FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

Here we are on the Irish border for Hallowe’en, originally a Celtic festival designed to propitiate the ghosts of the dead.

Every time before the voyage,

Maybe, someday we will joke about this,

When I pushed the calling bell of my Fupi’s (father’s sister) flat, a bewitching beauty opened the door. She possessed love-at-first sight charms. Beauty-struck, I gawked at her.

Almost all the readers of this review, I believe, know of the dramatist Momtazuddin Ahmed, National Professor Anisuzzaman or social activist Dr. Anupam Sen. It is a matter of some clicks on your mouse to get to know about these legends from Bangladesh. But, maybe, some of you sympathize with me that you do not know them through the microscopic lens of a student, who were in good terms with these leading lights within the four walls of classrooms and even outside.

A hawker was constantly nagging in front of me for buying a handkerchief. It was only 7.30 am in the morning and yet the sun was ready to burn the entire world with its rage.

‘How dare you!’ She poured molten lead into my ears, the moment I had proposed to her. I stopped right there. More than a decade has passed since then.

I separate the bleeding stars

Gulshan Market Two has not changed much over the last three decades. Surrounding three sides of an open parking lot, it is a square, U-block construction, with a colonnade veranda running along the front of each shop. Some of the shops are new, but most are what they had been when Rita was a teenager.

“And brown for my hair,” muttered Mustafa to himself. He was engaged in his favorite pastime surrounded by a splendid array of multi-colored play dough.

Ms Banalata Sen is mentioned thrice, at the end of each 6-line stanza, and each time the effect, in the context of the stanza’s affective and ideational development, is climactic.

After six months of reading 151 books longlisted into 11, narrowed down further to six, the Booker Prize judges on October 14 announced this year’s winner—the “best novel” produced in English in the UK and Ireland (regardless of the author’s nationality) over the past one year.

The process of reading is consummated in rereading. It is sure to deepen and broaden our understanding of the work and its author, and quite possibly of ourselves as well.

Now late at night you have a bed

Jibanananda Das is probably one of the most read and yet the most neglected poets of Bengal. There is indeed a dearth of critical reading of his work, too.

Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets in the Bengali language. His poetry in particular has already made possible a staggering range of interpretive adventures and hermeneutic excavations, although he wrote 21 novels and 110 short stories that were discovered after his death.

What is Barishal known by? One hundred years back, the unfailing answer was “rice and river.” Half a century ago, the answer might have been a political name- Sher-e-Bangla A. K. Fazlul Huq.

Would a few doors remain closed?

Amazon burns Each flame licks a life

“I’m doing what I feel like doing. What’s that to you?” Aslam retorted. He opened the door and said, “Like mother, like daughter. Get lost.”