Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of The Three Greens by Rajesh Talwar
- Sameer Gudhate
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
There was a softness in the room when I finished this book.
Not silence exactly—more like the kind of quiet that follows a memory you didn’t know you were carrying. I was sitting still longer than needed, aware that something gentle had brushed past me and stayed.
The Three Greens didn’t arrive loudly. It didn’t demand attention. It behaved like a childhood afternoon—unannounced, unhurried, and somehow complete in itself. I didn’t enter the story as an adult reader. I slipped into it the way one slips into an old photograph and suddenly recognizes the smell of packed food, the impatience of travel, the excitement of cousins waiting at a station.
The journey begins on a train, and I felt my body respond before my mind did. The rhythm of movement. The anticipation of Nainital. The particular joy of going somewhere not alone. I remembered how travel once meant togetherness, not itineraries. How destinations mattered less than who sat beside you.
Monika, Pravir, and Roomy don’t feel like characters designed to teach. They feel like children allowed to exist. Curious. Earnest. Occasionally annoying. Often sincere. They form “The Three Greens” not as a badge, but as a shared instinct—to care, to question, to notice. Their concern for the environment isn’t performative. It grows quietly from conversations with elders, from watching a lake suffer, from listening more than speaking.
What stayed with me wasn’t the environmental message—important as it is—but how naturally it was absorbed. Learning happens here the way it once did for many of us: through stories, through being told to look again, through small corrections that don’t humiliate. No lectures. No urgency. Just awareness settling in, slowly.
There were moments when the book felt almost deliberately gentle. As if it refused to rush even when mystery entered the room. The “Green Ghost,” the haunted house, the secret basement—they arrive without the sharp edges modern storytelling often insists on. Part of me, trained by pace and plot, wanted more tension. I noticed that impatience in myself and stayed with it. The book didn’t respond. It continued at its own rhythm. And somewhere along the way, I slowed down to match it.
That resistance was revealing.
This story isn’t trying to thrill. It’s trying to remind.
Remind us of picnics where the food mattered because someone had made it. Of games that didn’t need batteries. Of adults who spoke and were listened to. Of children who were allowed to think aloud without being corrected too quickly. Even the scenes with Mamu carry a warmth that feels increasingly rare—the presence of an adult who explains instead of instructing.
Roomy, in particular, lingered with me. Not because he is extraordinary, but because he is familiar. I’ve known that child. I might have been that child at times. There’s something deeply honest in how he’s written—no attempt to polish away contradiction.
The environmental concern, when it surfaces, does so with quiet gravity. Pollution isn’t an abstract threat here. It is personal. It affects places that are loved. And because those places are loved, responsibility follows naturally. The book trusts that connection more than it trusts fear.
I did feel, at times, that certain moments could have been allowed to breathe longer. Some scenes passed by like a window glimpsed from a moving train—enough to feel, not enough to stay. But perhaps that, too, is intentional. Childhood rarely pauses to explain itself.
When I closed the book, I didn’t feel instructed. I felt accompanied. As if three children had walked briefly through my adult life and left behind a different pace, a softer way of paying attention.
The kind that notices a lake before it’s ruined.
The kind that remembers how caring once began.
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