What does a young woman do when she emerges at the top of her class in graduation and post graduation courses? While options abound for such young persons these days, there were few options except teaching to take up when Leela Roy passed out of Calcutta University. Taking up teaching assignments in Darjeeling, Santiniketan and Calcutta, as it was then called, her heart lay elsewhere.

Journalism did not interest the lady of whom redoubtable scribes of English dailies were chary of lest she pick holes in their write-ups. Her heart lay in penning stories for children. And even during her stint at the All India Radio, she devoted her life to children&’s literature, writing stories for the little ones about the every-day life occurances, colouring them in optimism and fun which make overwhelming problems seem trivial. Her first published book was Boddi Nather Bari (1939) but her second compilation Dine Dupure (1948) brought her considerable fame. From the 1950s, her incomparable children&’s classics followed.

Although humour was her forte, she also wrote detective stories, ghost stories and fantasies. Her autobiographical sketch Pakdandi provides an insight into her childhood days in Shillong and also her early years at Santiniketan and with All India Radio. Apart from her glittering array of children&’s literature, she wrote a cookbook, novels for adults (Sreemoti, Cheena Lanthan), and a biography of Rabindranath Tagore. She lectured on AbanindranathTagore and translated his writings on art into English. She translated Jonathan Swift&’s Gulliver&’s Travels and Ernest Hemingway&’s The Old Man and the Sea into Bengali. Podi Pishir Bormi Baksho was made into a film by Arundhati Devi in 1972. Chhaya Devi played the role of the young hero, Khoka&’s famed aunt Podipishi. For a special Mahila Mahal (women&’s section) series of AllIndia Radio, dealing with the “natural and ordinary problems” in the everyday life of a girl growing up in a typical, middle-class, Bengali family, she created Monimala, the story of a “very ordinary girl” whose grandmother starts writing to her from when she turns 12, continuing into her marriage and motherhood. Her marriage to noted dentist S K Majumdar saw her increase her literary output. Bangiya Sahitya Parishad and state higher education department observed her 108th birth anniversary recently