Mid-way through reading The Curious World of Uncle Tarini (Penguin India), we realise that most of us would have had a similar ‘uncle’ in our lives. He is a raconteur and a storyteller whose tales are dripping with wanderlust and discovery.

Tarini Charan Bandyopadhyay or Tarini ‘Khuro’ (Bengali: uncle) was created by the master storyteller Satyajit Ray. He crafted 15 stories from 1982-88 about this uncle’s exploits across India, and ensured his busy work life (he had 56 jobs; see box) takes the reader through all kinds of fast-paced, often oddball plots and mysteries as Paltu, the young narrator, reveals to us. The stories have appeared in three Bengali children’s magazines, and continue to delight readers since then. This new title is the first time that it appears as a collection, translated into English by Gopi and Indrani Majumdar.