Before I could read, I was read to, and there was only one book that was read aloud in our house. I am four years old. Then five, then six, seven. Even when I’ve learned how to read, the routine doesn’t change. The book comes out from its place on the shelf in the evening after my father is home from work. He lies back on propped up pillows, my brother and I lolling next to him. Even though my mother can read the book for herself, she wants to listen in as well; when my father reads from the book, it becomes funnier, hysterically funny. We know all the poems backward, but he only has to start reading and we laugh till our stomachs hurt. It is a book of nonsense verse in Bengali, populated by a collection of violent oddballs—our favourite is a poem about a head clerk who leaps up from his gentle afternoon snooze convinced his moustache has been stolen. Everyone around him is flummoxed. He is shown his face in a mirror. Your moustache is intact, look! But this