. For Ruvani, it was a totally new experience and she recalls how it felt overwhelming and complicated. Not knowing the process of writing and publishing was a massive challenge for Ruvani and the process of writing to the younger audience felt even more challenging.
She wanted the book to be exciting and easy-read but also didn’t want to simplify it too much and make the book boring.
“I had to make sure it is simple, interesting, accessible and a lot of other things. It took a lot of effort and hopefully I managed to accomplish that,” Ruvani said. Committing to an illustrator was another challenge to the new author. “I wanted the illustrator to be talented but also to be a Sri Lankan who had a good understanding and appreciation for Sri Lankan culture. I have to say Supuni did a fantastic job at it.”
Overthinking
When Ruvani started writing the book, she listed all the places that she wanted to highlight and mentally went on a trip around Sri Lanka. She first started on Pettah and Galle Face because these two landmarks show two different sides of Colombo.
Pettah, a bustling, chaotic marketplace and Galle Face, a relaxed and fun-loving environment. She later added the historical and nature-oriented landscapes and was focused on showing the children how diverse and contrastive Sri Lanka is.
Ruvani said that she put so many limitations from her side while creating this book out of hesitation and doubt which wasn’t necessary at all. “I was definitely overthinking a lot,” she said. “Still, there might be a lot of pieces in the book that could have been done better but the positive feedback I have been getting so far makes me feel like there’s indeed value to it,”
The whole process of creating this book was a new and daunting experience for Ruvani but now she believes that if someone has the ability and purpose to do something, they should definitely go for it without hesitation.
“I started working on this book in October 2023. If it’s not for my doubts, I would have published this way earlier. However, I humbly believe this book to be a beautiful creation of mine and I hope that children worldwide would enjoy reading it. My goal is for them to appreciate Sri Lanka just as I did since my childhood,” she said.
