In the World of Witches and Demons

“I slipped into a secret room. It was nowhere else than in my own home! Nobody knew this – not even my parents. One night the world went black around me. No light. I found myself in that room of mystery. Doors locked. I fell under the spell of an evil spirit,” says ten-year-old Sarina Hossain, a Class IV student of Chittagong Grammar School. She has recently got her story 'Castle of Doom' published as a book by Olympia Publishers in London. She is sharing her ideas with me in her home in Gulshan.
Shifting her eyes from right to left as if trying to recall something, the child prodigy goes on, “Turning around, I saw a shadow take the shape of a man. It was too scary. He had very big eyes. No eyeball was there but a dot. I tried and tried to come out of the maze. I could see the light again only when I woke up. It was really a scary dream!”
An engaging smile creeps into her face as she finishes recounting a dream she had a month or two ago. Talking to her gives the impression that she lives more in her imagination than in reality, being in contact with imaginary characters – witches, evil spirits, living scarecrows and demons. An avid reader since her early years, she finds fiction like that written by RL Stine quite enthralling.
With all the possibility of becoming a prolific writer, Sarina has so far written more than ten works of fiction and two hundred rhymes. Her stories accompany sketches that perfectly compliment the plot. What makes the stories by this gifted child stand out is her outstanding ability to come up with an ending no one could predict. She started writing 'Castle of Doom' at the age of eight, and it took two months to finish.
Always a source of inspiration for her writing, her father, Saiful Hossain, emailed a copy to Olympia Publishers in 2011. The editors' panel were astonished at the storytelling quality of the eight-year-old. They emailed her father asking him to send the scanned copy of the manuscript. Having found the handwriting and sketches convincing as being that of a child, they sent another email seeking the original manuscript.
For further confirmation, one of the editors called her father over phone and then talked to the girl about her story ideas and rhymes. This was the conversation that left the editors' panel with no room for doubt about the writer's authenticity.

Sarina Hossain

“The story was reviewed in three or four stages. The authenticity was a major concern. No less than two years did I wait to get the story published. Before I got the complimentary copy beforehand this year, I could not believe it would ever be published,” says her proud father.
“You see the edited copy that marks the edited portions with red colour. They had to change very little,” he adds.

The book starts with her poem:
Doom Poem
(Introduction to Castle of Doom)
Faraway there's a castle
That's high,
Where people and animals
Come and die.
A place of people
Who wear haunted wigs?
A place where people
Eat poison twigs.
You know it's whom?
It's the coming day of the Castle of Doom!
So you need to beware,
Because the monsters are here!

The young writer describes the ill fate of ten friends who find the castle of doom in PixiDoomland. They must figure out how to undo the spell cast over them by a witch. For fiction-lovers, it is a book to read in a breath and meet an unexpected ending. Both Sarina and his father dream to see someday a Hollywood movie based on any of her horror stories.
Her game with words is profoundly expressed in her rhymes. One of them is 'Nose in the rose'.

Billy the fat, eats flowers,
The colour is red,
But after someday, he says,
I should smell something instead.
In his garden, he slipped by water,
He took the flower when he fell,
When he smelled it, He felt calm.
“Wow! What a spendid smell!”
But he thought, he forgot something,
left in the rose,
He felt something missing in his face,
“Oh no! Where is my nose!”

Among the treasures – stories, rhymes and other write-ups, I found something intriguing in her diary. This she wrote when she was aged seven. It starts with a title 'About the Author'. It says, “The author is only 7 years old. Then she will grow to 8,9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 years and will still be writing lots and lots of books. She will never stop.”
Let it be.