—

After reading Vandana Singh’s Younguncle Comes to Town, I remember talking to a friend, and our saying that the book was almost as funny and whimsical as Lila Majumdar’s children’s writing—and there is no greater compliment that we could bestow. That is an index of Majumdar’s secure place in the Top of the Pops of Indian children’s writing. Majumdar, born in 1908, and a cousin of that other incomparable humorist, Sukumar Ray, has written successfully in Bengali in a whole gamut of genres, such as ghost stories, science fiction, adventure novels, plays, and humorous short stories.