young fare
The bounds of the
boundless
Amarinder Sandhu

Island of Infinity: Marina’s Dream
by Anuradha Majumdar. Puffin. Pages 300. Rs 250.

Summer holidays at last. Goodbye to all the schoolbooks. Meet the siblings, Marina and Gautam. Marina is the perpetual dreamer, while her brother, Gautam, is on the lookout for the real pirates. They have come down to Kodai to spend their vacations with Grandpa Narayan, a famous geologist who can make a simple stone appear as the most marvelous thing on Earth.

Grandpa Narayan has in his possession the Fuji Rock that turns invisible in the sunlight. The story becomes even more interesting when Marina has inconsistent dreams about an island engulfed in light. The peace of the Narayan household is broken when Grandpa starts receiving threatening phone calls from Dargate, an international arms manufacturer, who wants the Fuji Rock.

Majumdar has a way with words and puts life into all the characters. She makes the Narayans appear as the family next door. As the novel progresses, we are introduced to Deenu, who is the helper and makes the best idlis; Tenzing, the Tibetan friend of the siblings, and Spark. Who is this Spark? Well, Sparky talks ten to a dozen and his vocabulary is par excellence. His command of the languages ranges from Hindi to English to a smattering of Italian. "Excellentati!" "Macaro-ni!" "Garam chai!" "Pongal-oh-Pongal!" "To good ya !" Have you guessed? He is an intelligent talking parrot.

Tenzing also holds a rock which has properties similar to the Fuji Rock. Grandpa has invited Madame Michiko all the way from Japan. In a storytelling session, delicately strumming on her guitar-like instrument, Madame Michiko relates the tale of the giant messenger turtle, which was swept from the Pacific to the shores of Honshu. The shell of this turtle had strange markings. The marking deciphered by a lama, were a cry for help from the Island of Infinity and the shell also had a map to this Island.

Events take a dramatic turn when the hotel room of Madame Michiko is ransacked and a strange man is seen shadowing Karoo la. The children now have to go join their school camp in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The children board the Emerald Voyager and sail from their school camp. They have to share their cabin with the hoity-toity flamboyant Lady Rukmini. Lady Rukmani applies her warpaint, despite the increased humidity, strews her glossy magazines over the children’s bunks and, what more, she is terrified of Spark. A tsunami carries the voyager to an island not shown in the maps. Is it the hand of fate? On the island where the landing of Captain Ali is opposed, the readers get to meet Dharmaji with his atrocious "what ij your business" attitude.

Many scenes in the humorous novel keep the reader at his wits’ ends. Island of Infinity is a children’s book packed with adventure and magic. The language is simple and the words have an easy flow. The young readers will go through a roller coaster ride in the book. The story carries a strong message of man’s tampering with nature and how nature has its strange ways of retribution. The book has it all—adventure, magic, the raft to infinity and telepathy. Do the children find the missing crystal and the much sought after Island of Infinity? Read on and find out.

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