It all began with the fall of a meteorite and the crater it made. In its centre was a red notebook, sticking out of the ground-the first (or was it really the last?) of Professor Shonku's diaries.
Professor Trilokeshwar Shonku, eccentric genius and scientist, disappeared without a trace after he shot off into space in a rocket from his backyard in Giridih, accompanied by his loyal but not-too- intelligent servant, Prahlad, his cat, Newton, and Bidhushekhar, his robot with an attitude.
What has become of the professor? Has he decided to stay on in Mars, his original destination? Or has he found his way to some other planet and living there with strange companions? His last diary tells an incredible story... Other diaries unearthed from his abandoned laboratory reveal stranger and even more exciting adventures involving a ferocious sadhu, a revengeful mummy and a mad scientist in Norway who turns famous men into six-inch statues.
Exciting, imaginative and funny, the stories in this collection capture the sheer magic of Ray's lucid language, elegant style, graphic descriptions and absurd humour. The indomitable Professor Shonku has returned, to win himself over a whole new band of followers!
I'd be lying if I told you I had read Shonku as a child. For starters, I went to a boarding school in the hills where my Bengali teacher was a waddly wobbly wheezer who spat through the gaps in his rotting teeth as he spoke and smothered us with vaporous clouds of halitosis that drove me to study the plebian language of rickshawallahs and phuchkawallahs instead, Hindi. In other words, it eventually stood me in good stead.
The truth, of course, is that Shonku landed from the Red Planet into our Sandesh when we were studying for our Senior Cambridge and solving algebraic puzzles and geometric theorems and staring like idiots at calculus, logarithm tables and dividers and protractors. All this was under the stern gaze of an enormous and powerful Irish Christian Brother called Cooney, who looked like a bulldog and dressed in an unwashed black habit all year long that smelled of the tobacco which spilled from his pipe into his pockets and everywhere he went. This monstrous Irishman would whimper 'meow' under his breath so his clouded pet alley cat could hear him and follow him around with its tail held erect and twitching.
Now let me put two and two together in arithmetic progression and tell you that it was on one rainy afternoon in Shillong that that smelly bundle of linguistics, our Bengali teacher (for he, like Shonku, spoke several languages that he probably picked up on his trek through Japanese battle lines in Burma into India, like our Bengali Chemistry professor had), terrified of Cooney and allergic to his cat, slunk into the shadows of our hallway with a snuff-smeared handkerchief stuffed up his nose, to let the monsters pass and whispered, 'Byata Irish Byomjatri aar Newton," and thus, quite fortuitously, introduced us to the crazy world of Professor Shonku-and sneezed.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
For privacy concerns, please view our Privacy Policy
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist