Veera Hiranandani Draws on Family History in 'Amil and the After'

Award-winning author, Veera Hiranandani, talks to us about her latest middle-grade, historical fiction novel, Amil and the After. A follow-up to her previous book, Newberry Honor winner, The Night Diary, Amil and the After takes place in 1949 after the Partition of India and tells the story of 12 year-old Amil as he adjusts to life in his new home of India with his family. While The Night Diary was told from the perspective of Amil’s twin sister, Nisha, and focused on her diary writing, this story pivots to Amil, who expresses his thoughts and feelings through pictures rather than words. According to Hiranandani, it was Nisha’s idea for Amil to begin drawing. “Nisha suggests to him, because he’s really… he feels very lonely and displaced, and they went first to Jodhpur and then to Bombay, so they’re starting all over again, and this was because their father had a new job that he had to follow. So, Amil just has a lot of questions about the world and is trying to make sense of it, and Nisha suggests that he start a drawing journal for their mother who is no longer living. She died during childbirth and, just as Nisha wrote this diary, now Amil is writing this drawing in his drawing journal… these drawings for his mother, kind of processing what he’s going through and expressing his feelings, and just having this creative outlet.”

For Hiranandani, writing this story gave her the chance to go back to a world she wanted to return to. She also explained why she shifted her attention to Amil this time around. “About a year after I wrote The Night Diary, I really missed the characters and I wanted to come back to them and revisit the world, but I didn’t want to write a direct sequel. I didn’t necessarily want to continue it exactly the way it was. I wanted to try to do something a little different. So I wanted to focus on Amil. A lot of the students that I would visit at school visits wanted a book from his perspective so I wrote this, sort of, companion novel where it does follow the story a few months after, but it has a very different feeling and a very different point of view, and it’s really looking at, what happens after the survival story? …Are they going to survive this horrible situation or not? And then they do, but as we know from either our own personal difficulties or going through a global pandemic… if you’re ok after the immediate crisis of it, ok isn’t always ok. There’s things to process. You have to put your life back together after that, kind of, trauma or disruption, and so that’s what Amil and the After is looking at. It’s looking at Amil and his family trying to rebuild their lives on, with this very unsteady feeling, and so that’s the story I wanted to tell with this new book.”