As I turn the last page of the third book, right out of the blue, I realise that Meera Mukherjee's stories for children have the same strengths as her sculptures-they are fantastical, they are spared of excesses, and they are honed to a fine finish. It's a magical combination, with a contemporary touch.

These whimsical forays into worlds where children inhabit both realistic and spiritual planes make these three volumes a treasure. An unusual treasure, when Indian books for our children are just beginning to come into their own.

How can one resist the talking fish that befriends three young boys one monsoon- and convinces them not to fish for fun? How can one fail to identify with the cotton carders who fill their quilts with clouds, and take wide-eyed Khoka on a sky-borne adventure? How can one not join the music of Kalo and his koel, who are the closest of friends? How can one miss out on Pari's delight as she paints on the sky with a broom-like thing? How can one not thrill to Shefali's growth from a young domestic help to an imaginative being in full bloom?

Meera Mukherjee's creativity is unusually alive, fresh forever like the grandmother's tales that coaxed rice into little mouths down generations. Take this delightful excerpt from 'Quilt', 'in which Khoka travels into the skies with the mysterious quilt-makers: The carders started plucking tunes from their instruments. Such were the notes they sounded that first a cloud elephant arrived, next a flat looking horse, then a human being with a squished up face.

The drawings that weave their way through the text are integral to the story's being-every line counts, every stroke is fluid and evocative, every illustration teases the mind's eye.

In Kalo and the Koel, the story text wraps itself visually around the figure of the delightful little boy, as he toys with the bird, plays his flute to charm his feathered friend, even sets the bird free. The lyricism of the child mind is captured sensitively by the writer's pen: Should he take the koel home and put it in a cage? No, he doesn't like that idea. Their hut feels like a cage to him,, he doesn't like being indoors, imagine how a bird would feel!

Gently peeping into the open windows of a nascent world, the writer traces the bonding between the boy and the bird, the imagination that allows every child-no matter how deprived- to soar on the wings of a paintbrush, the verbal sparring that brings young lads together, the little touches that enrich a young world, like the whiff of smoke that becomes a vitally alive being, a smoke 'dada'!

Through the stories, we realise that Meera Mukherjee has a fine-tuned ear for music. And that she is sensitive to the nuanced world of women and children, for she has been a cultural anthropologist and studied music.

These stories mould their vital child characters from our very lives, from our slums and rural areas, and transform us through alternate ways of seeing. The very simplicity of her narrative, and the powerful play of her drawings that dip in and out of the word world, add to the essential charm of these tales.

Anjum Katyal's translations from the original Bengali capture the vernacular flavour, as in the 'ghaon piding piding' sound that the cotton carders make with their instruments, or the enchanting evocation of the slum kids who fill the sky with their delight in Drawing Pictures.

Naveen Kishore's designs help to integrate the text and the visuals in these small-format books, with words bobbing like fish through the drawings, and faces in active interface in 'Catching Fish', or the endless journey replicated visually in 'Somewhere'.

I have a minor complaint about the layout, though: Doesn't the extensive hyphenation of words in the narrow columns of type, hinder easy reading?

But this is a slight defect in these innovative books, whether prized as artist's books or children's literature-as in the case of K.G. Subramanyan's graphic fables. For these jewel-bright books are burnished to a luminosity akin to those of Meera Mukherjee's bronzes. Isn't that reason enough to celebrate?

ADITI DE
is a Bangalore-based writer and editor.