This Russian Colouring book called The Red Poppy with drawings by N. Obrucheva, printed in the USSR, was published by the “Malysh” Publishing House. It was bought for me by my grandafther between the late 1980s- early 1990s in Asansol.

In January 2019, while rummaging through my mother’s collection, I found an old looking book belonging to Daddy. With “Hem C Mahindra. Oxford. 1928” handwritten in ink on the partly stained page inside.

Omar Khayyam composed this collection of four-line stanza poems, or rubai, as they are known in Farsi, sometime between the late eleventh century to early twelfth century, before he died in 1131. History further made itself known in a personal and intimate way as I read the Bengali inscription on the first page – “To Priti and Dilip Bandopadhyay – on their wedding, 6.6.66”.

The Children’s Dictionary was published in the year 1910 by the Standard Literature Co. Ltd with publishing offices in India, Burma and Ceylon. The volumes date back to the colonial period in India and were purchased by my father whilst he was a student at St. Xavier’s College, Bombay.

I was quite small, the first time I set my eyes upon this tiny dictionary. It was during our annual summer holidays, spent happily at my grandparents house in Jabalpur. The dictionary belonged to my maternal grandfather who purchased it from a bookshop in Kashmir on his honeymoon in October, 1957. This little Webster is a classic 18000 words Liliput pocket dictionary with 799 pages.