A boy remembers his huge ancestral house on the banks of the Ganga at Ahiritola in present-day Kolkata. The grand mansion was built by his "father's great great grandfather" in the heyday of the British Raj. Once, he decided to run away from home after receiving a drubbing from his parents for scoring 15 out of 100 in a Maths pre-test in school. Hungry and fuming with rage, he reaches the palatial house at Ahiritola, and there he meets two men—Shibubabu and Pardesi —amid a heady aroma of dhup-dhuno, rosewater and tobacco. Shibubabu treats him to an exquisite meal and puts him to bed. After a night of peaceful sleep, the boy wakes up to glasses of almond milk and Kuttibabu, a maths tutor. Kuttibabu makes math seem as easy as ABC and the kid is extremely pleased with his morning lesson. But, soon, his father comes pounding at the gates of the mansion, frantically looking for his son. When the kid tries to placate his railing father, to say that Shibuprasad and Pardesi took good care of him, the mansion is no longer the clean, well-stocked house studded with pots and plants and parakeets. It is dirty and dilapidated, with no trace of Shibuprasad and Pardesi. The father scolds the boy again, "Don't you know, Shibubabu was my great great grandfather, and Pardesi was his valet." The aghast little boy promises to score well in Maths next time, earn enough money one day and renovate The House at Ahiritola.
The original Bengali shorty story Ahiritolar Bari was written by Leena Majumdar, a much-loved children's writer in the canon of Bengali literature. Majumdar published her first short story when she was just 14 years old. It appeared in Sandesh, Bengal's favourite children's magazine, started in 1913 by the illustrious family of Satyajit Ray and overseen by four successive generations of the Rays. Sandesh, still going strong in its 105th year, spawned the two most important names in "Bangla children's literature": Rabindranath Tagore and Sukumar Ray. The delectable short fiction penned by these writers and twenty seven more have been newly translated into a concise collection called Timeless Tales from Bengal: An Anthology of Bangla Children's and Young Adults' Stories. Edited by Dipankar Roy and Saurav Dasthakur, both teaching English Literature at the Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, the compendium of children's literature is a primer for the "non-Bengali readership", with an extensive glossary to acquaint them with regional and cultural nuances.
The 34 short stories traverse a vast landscape of categories, genres and sub-genres; from folk tales, animalia, ghost stories and detective fiction, one can also dip into narratives which are historical, sports-related or raise social consciousness. The stories have been arranged to follow the chronology of the original authors' birth. This might have the effect of making the readers more deeply conscious of the evolution and trajectory of children's literature in Bangla; from the moralising and educational mission of Kathamala by Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar in mid-nineteenth century to Western imports in the form of translations and adaptions which fascinated young readers with adventure and sci-fi. But with the birth of magazines, the corpus of children's literature only kept growing. All the famous Bengali short stories for the young have grown out of magazines like Mouchak, Sakha, Sishusathi, Ramdhanu, Sandesh, Rangmashal and Anandamela. And the editors have tried to offer an eclectic selection of translations from this rich history. There is Buddhadeva Bose's The Old Woman at the Metro Theatre, Satyajit Ray's Math Sir, Golapibabu and Tipu, Sunil Gangopadhyay's Walkie-Talkie, Mahasweta Devi's Nyadosh, Our Incredible Cow, among others. These are stories you won't find easily online.
Perhaps, considering the thickness of the book which runs for over 450 pages, there could have been more stories in the collection. And even though the book has been produced for a novice in Bengali children's literature, other ingredients like poetry and nonsense verse, games and nuggets of trivia from the relevant historical period would have definitely layered the presentation.