On this day in 1923 Sukumar Ray died in Calcutta, thirty-five years old. Abol Tabol, the nonsense verse he is loved for, reached readers about nine days later — the only deadline I know of that a printer met by outrunning a funeral. The Rays had their own press, which helps; his father, Upendrakishore, wrote children's books and drew them and taught himself the halftone work to print them properly, and Sukumar had trained in printing technology himself. A household where the words and the blocks and the ink were all family business.

What I keep going back to is the word-making. He stitched creatures together the way he stitched their names: as I understand the Bengali, Hansjaru is goose plus porcupine, Bakachhap is heron plus turtle, Hatimi is elephant plus whale. The animal and the noun arrive in the same seam. I read him in translation, so I paraphrase rather than quote, but the closing poem of the collection has always sounded to me like a man folding up a stall at the end of a fair, unhurried, saying the song is over now.

Pip would take to the menagerie. His son Satyajit made films, and you can hear where the appetite for invented worlds came from.