Help! My Aai Wants to Eat Me book review: Bijal Vachharajani paints a delightful coming-of-age read

Seven-year-old Avi (short for Aviv) has a habit of seeing the good and the bad side of everything. This is how he makes sense of situations he happens to be in, making a “mental list” of pros and cons. However, nowadays he has started feeling that doing that is giving him a “ginormous headache”.

However, there’s something that happens in Avi’s life that troubles him more than anything that ever did till now. Help! My Aai Wants to Eat Me (Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2022) written by Bijal Vachharajani and illustrated by Priya Kuriyan begins with that troublesome day.

His mother, his Aai, has packed tinde-ki-sabzi in lunch, which even Dahi-Vada (the school dog) wouldn’t like to have. As kids (even as an adult), who likes tinde-ki-sabzi? But it isn’t the case that everything about this particular day is bad: there’s something to look forward to, to cheer him up and sail through this “yucky day”: Their class is going to watch a movie!

On a dedicated day, Miss Mankad, their environmental science (EVS) teacher, shows a movie. And today happens to be that day when their class will get “to watch a wildlife film instead of studying”. Avi, who has “already seen films about climate change, about a tigress called Machli, and one about ghost crabs!,” was very excited, but nothing prepared him to watch this: A mama bear gobbling up her second-born cub.  

Avi is beyond shocked as he’s the second-born in his family. He wonders whether his mother will eat him, too. And to make the situation worse, when he asks his favourite teacher about this bizarre thing he has just watched, the “eco-friendly [Miss Mankad>, always insisting on saving the planet one switch at a time,” reasons that “this is normal in the natural world.” Still, Avi can’t wrap his head around the fact that a mother can have her children: That’s the central conflict driving this joyride of a children’s book.

Divided into eight short chapters with quirky titles that only add to a reader’s curiosity as with every flip they are left wondering how Avi will navigate his life as he’s faced with the biggest revelation: “THE MONUMENTAL FACT that Aai had cannibalistic tendencies, something he’d had no idea about for the last seven years of his life. How was it that he had not known this?”

But is there a way to know what’s going on with adults? It seems like in their world, everything has “to be triple-copied and signed, with multiple calls to be made. And everything seemed to need Aadhaar and PAN (sadly, not Peter Pan) and lots of passport-sized photos,” as Avi notes. Though little can one know about adults, this book dives deep into the psyche of a seven-year-old pretty well. Be it the pros and cons lists or his journals, each detail in this book is done to the tee.

Sample this: “Pro: She looked too worried to eat him. Con: She kept trying to get him to eat.” And this, from one of his journals: “Subject [Aai> has skipped dinner again.”

And like other books by Vachharajani, this book also has a character that is sensitive towards the natural environment. We’ve Avi’s father – Baba – who not only finds competition to be unhealthy but also remains deeply worried about carbon footprints and climate change. He “grumbles” when they all hop into Avi’s Maushis’ SUV to go to the theatre.

But nothing is helping Avi, really. No source of entertainment: neither a distraction like going to the “internationally-famous, world-renowned musical” nor even confronting his fears with his best friend Harjyot (aka HJ). Every day something or the other adds to his worries. This sentence seems to capture his frustration succinctly: “Not only did he get the worst chores in the house—setting table (boring) and taking out the trash (ugh)—now it seems second-borns were tastier options for their mothers.”

And then the drama in this book is wonderfully illustrated by Kuriyan. The graphics are not only beautiful, but they also break away from the regular practice of caricaturising characters. Kuriyan instead gives them a visuality that’s missing in children’s books. For example, the mother unlike in so many children’s books is not your everyday sari-draped woman just because she happens to be a ‘mother’. It’s important for the way we present characters in children’s books leaves an ever-lasting impression on them.

And this is equally true for the text, which is masterfully sensitive in this book. We not only find Avi wondering why history books always mention “kings and kingdoms” not “queens and queendoms,” but also witness how a conversation regarding the adoption of children is conducted. Vachharajani’s prose perfectly demonstrates that issues facing humanity at large can be supplied into children’s stories while keeping humour intact. And this is why this book happens to be a delightful read.

Saurabh Sharma (He/They) is a Delhi-based queer writer and freelance journalist.

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