topics: |  children | picture-book | india

This story thrives on the brilliant colours and visual beauty of saris.

A child is shown playing with her mother's sari, which "is long like a train" (red patterned sari, trailing behind her). "It fills the air with colours when I dance and sing" (a number of colourful prints, rich zari borders and patterns, in orange, green, red, blue). "I sail down a river" (dark-blue-purple bAndhni sari, the girl falling down it like a slide) "and climb up a rope" (red-pallu green-check cotton sari, twisted like a rope). At one point, she is even wiping her nose on a sari her mother is wearing (a bit of the mother visible from the back). A sari even acts as a hammock.

The endpapers illustrate how a sari is worn.  In the end however, the story
doesn't connect in an emotionally powerful way like Pooja Makhijani's "Mama's
Saris", which combines the rich hues of saris with a girl's longing to dress
up in adult clothes, and also throws in a bit of the diasporic experience,
where the girl's mother (in the US) wears saris only on special occasions,
whereas her grandmother wears one every day.