There is no ‘handheld device’ that a child needs, other than a book. If you agree with this conservative claim, then here you may read a review of two such wonderful ‘devices’: The Merry Adventures of Harshabardhan and Gobardhan by Shibram Chakraborty, and Deki: The Adventures of a Dog and A Boy in Tibet, by George Schaller. Both these books will appeal to young and old alike; for it is often seen that the more admiring audience for quality children’s fiction are the adults who dip into a child’s bookshelf for a respite from the horrors of the world! Bangla has a glittering phalanx of writers who wrote especially for children: Sukumar Ray, Lila Majumdar, Satyajit Ray, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Samaresh Majumdar, and Upendrakishore Roychoudhury, to name a few. Indeed, Bangla has done more for children than any other Indian language, as Gulzar Saab said in an interview (to Tehelka magazine) once. Shibram Chakraborty is part of this canon. He is often called the Bengali Wodehouse. Thanks to Arunava Sinha’s translation, you will see why. We are indeed fortunate that Hachette have commissioned a translation, for it brings the much loved duo, Harshabardhan and Gobardhan, and all their bumbling antics, to a pan-Indian audience.  Irony is the principal vehicle of Shibram Chakraborty’s humour, so we cannot expect a Laurel-Hardy style slapstick humour when dealing with our Harshabardhan and Gobardhan. In the note to the translation, we hear the author’s unorthodox voice when he says: ‘What they [children] got from my stories were not moral lessons about growing up, but the taste of being grown-ups. Children love my stories because I don’t write for children. My writing is adulterated, which is why it turns children into adults.’ There, he has said it all. In the 20 stories in this collection, neither children, nor spaces associated with children, like the school or playground are to be found. No morals taught, no models of good behaviour imparted: these are stories meant to delight with the silly antics of grown-ups. Children get to encounter the eccentricities and idiosyncrasies of adults, who are rather like children themselves: throwing tantrums, pursuing fantasies, unraveling the world.  Shibram Chakrabarty is a punster of formidable repute, and one can only admire the translator’s expertise that most of the wordplay has been carried forward into the translation. That humour does not travel well ...