FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

I inhale the luxurious scent / of squelched earth / smoking under the sodden leaves

Echoes of your voice ring in my ears / As the world turns scarlet in front of my eyes

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was an autodidact who became a formidable champion of women’s rights and education when women in South Asia, especially Muslim women, were forced to live in subhuman conditions, almost like animals, or even worse than animals

I feel my rage, ma, a living thing;/ A beast, caged, like me

“My reader, I dip into the water just for you.” Bibhas Roy Chowdhury

“An exceptional novel that makes gender disappear to build unconventional love and friendship”

Backman, in his style of writing and the characters he builds, tends to approach all the complexities of humanity with a touch of distance, while still managing to maintain intimacy

The forum was held at Bangladesh Shishu Academy and was anchored by Professor Azfar Hussain.

All that I’d despicably known / Things I wish I didn’t know–

Skin sticky with perspiration from a long month of June 

What I wish I didn’t know is that when your dear friends whisper the word “psycho” behind your back, you’ll grow up accepting it.

You must have heard the story of your birth a thousand times by now, sweetheart. Your mother and I—home alone.

This award is meant to be shared with a Writer of Courage, which PEN describes as a ‘writer who is active in defence of freedom of expression, often at great risk to their own safety and liberty’

In Alex Christofi’s newly published fascinating book—Cypria: A Journey to the Heart of the Mediterranean—we get a deep close-range look at one of world civilisation’s interesting hotspots that has long swayed between the cross-currents of the rise and fall of the great monotheisms.

It’s hard not to recall our many conversations about literature as I try to summarise Shah Tazrian Ashrafi’s debut collection of short stories. They were always short discussions, opening and closing off in spurts, as happens over text. Exclamations over a new essay collection by Zadie Smith, or a new novel by Isabel Allende.

Begum’s Blunder is a clever adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. The play transports the Victorian setting to the imaginary Behrampur, the heyday of the Nawabs in India. With Naila Azad Nupur’s direction, and Sadaf Saaz working her behind-the-scenes magic as the producer, the production by Kaleidoscope projects lights on the prism of Wilde’s 1892 play to find their contemporary refractions and reflections in colonial India.

I skip talking to myself for hours / The “me time”, before going to bed

If you travel on a bus, always take the window seat.

Is it true that when we migrate, we lose a few people from our past?

Raindrops whisper on the tin roof’s drum,