In an age when it feels like surprises and amazement are hard to come by, here’s a book about presence, our senses, and seeing the natural world in a new light.

What the Dark Sounds Like, sensitively written by Aparna Kapur and whimsically illustrated by Krishna Bala Shenoi, follows a child’s trail of thought, and the simple yet ingenious answers he finds to the big questions that he poses.

“I wanted to know what the dark sounds like
So I listened to a night,
One dog barking and a lot of quiet,” the book says.

The writer, Aparna Kapur, puts a spin on the traditional themes that a book on the senses could revolve around: the things that we might hear, feel, smell, taste, and see. The illustrator, Krishna Bala Shenoi, introduces a touch of the surreal into the quotidian with his images which seem to convey that something awaits just beyond the surface, waiting to shine through from the edges of our everyday. 

With its visions of shops that lie shuttered at night, sun-dappled trees, the morning light filtering through Grandma’s kitchen, and the poetic aesthetic of an everyday streetside scene, this book shows us that we don’t need amenities to dream. All we need is an active imagination, and the desire to see the world around us anew, afresh.

What the Dark Sounds Like

Written by Aparna Kapur
Illustrated by Krishna Bala Shenoi
Published by Pratham Books

Read the book online on Pratham Books’ Storyweaver here

Story Attribution: This story What the Dark Sounds Like is written by Aparna Kapur . © Pratham Books, 2023. Some rights reserved. Released under CC BY 4.0 license.

Other Credits: ‘What the Dark Sounds Like’ has been published on StoryWeaver by Pratham Books. The development of this book has been supported by Henkel Anand India Private Limited. http://www.prathambooks.org.

Karthika Gopalakrishnan is the Head of Reading at Neev Academy, Bangalore, and the Director of the Neev Literature Festival. In the past, she has worked as a children’s book writer, editor, and content curator at Multistory Learning which ran a reading program for schools across south India. Prior to this, Karthika was a full-time print journalist with two national dailies. Her Twitter handle is g_karthika.