There is a character in The Great Disguise Chronicles who I think about more than any other. Not because he is the most active in the story, but because of what he represents. What he quietly insists on, simply by being present.
His name is Baba Jaan.
Baba Jaan runs The Great Disguise, a costume shop that is central to the series, maybe even a character in its own right. He is old, patient, and careful with words. He has dark eyes that pay attention to things, not watching, but noticing. When he speaks, he rarely answers directly. His explanations arrive in their own order. You cannot rush them.
He is Ruben’s grandfather figure. Not biologically. He came into Ruben’s life because Ruben and his mum live in the flat directly above the shop. Ruben’s mum is a nurse who works long, irregular hours. She is warm and present in the ways she can be. But she cannot always be there.
Baba Jaan is there.
He did not step in to fill a gap. He was not a substitute. He is the grandfather Ruben has, the one who showed up and stayed. Ruben does not think of him as “not really” his grandfather. He is his grandfather. That’s the whole of it.
I want to be honest about why this relationship sits at the centre of the series.
There are a lot of children growing up in families that don’t look like the traditional template. Single parents working hard, grandparents or neighbours or family friends becoming the consistent adult presence in a child’s life. People who are not related by blood but are family in every way that counts.
Those relationships rarely get the same weight in children’s stories that conventional family structures do. They are sometimes treated as a stand-in for the real thing, a gap-filler, a lesser version. I wanted to write one that was simply the real thing. No qualification, no explaining, no sense of loss built into the structure of it.
Baba Jaan is not Ruben’s grandfather despite anything. He is his grandfather.
He is also doing something else in the story, something I didn’t fully understand when I started writing him.
Baba Jaan is a man who has never been diminished by admitting what he doesn’t know. Who does not look away when Ruben is frightened or uncertain. Who does not fix it, or tell Ruben to be brave, or change the subject. He becomes more present, not less. He sits with whatever is hard and doesn’t make Ruben feel that the hard thing is a problem to be managed.
That sounds simple. It is, in practice, surprisingly rare to write.
The contrast is with how many adults, and particularly men, respond to a child showing vulnerability. The urge to resolve it. To reframe it as something positive, or minimise it, or move on quickly to the part where everything is better. Baba Jaan does none of that. He just stays.
And in staying, he shows Ruben something that the story never states directly but, I hope, a reader can feel across the series: that the things worth doing were always done by people who were not always confident. That uncertainty is not a sign you shouldn’t be there, it’s telling you that you can be afraid and still move.
He is also, I should say, genuinely funny. Obliquely funny. The kind of funny that arrives from perfect precision, from saying exactly the right small thing at the exact right moment. He is not a warm-hearted eccentric. He is a man who has been thinking about things for a very long time.
He knows what Ruben will find before Ruben does, but he never uses this knowledge to hurry anything.
I think about the adults who shaped me at different points in my life. Not always family. Often people who had no formal responsibility for me but who paid attention anyway. Who said something small and specific at a moment when I needed it. Who didn’t flinch when things were complicated. Even as an adult, there are people who have given me a quiet confidence and direction, that has left a lasting impression.
Baba Jaan is built from versions of those people. He is an ideal, yes. But not an impossible one. I think children know the difference between a character who represents something real and one who is just a placeholder for wisdom. Baba Jaan is, I hope, the first kind.
When I talk to parents about the book, the question I get asked most often is whether it’s about loss. Whether the absent parent, the unconventional family structure, the old man in the shop, all add up to a sad story underneath the adventure.
It doesn’t. Ruben’s world is not defined by what is missing. It is defined by what is there.
A grandfather who notices things. A shop full of old stories. A mirror that opens onto something vast.
That, I think, is enough.
Ruben & The Curious Cosmonaut, Book One of The Great Disguise Chronicles, is out now.
A R Marchant