Goodreads asked Sanchit Gupta:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Sanchit Gupta This goes long back. Nearly a decade before I wrote the first word of The Tree with a Thousand Apples, I was a student who happened to read an article on the then ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas in Lebanon. I couldn’t understand much of world politics back then, but what I could not forget was that the article was written from the point of view of a ten year old boy. This boy had just lost his home, his town and his family, even though he was not a part of Hamas and he was not an Israeli. He was a Lebanese, the place who was not on either side of the conflict. I found that very peculiar.

Irrespective of how I felt, the boy had lost what he had lost. I too was a boy back then, and how would I have felt if I had lost my family and my home at that age? There won’t be any more birthday parties for him, he won’t play with the neighborhood kids when the evenings dawned, he won’t be scolded for cheating during exams. No, it was not just an attack on his home. What that boy had truly lost was his childhood. Did he know about Hamas? Or Israel? Or terrorism? Or oil prices? Or good and bad? Did he care about any of them? He would have wanted to ask questions, but from whom and when? He must have forged an enemy in his heart, a nameless one. Yet, even though I could read and see all that, I felt I could not really understand it very well. Maybe because as someone who had himself seen a very comfortable childhood, what could I have known about the pain of losing one?

I visited Kashmir about eight years later. And preserved in my memory, that boy from that article came alive in those streets. I saw children who had lost their childhood. I saw children who were not on either side of the conflict, yet had grown to choose one. A side where all of them were right and all of them were wrong. I could see that the Lebanese boy and his nameless enemy were no-one but the same children. Children like us. For eight years I had that boy in my head and my heart. I could see, but I could never understand. The day I did I had to tell this story.

flag