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

We might never know how it feels when your whole existence is denied or the loss of homeland, but we can get a little glimpse of their suffering.

Eurydice, his beloved,  lost to the shades, In the underworld's depths,  where darkness pervades.

This week, then, we're thinking: music and books, music and literature. In print and online, we're dreaming in tunes, dancing with words, daring to merge the two.

35000 spectators turned out amid the colourful shamianas and flags to watch the one (and only) unofficial Test in Dhaka in January, 1977.

Once on a particularly smothering hot day, on a CNG ride to work, I was stuck in the most heinous traffic for over two hours. Over the yelling drivers, honking cars, and incessant cursing over why the CNGs were trying to overtake the expensive cars, I was listening to my usual cycle of songs. As coincidence would have it, David Gilmour in his seraphic voice posed the question: “So, so you think you can tell/ Heaven from hell?”

Who is the one playing such a plaintive tune on a flute

My mother’s house is beside a lake that separates the rich and mighty of the city from a little isle of people who work for them.

A large number of contemporary writers in the country think of avoiding politics. But that itself is also a kind of politics—the politics of the status quo.

With the publication of his first collection of poems, Tabak Deya Paan in 1975, Bangla literary scene witnessed the emergence of a powerful new voice.

I cannot, for the life of me, definitively describe what makes music. Growing up in a family where music of any form was not typically paid any reverence, my exposure to it was tunnelled into mainstream pop songs for the longest time.

As someone who is interested in Muslim novels—by which I mean novels written by Muslims about Muslims—I always feel a scholarly tug towards Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album (Scribner, 1995) when speaking of the at times uneasy but mostly comfortable marriage between music and literature.

Ushinor Majumdar’s book details how, since Partition, the Pakistan military junta had continued to exert unjust power over Bengal and its resident Bengalis.

Before The Brothers Grimm published their version of the story, titled Sneewittchen, the original Italian folktale was about a mother’s envy and jealousy towards her own daughter.

Death dwells between is and was, Riding the final particle of a fading breath.

It is odd that nowadays One seldom hears the words

Tell me what to say when I need to speak, If I have to say something, So what can I say: look at that

The door didn’t fully click shut. That was an ordinary affair in the house because the door locked to prevent escape. But, by chance or sheer good luck, it didn’t fully lock this time. The click was off. Someone hadn’t done their job correctly. Bloody hell, no one does their jobs correctly in this godforsaken country.

Rumi's spiritual and motivational verses not only empower us to confront life's frustrations and anxieties but also illuminate the path to genuine emotional fulfilment and inner peace.

It’s a truism to say that modern life is complicated, but even a couple of decades ago, it would have been hard to predict the things we are dealing with today.

As an Anglophone writer in Bangladesh, I’ve frequently faced the rather inane question of why I write in English.