Sohana Manzoor

While the Partition of 1947 is a chapter that historians are constantly bringing up, one question rarely explored is what does the Partition mean for the Millennials and Gen Zs? How much do our younger generations know of the significance of the Great Divide?

“Bhabi, do you remember Banu?” my paternal aunt Janu phupi asks Amma. We are in the middle of a grand celebration—I am getting married and today is my gaye-holud. My grandmother barks, “Don’t mention that ill-fated girl now. She tricked us all.”

A daughter of immigrant parents, Andrea Levy wrote mostly on the struggles of Jamaican immigrants in England. Critically acclaimed Small Island (2004) is one of her best-known books and it attempts to visualize the days before, during, and after the Second World War.

Years ago, when I was about eight-years-old, I heard a teacher say that a woman’s lungs are stronger than a man’s.

I had to come to this dense forest yesterday. I have no clue why we had to fall back. This is the beauty of military life-- the order comes and you have to do it. You can never ask, “Why do I have to do it?”

Our boat was docked by a sandbank on the other side of Shelaidaha. It was a gigantic strip of sand where the contour of a river could be seen.

The intriguing image of a woman’s eye peering through a hole cut into the glossy book jacket suggests that there is more to Saikat Majumdar’s The Middle Finger than meets the eye.

DS. To some readers the title of your most recent novel The Middle Finger may sound controversial. But as I discovered while reading, it focuses on something very different. Why did you choose this title?

He did not look at me once. His eyes were engrossed in deep thought; to me he seemed to be dipping in the deep waters of memory. Bent with age, he sat at his desk.

In popular culture, if not in criticism, Wuthering Heights stands as the tale of love lost in betrayal and a grand reunion in the afterworld. The

The banks along the river Shitalakshya flooded on a regular basis. During the rainy season, most villages around the area turned into islands.

 I came across Heldris de Cornuälle’s Silence in 2011, a hundred years after its discovery in 1911. Dated to the early

While students of literature are most often advised not to ponder over the personal lives of authors, it is almost impossible to do that in the case of Sylvia Plath.

An abrupt noise woke Obhoy up in the middle of the night and throughout the rest of the night his eyelids would not shut. What was the matter with him? He had been sound asleep; then suddenly he woke up as if someone was battering at the gate of his senses.

It was a hot August afternoon when I stood on the tarmac at the St Louis airport staring at the tiny 7-seater that looked like a toy plane. What? I thought. I would have to get on that? Was this some kind of a joke? Three other passengers were also waiting, but they seemed strangely unperturbed.

Solayman rolled off his bed in terror. Twisting his body, he dived under the bed stand and lay flat. His whole body was trembling. The freedom fighters must have surrounded his house!

Last summer, one of my dissertation supervisees approached me as she plans to go abroad for higher studies.

“Have you met Mr. Skunk? In case you have not, he is a short black and white fellow that you might often see at the bottom of the stairs, or near the dumpster.” Joe paused for breath.

Last November, our elderly maid servant Fatema’s ma who works full-time at our house, wanted to take leave to get her son married. Of course, I agreed immediately. But she would be gone for about two weeks and hence she proposed that her eldest son’s wife might work in her absence.

Readers over the last two centuries have generally liked the bright and sparkling world of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, whereas Persuasion has often been described as “a departure from the rest of the novels, a turning away from the brilliant and public play of the mind for the deep and private truths of the heart” (Morgan 168).