Chiri Chookdi

ਚਿੜੀ ਚੂਕਦੀ - Chiri Chookdi, the sparrow's chirping - is what a Punjabi mother says for first light. It is not a song; it is the two words that mean the day has come. This is an original picture book built around them: the morning after the lullaby, on the same village roof.

The rooster crows in the dark. The sky goes pink. A sparrow lands on the roof's edge and says get up, get up. The buffalo is up, the goat is up, the dog and the cat are up, and my moon is still right there under the sheet. Dadi puts the churn on. Wash your face, clean your teeth, comb your hair; a lump of gur and a bowl of milk, I said so last night. Tea on the chulha, Papa off to the fields with the bullocks, the sparrow fed from the child's own thali and off with a phurr - and look who's come to the gate.

Every page has three lines:
One in Punjabi, in Gurmukhi script.
One in English letters, so you can say it even if you do not read Gurmukhi.
One in English, so you know what it means.

The refrain comes round five times, set in bold, and turns with the morning: get up, come, eat up, play. A mother's voice, in the first person, the whole way through - sung to a child, never a boy or a girl.

Twenty original illustrated pages of a Punjab morning: the roof, the yard, the trough, the churn, the chulha, the gate. The fourth of the Inara Library folk-rhyme picture books, after Allar Ballar Bave Da, Kikli Kaleer Di and Saun Ja Kaka. Written for children who are growing up far from Punjab, and for the people who wake them up in the morning.