A more macabre exercise in historical reconstruction follows the fate of those who, on the eve of the Great War, scrawled their names on the plaster of the ‘thunder box’—the toilet next to the dark house.

Every year there was a mela in the small village where Jutimala lived and Khitish would send three workers to set up a stall there.

Nowadays presses have become so large and so expensive that they are housed in their own mega-sheds, usually on an outlying industrial park that allows easy access for the lorries that bring in reels of paper and take out pallets of newspapers and magazines.

Marry, farewell! I pray you, sir, what saucy merchant was this, that was so full of his ropery?