Amil and the After

A hopeful and heartwarming story about finding joy after tragedy, At the turn of the new year in 1948, Amil and his family are trying to make a home in India, now independent of British rule. Both Muslim and Hindu, twelve-year-old Amil is not sure what home means anymore. The memory of the long and difficult journey from their hometown in what is now Pakistan lives with him. And despite having an apartment in Bombay to live in and a school to attend, life in India feels uncertain. Nisha, his twin sister, suggests that Amil begin to tell his story through drawings meant for their mother, who died when they were just babies. Through Amil, readers witness the unwavering spirit of a young boy trying to make sense of a chaotic world, and find hope for himself and a newly reborn nation.

Autorentext

Veera Hiranandani, author of the Newbery Honor–winning The Night Diary, earned her MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the author of The Whole Story of Half a Girl, a Sydney Taylor Notable Book and a South Asia Book Award finalist, and How to Find What You're Not Looking For, winner of the Sydney Taylor Book Award and the New York Historical Society Children's History Book Prize. A former editor at Simon & Schuster, she now teaches in the Writing for Children and Young Adults MFA Program at The Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Klappentext

A hopeful and heartwarming story about finding joy after tragedy, Amil and the After is a companion to the beloved and award-winning Newbery Honor novel The Night Diary, by acclaimed author Veera Hiranandani

At the turn of the new year in 1948, Amil and his family are trying to make a home in India, now independent of British rule.

Both Muslim and Hindu, twelve-year-old Amil is not sure what home means anymore. The memory of the long and difficult journey from their hometown in what is now Pakistan lives with him. And despite having an apartment in Bombay to live in and a school to attend, life in India feels uncertain.

Nisha, his twin sister, suggests that Amil begin to tell his story through drawings meant for their mother, who died when they were just babies. Through Amil, readers witness the unwavering spirit of a young boy trying to make sense of a chaotic world, and find hope for himself and a newly reborn nation.

Zusammenfassung
A hopeful and heartwarming story about finding joy after tragedy, Amil and the After is a companion to the beloved and award-winning Newbery Honor novel The Night Diary, by acclaimed author Veera Hiranandani.

Leseprobe
Chapter One
Amil lay stretched out on the daybed in the living room, trying to balance a thick charcoal pencil on the tip of his nose, his sketchbook sitting open on his chest. He finally got the pencil balanced, and it stood proudly, extending into the air.
Look! he said to Nisha, trying to keep his head still.
Nisha s head jerked up from her writing just as the pencil toppled to the ground. She was always writing something. She used to write every day in her diary. Now she wrote secret stories she wouldn t let anyone see. She stopped writing in her diary because she said it hurt too much to think about the before. She didn t want to think about the old India ­before their horrible walk across the new border, before Amil almost died and Dadi almost died, before the man with the knife tried to attack Nisha, before they saw what they saw on the train.
You re distracting me, she said when the pencil hit the floor.
Aw, you missed it, he said.
Missed what? she asked, absorbed in her writing.
Forget it," he said, and sighed.
He got up, grabbed the pencil from the cool tile floor, and plunked himself back on the daybed. He decided to draw a quick self-­portrait for his mama of what he looked like now. It felt like a message he was sending to her that was somehow different than what she could perhaps see of him in real life.
Amil had never known his mother. She died the day he and Nisha were born, and now, more than twelve years later, his family had traveled far from where his life had briefly connected with hers, one ending and one beginning. Did she wonder where they went ­Amil, Nisha, Papa, Dadi, and Kazi? Or had she somehow traveled with them?
Maybe she was just gone, like the way a cloud moved across the sky, changing into something else and eventually disappearing into the atmosphere. He hoped she did watch over them, though. He wanted to show her what it had been like after everything happened, the way Nisha kept a diary written to her about what happened before. He wanted to capture what it felt like when the before became the after the second it went by. It was like catching air.
He liked drawing much better than writing. Writing was not his favorite thing to do, and reading was even harder. Nisha loved his drawings. She said it was like magic, how he could think of a thing and create it on paper so easily. Drawing set his fingers free.
It was hot for January, so they stayed out of the sun on this sleepy Thursday afternoon while their dadi wrote her letters and Kazi prepared dinner. Papa did his paperwork. Neither Nisha nor Amil knew exactly what that meant, but Papa sure seemed to have a lot of it.
It wasn t just any old day, though. It was New Year s Day, January 1, 1948. Last night, on New Year s Eve, Papa had let them stay up late so they could walk to the pier at Apollo Bunder just before midnight. Amil was surprised that Papa wanted to do this. He never seemed to be in a mood to celebrate anything lately, but something about last night felt different. Even Kazi and Dadi came.
Amil saw a few other people gathered along the harbor, mostly young men and a few families with older children. Two boys around his age were holding sparklers. When Papa s watch struck midnight, the boys called out, Happy New Year! and someone set off a firecracker into the inky sky over the water. He watched the boys sparklers light up the harbor and send sprays of gold into the air. He turned and saw Papa, Kazi, Dadi, and Nisha also taking in the glow, their faces bright and happier than he had seen them in a long time.
He couldn t help but think of another midnight, the one last August when the first prime minister of India had announced India s independence. Amil had heard Prime Minis