"My father had purchased a big dining table. Every night I would wake up to the sound of the footsteps of a memsahib - the clickety-clack of her high heels as her spirit wandered about the house. Mukhopadhyay and his family lived in Katihar in Bihar. Unlike my books, they are not funny," says Mukhopadhyay, as he takes a trip down memory to recount his sightings and "inexplicable experiences". "In life, my ghostly encounters have been serious and fearsome. "It's a deliberate attempt to create funny ghosts to remove the fear," he said.īut unlike his books, Mukhopadhyay's real life spooks are far from funny. "I have written about magic realism much before Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie," said Mukhopadhyay, who is considered on par with Satyajit Ray as a practitioner of the genre of magic realism in children's stories. The story weaves the reality of peer pressure, expectations, teenage dilemma with the supernatural, appealing to children as well as adults. The ghost desperately tries to scare the boy, who is unfazed. Young Barun, who fails to make the grade in a school test, runs into a ghost, Nidhiram, in a deserted orchard. Mukhopadhyay's signature book The Ghost of Gosain Bagan, translated into Hindi, is a satire on ghosts narrated with humour in his trademark style. The book has been published by Scholastic. He was here for a children's book festival where he promoted his new anthology of humour and supernatural short stories "Funny and Funnier", translated from Bengali by Palash Baran Pal and Abhijit Gupta. Contemporary writers are not writing good stories," he said.
![bengali books for children bengali books for children](https://rumahhijabaqila.com/img/bengali-story-book-free-pdf-download-3.jpg)
"A good ghost story finds takers but the stories have to be well-told.
![bengali books for children bengali books for children](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/411p2ENIiJL._SX218_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_ML2_.jpg)
After every productive period comes a non-productive period," Mukhopadhyay told IANS in an interview.Īccording to the novelist, ghost stories still hold good for children despite reality television. However, the writer observed that "children's literature is going through a period of lull". "Ghosts exist, I believe in them and am scared of them," said the 75-year-old novelist whose cult spook story The Ghost of Gosain Bagan was published as an English graphic novel this month. But acclaimed writer Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay says in real life, ghosts are not as funny as in his books! He is the Ruskin Bond of Bengali literature and has written more than 100 stories and books for children, most of them on ghosts.