Climate fiction for children: Gogol’s friends have to leave as forests are cleared to build houses

Gogol was no ordinary kid. He was born on the day that the instruments of an atmospheric observatory on a Hawaaiian mountaintop, which measures how much carbon we are pumping into the atmosphere – crossed a dangerous limit. But that was not why Gogol was marked different right from the time he was a young boy, lugging along his bags to the boarding school at the edge of an old forest, a few miles from the sprawling city of Anantanagar. There were other reasons that made him different.

But we have to begin at the beginning. Because if we do not, then all that happened later will sound like a fairy tale told by a storyteller with a fevered mind. One whose thoughts change colours like the chameleons that flitted across the neem tree branches in the village graveyard just behind Gogol’s hostel rooms.

Now it so happened that some years ago, a gang of thieves had emerged from the forest and knocked off some bricks from the boundary wall, which had created a hole through which the graveyard could be reached. And every night, when the moonlight would be painting the devil trees silver and the barn owls would be screeching...

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