As a child, when Shanta Gokhale first read social activist Sane Guruji’s autobiography, Shyamchi Aai, she “wept copiously”. “I didn’t like Shyam’s mother when she beat him when he was afraid to learn swimming. I was scared of water and I knew how that felt. I didn’t like Shyam’s father when he scolded him for not having his head shaved. When my mother asked me how I was getting along with the book, I told her what I thought. She said times were different then and the family was poor. I had to understand that,” the veteran writer-translator-critic shares, in an email interview. The impact of reading the book, she remembers, was “distinctly different from reading Heidi”—a book she loved. “Heidi was in the Swiss mountains. Shyam was next door. I suppose I realised that Heidi was about other   people,  and Shyam  was  about us,” she adds.

Replete with life lessons, Guruji wrote the book when he was imprisoned in Nashik jail between 1932 and 1934. The author-protagonist locates the book in an ashram, where he shares stories about his childhood in Palgad and most importantly his relationship with his mother, to fellow residents. The stories, told over 42 nights, are like parables from a child about a mother, who taught him values of self-respect, hard work, honesty, and being a better human.