[ Prachi Sharma ]

I was born and raised among the hills of Arunachal Pradesh, in the small town of Lumla – and whatever I have become, it began there.

My father, Satya Prakash Sharma, came from a modest village and gave his working life to Arunachal as a senior government teacher, in a remote corner of the state where good teachers are everything. Later, when we children had grown, my mother, Manju Sharma, taught here too. Ours was a home of educators – and so, naturally, a home of books. They were never just objects on a shelf; they were how our family understood the world, and how we passed ourselves on.

The schools of Arunachal shaped me in ways I still carry. I studied hard in those classrooms, and I was fortunate to become a Class 10 state topper – an achievement that belongs as much to the teachers and the place that raised me as it does to me.

That love of books became a family inheritance. My mother preserved our family’s old, unwritten vegetarian recipes in her book The Lost Recipes, saving a generation’s flavours before they could be lost. I went on to write Manju, a tribute to her, and a children’s book, Paws around the World, featuring our rescue dog Oreo. My sister Richa wrote Finding Home Again. And the next generation didn’t wait – my son published two picture books at the age of six, and even read his book aloud at a public library; my nephew wrote a superhero story at eight.

Three generations. Seven books. One family – rooted in a childhood in Arunachal.

Today I live in California, where I run The Sapling Press, helping other children become the published authors of their own stories – carrying forward exactly what my teacher-parents gave me in Arunachal: the belief that every child has a story worth telling. Recently, India Currents, a respected Indian-American magazine in the US, featured our family’s journey.

Sometimes I think of those classrooms in Lumla, and of my parents teaching in a far-flung corner of the country, and I realise the whole journey began there – in the state that gave a young girl her foundation, and then watched her carry it across the world.

Arunachal made me. Wherever the books travel, that is where they started. (The writer is the founder of The Sapling Press, and can be contacted at hello@thesaplingpress.com)