Calcutta, March 24 :    Calcutta, March 24:  Ikir-mikir-cham-chikir. Ghum parani mashi-pishi. Traditional Bengali rhymes in the US? If you want to make reason of that, ask Shishu Sahitya Samsad. The publishing agency, which has given every child a rhyme and a reason to smile, is now into selling dreams abroad. From books that have educated and regaled generations of Bengalis - like Vidyasagar's Barnaparichay, Jogen Sarkar's Hasikhushi and Purnachandra Chakraborty's Chhobite Ramayan - to more serious stuff, like critical essays on Tagore, the Samsad is now discovering that Bengali literature has a market abroad. There were one-off sales earlier, but a man called Nilotpal Bhattacharyya from Illinois changed the way the very-Bengali group looked at exports across the Atlantic, officers admitted. 'He came here to look for some books he had read as a child and, in the course of the conversation, revealed that he was taking back some books for his own and some other Bengali kids back 'home',' a Samsad officer said. That transaction, say officers, opened the agency's eyes to the demands of a growing market for Bengali children's literature in the West, particularly in countries with a decent sprinkling of Bengali population. Orders from Montreal and Toronto in Canada, some areas of the US and, of course, the UK, have come up recently, forcing the Samsad to look at this market differently. Besides the 'direct' exports, 'indirect' exports are growing as well, say officers. 'We have our agents in Delhi and Chennai and they have corroborated our findings,' they added. Most of the Bengali children's literature which goes abroad is headed for informal Bengali-teaching schools set up in large urban centres by first-generation, middle-aged Bengalis settled there, who now want their children to learn Bengali the way they did in their childhood in Calcutta, say Samsad officers. The more sought-after titles include Chhobite Ramayan and Chhobite Mahabharat, compilations of the Chharaar Chhobi series, Barnaparichay (emerging as the non-resident Bengali's favourite), abridged versions of the Jatakas and Panchatantra. Export of serious literature, however, remains confined to libraries in institutes with departments for Oriental studies.