In the sea, once upon a time, O my Best Beloved, there was a Whale and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, the crab and the dab, the plaice and the dace, the skate and his mate, the mackerel and the pickerel, and the really truly twirly-whirly eel.”

How I too giggled, I remember, reading aloud to my four-year-old daughter that quirkily rhyming opening of How the Whale Got its Throat, the introductory tale of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories. We were having fun under the shade of a fragrant mango tree on the campus of the Sir JJ School of Art. Shopping at Crawford Market, we happened to find ourselves across it. She was carrying this favourite book by Kipling, whose childhood bungalow stands on the grounds of the school where his sculptor father John Lockwood Kipling taught and was the Dean. Surrendering to serendipity, we had chosen an apt corner to hear the delightfully nonsense-nuanced passage in a match of monument to mood. Those beautiful buildings will always bear for me the memory of this ma-beti moment.