Creative nonfiction / Growing up with a new nation: The Dhaka we once knew

During the recent weeks of lockdown, these five books—ranging from historical fiction to memoirs to fantasy to romance—allowed me to disappear into stories, to live many lives, and they reminded me how vast the world was and will soon again be.

Each night, the sea with the moon croons a lullaby.

Purify my life, like dawn let me rise anew each morn.

On January 1, 2021, Maya Angelou posted the following on her Facebook:

“This weather app is a life saver, I’m telling you! Look how sunny this weekend will be!” Ruma pointed at her phone with her freshly manicured fingers—donned with diamond rings. As her fingers tap-danced on the seven day weather chart on the phone, her listener got distracted by the new rock on her pointer finger.

I discovered Olga Tokarczuk in 2018 after having lapped up the contents of Flights (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), a novel, written in fragments, that invites obsessive reading, winning Tokarczuk and her brilliant translator Jennifer Croft no less than the Man Booker International prize that same year.

In Golden: Bangladesh at 50 (University Press Ltd, 2021) edited by Shazia Omar, 23 of Bangladesh’s eminent writers and poets—including Kaiser Haq, Arif Anwar, Shabnam Nadiya, Farah Ghuznavi, and others—find home for their varied expressions of Bangladeshi life, culture, history, love, hate, as well as the lulls that defined our quarantined existence this past year.

Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia (Pan Macmillan India, 2020) is a delightful anthology edited by Claire Chambers—no stranger to the lifestyle of Muslims.

It happened on a slow morning during my university English literature class. We had just finished reading one of Roald Dahl’s lesser-known short stories, “Skin”, published in The New Yorker in 1952. The lecturer called upon the class to present their analyses of the short story. When it was my turn to speak, I became tongue-tied as my mind slowly went blank. It had been close to four years since I had picked up a book.

In memory of eminent writer, scholar, academic, diplomat, and freedom fighter Professor Abu Rushd Matinuddin (1919-2010), the Abu Rushd Memorial Committee has decided to introduce the Abu Rushd Literary Award from this year. Any novel published in Bangladesh in the last three years will be considered for this year’s award. The winner will receive one lakh taka and a certificate of recognition.

The Water Dancer (Random House, 2020) follows the life of one Hiram Walker, whose biological mother is a slave and father a slaver. Born as a slave bound to the shackles of a plantation in Virginia, Hiram is unique from the others who work beside him. He has a sharp and photogenic memory. And as he grows up with a pang of grief left by the absence of his mother, he discovers another life-changing superpower: Conduction, a form of teleporting through time and space and inspired by Harriet Tubman’s phenomenal work of secretly ferrying slaves to freedom. His extraordinary powers bring him under the mercy of some privilege—like private tutoring alongside his white half-brother—that other slaves cannot enjoy.

In the American South, until the 1960s, Jim Crow laws legalised racial segregation in every sphere, starting from education to transportation. It took the Civil Rights Movement and a series of Supreme Court decisions and laws passed by the Congress to finally dismantle the nightmarish structure that legally kept African-Americans shackled well into the 1960s. The shadow of these laws loiters even today.

After three successful years of sehri-time storytelling, Sehri Tales is back with their annual month-long “boot camp for creativity”. The fourth iteration started off with the prompt “Mercy” on April 14, 2021.

Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, may have separated from India in 1947, but the centuries of shared history, society, politics, culture, and religion remain etched in the countries’ fabric. Some decades later, Bangladesh, too, carved out a space for themselves, becoming an independent nation with the help of India’s military operations in December of 1971. Thus, the Liberation War connected Bangladesh and India as historic allies, a relationship that has carried over through the years, with varying congeniality. Fifty Years of Bangladesh-India Relations: Issues, Challenges and Possibilities (Om Publications, 2021), evaluates these “contested” relations between the two countries from various perspectives, from both a contemporary and historical standpoint.

I’ve lost count of the number of people who have recommended Jennifer Mathieu’s best-selling book Moxie (Roaring Brook Press, 2017) to me. All I ever saw about the book were torrents of positive reviews on social media, one following another.

All things colourful make up the Bangla New Year—boisterous celebrations of nature, art work, music, food, the quintessential Bangali warmth, and the Mongol Shobhajatra as its crowning jewel

Very few visitors were seen on the last day of the Boi Mela yesterday, it being a working day.

Poet and novelist, Shahosro Shumon, who has recently met with great acclaim following his poem, “E jatray beche gele”, has published a new book on the relativity of success and how modern society has come to measure it in monetary terms.

Nabendu Ghosh (1917-2007), an eminent author in Bengali literature pursued many passions. A dancer, an actor, a writer, a screenwriter and a film director, his opus of writing includes thirty novels and fifteen short story collections, that are being translated and continue relevant.

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, as much at home on the Kali Ghat as in Greenwich Village, is best remembered in Bangladesh on account of his poem, September on the Jessore Road. Year One.