FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

The Gulmohar tree was tall and wide glowing with blossoms and green leaves. It gave a shelter as good as a home for some. The old woman sat under the tree from morning till evening with a bundle of clothes and beddings she needed. She slept under the tree using the bundles as her pillow. People and passers by would leave some food and fruit for her.

Each year from November 25 to December 10, women around the world unite and raise their voice in support of the UN’s 16 Days of Activism Campaign against gender-based violence.

Amitabha Bagchi’s brilliant novel Half the Night Is Gone has won the prestigious DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019.

“Let thy speech be better than silence, or be silent,” said Dionysius of Halicarnassus. While realizing the essence of this sagacious saying, we can readily conclude that good English speaker is rarer than hens’ teeth in these regions of the world where there is an outlandish, preternatural and almost spurious cultural supposition that having a kingly command of the English language is rather an odious pageantry of colonial aggrandizement.

I was a student of ninth grade when I first discovered Emily Brontë.

The bus was scheduled to depart at 2 pm. It was already ten past two! Everywhere there is a competition of breaking schedule.

In poetry’s kaleidoscope the clichés are sentiments, philosophy.

The universe is an hourglass

In an abyss devoid of rules,

Leaders big and small set no good

We emerged victorious in a burning city of chaos,

Majid kept sniffing the air as he walked. He slowed down when he heard someone’s footsteps behind him.

The title of the story could have been “Tiger,” just “Tiger,” as, for a few days in 1971, a tiger had been the cause of a massive terror to us.

I was so excited when my first story – “My American Dream”–appeared in The Daily Star back in 2007 that I quickly emailed the web link to all my friends. And they promptly responded with “What is Tohon?” as if the name was more important than the story itself.

“What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare. We often say that too as if names do not matter. Yet how else can we introduce ourselves if we do not have names?

I hate my name, particularly my nick name: Shuman. It’s so common that some of my classmates at Jahangirnagar University used to call me “common.”

Furniture dies. Empty now,

When it comes to their names, most people in Bangladesh may find themselves in a convoluted situation.

If people in Bangladesh remember Kaifi Azmi (1919-2002) now, it is either because of the famous songs he wrote for popular Hindu films such as Kagaz Ke Phool (1959), Pakeezah (1972) and Aarth (1982), or because he is the father of the celebrated actress-activist and member of the Indian Rajya Sabha, Shabana Azmi.

I tried to open my eyes,