No book, or anything truly creative, is ever the work of one person.
Many people, generations, cultures, circumstances, causes, conditions come together to make it happen
Aalolika too has emerged over nine years from many rivers, many shores, many riverbeds — each holding, shaping and carrying her into being.
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Long before Aalolika became a book, there were stories.
Then there were people I met through life.
Some of their faces appear in Aalolika's pages. Some of their voices, gestures and ways of seeing have quietly entered the stories.
Ma and Da. Nana and Nani. Amma and Babu.
There were stories I heard at home, stories retold over the years, and some that simply stayed somewhere inside me.
And behind all this runs an ancient current.
The many streams of wisdom and practice emerging from India that have reached me through texts, traditions, teachers, gurus.
Some things we learn. Some we inherit.
Some, keep travelling through us.
Aalolika began, quite simply, with my husband, Sunny.
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I randomly started telling him these stories. Then I noticed. The moment he began listening, he would yawn, stretch and then slowly fall asleep. His rather sharp, constantly moving mind came to a deep rest.
That became our little ritual.
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I had not set out to write a book. I was only telling stories to someone I loved, hoping they would soften the movement of the mind for a while.
In that sense, the first listener to Aalolika was also the reason she began.
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And perhaps that is why she became
The First Lullaby
Then came Tania.
I first narrated to her a few stories near the sea in Goa. Her eyes lit up. She could see, she could recognise the potential. She co-mothered Aalolika.
Through some very challenging years, including COVID, she walked with her step by step, with extraordinary love.
Much of the physical being of Aalolika — how she eventually came to live on paper — carries Tania's presence uniquely.
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Tania touched. But never did she ever allow her touch to become obvious. It takes tremendous strength, clarity and love for that art to manifest.
Tania dug the channel through which the river of Aalolika could flow.
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Tania trusted Swati as the designer of Aalolika.
With Stories, Sutras and Photo-art as its three mandalas, it was not an easy book to design. Each had its own rhythm, its own visual language, and yet all three had to belong to one book.
Much of what now appears effortless on the page came through Swati’s extraordinary attention to detail — the placement of a motif, its size, its colour, whether something worked, and how it worked.
Nine years in the making — so much changed in all our lives. Swati had a baby. From Pune, she moved to Toronto.
And with her moved Aalolika.
Through pregnancy, childbirth, and a move across continents, the work continued. Aalolika received some of her final touches, across the ocean, in Canada.
I have, even as I write this, never met Swati in person. But we have met, again and again, in the making of Aalolika.
Sutanu's 2021 sketches for Aalolika
What was Aalolika going to look like?
We were all confused. But I had a sense.
I had never met Su, but I had seen his art. Something in me had always known we would work together.
During COVID, I gave him the manuscript and said, “Read. Play. See what happens.”
And happen it did.
Aalolika found her face. And, in a way, so did I. From then on, I became Su’s Ku — his even shorter name for Akku.
Su's portrait of me "Ku garden of delightenment"
At the time, Su was leaving Delhi and returning home to Odisha. One part of his life was ending, another beginning.
Aalolika’s illustrations emerged right in the middle of that passage.
Since those first sketches in 2021, I have watched his art acquire an increasingly mystical quality.
I am not Aalolika’s author. I never was.
Sure, I have written the stories. But they are not mine. They belong to themselves. What is intimately mine is the process.
Ma Ahalya. Rishi Gautama. Mandodari. Nachiketa. Shiva. Ma Parvati. Queen Madalasa.
They became real for me. Their struggles, their glory. Their challenges. Present within.
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Sometimes I entered their story-worlds.
And sometimes they entered mine.
In the Indian understanding of speech, pashyanti is that stage before thought has fully become articulated language. I have often felt that I was Aalolika’s first listener there — hearing before writing.
Over the years, the central image of Aalolika has revealed another meaning to me.
We see a mother lulling a child. But the child changes the mother too — asking her to become quieter, more patient, more attentive.
Perhaps that is what Aalolika has been for me.
- akanksha damini joshi
Aalolika The First Lullaby
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