A book for Daughters' Day- CLOUD TEA MONKEYS

This sunday is the 4th sunday of September, and will be Daughters' Day. Now for me every day is my daughter's day. But I had not reckoned with the power of peer pressure.

So daughter comes home from school armed with the information that it will be Daughters' Day. "And what have you got for me?" She will not be put off by promises of we'll get something later, as she knows I normally do not go shopping on weekends, and will have something ready for her today.

Sigh! It is for such days, I think, I get books to give her 'later.' (Of course, books! That goes without saying.) So I dig into my kitty of books after suitably distracting her with homework. And I do come up with something suitable for a mother-daughter duo to savour, something wonderful that I wanted to share here. Also a book that is in line with the husband's theory that kids' literature often has something to do with monkeys. A always opposes this statement vehemously, and we have hilarious arguments as a result.



Image Courtesy Amazon

CLOUD TEA MONKEYS
Written by Mal Peet & Elspeth Graham
Illustrations by Juan Wijngaard
Published by Walker books
Ages 5+

Tashi is a little girl staying on the tea-growing slopes of the Himalayas, with her mother who works as a picker on the plantation. Her mother's basket which she puts on her back to put the tender tea shoots into is larger than Tashi.

Every morning, Tashi gets ready with her mother to go to work, with a hot cup of sweet tea, watching as the sun '...was coming (up): a light the colour of lemons was soaking into the sky and painting out the stars....As the stars went out, small squares of light appeared on the dark hillside above her: lamps were being lit in the village.'

Every day as her mother and the other women work, hard, back-breaking work that ends only after the sun has gone down, Tashi amuses herself with the monkeys who come down the mountains every day. They know her and trust her; the babies climb up on her and share her little food, and the mothers relax around her.

But now her mother is too ill to go to work, and if she does not work, they do not eat.

So Tashi picks up the (bigger than herself) basket, and goes with the other women to pick her share of tea. She is, however, too little to reach the very tips which have to be picked. Frightened of the loud, big Overseer, she starts to cry, not knowing what to do. How does she pick a whole basketful so that she can help her mother to pay for the doctor, the medicines and food?

The monkeys, who are her friends, and who trust her, help her out. And they never have to worry about picking tea again. How? That makes up the rest of this magical story, which ends like this:

'There are only three people in the world who drink Cloud Tea. One of them is a little old woman who is called the Empress of All the Known World and Other Bits That Have Not Been Discovered Yet. The other two are a retired tea-picker and her daughter, who live in a village among mountains whose tops are lost in clouds.'

A very heart-warming tale from the Himalayan regions of India. In a note at the end of the book, the authors write: 'Cloud Tea Monkeys is set in the past, but you can still buy "monkey-picked tea", though whether or not it is really picked by monkeys is another story again...'

You know you have picked up a book that you will like from the minute you set eyes on it. The book is hardcover, with a jacket- an indicator that it is will be a keepsake, with full page, framed pictures in full-colour on one page corresponding to the story on the opposite page, where the often lyrical text is also embellished with a relevant black-and-white sketch. Some of the paintings of the rolling tea plantations have a photographic quality as if painted from life.

Needless to say, the daughter was extremely pleased with this one! Even if there were monkeys in it!

Edited to add : I just realised that I have crossed the half-century mark and this post is my 51st. Here's to more posts.