Muezza and Baby Jaan

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Baby Jaan gazed at the skies as Muezza slept. The stars were out. Distant, cold and sparkling stars that seemed almost at touching distance...and try as Baby Jaan did, she didn't think she would ever be able to count them all. Stories were a little like that, she thought. Just when you thought you had come to the end of a story, it led to another one and then another. And Muezza, Baby Jaan thought, was like the sky with a treasure house of starry stories.

I am so lucky to have a friend like him, she thought, moving closer to him so that he would be protected from the desert cold. Then she sat there thinking of all the stories she had been told.

ANITA NAIR is a bestselling and widely acclaimed novelist. Among her several books, The Better Man, Ladies Coupé and Mistress have been translated into over thirty languages around the world. For her total contribution to children's literature in English, she was awarded the Central Sahitya Akademi Award in 2013. She has also published Malabar Mind, a collection of poems, and Goodnight and God Bless, a collection of essays. A playwright, she has written the screenplay for the film adaptation of her novel Lessons in Forgetting, which won the 2012 National Film Award for the Best Feature Film in English.

Anita conducts a creative-writing mentorship program in Bangalore called Anita's Attic. To know more, visit her at www.anitanair.net and www.anitasattic.com or follow @anitanairauthor on Twitter and Instagram.

It was 11 a.m. on 21 September 2013. I had just sat down with my pen and notebook. I had been working on my historical novel, Idris, when news came of unidentified gunmen opening fire in one of Nairobi's upscale malls. It was a Saturday and my first thought was for my friend Jayapriya Vasudevan, her husband, Harish Vasudevan, and her daughter, Miel Vasudevan, who were living in Nairobi. Where were they? Had they chosen to go to that mall on that particular day? Were they safe?

As soon as it was established that they were all right, I went back to my novel. Later in the day I began tracking the situation. TV channels and online newspapers had plenty to say. The mass shooting had left 67 people dead and more than 175 people injured.

It takes a publisher of rare courage to invest in a book that many others, in all probability, would shy away from. In Hemali Sodhi I found not just a fearless person, who understood the significance of this book, but also a child's heart who fell in love with the two protagonists, Muezza the cat and Baby Jaan the camel. Does any writer need more?

Thanks are also due to Sohini Mitra for nudging me back on to the road each time I swerved away; to Harshad Marathe, Gunjan Ahlawat and Meena Rajasekaran for making the stories come alive; and to Kankana Basu for painstakingly fact-checking them and for her careful copy-editing.

And, as always, I couldn't have done this without my parents, Bhaskarar and Soumini, who taught me the true joy of stories the telling and the listening and what they can achieve.