Listening to summer breeze, smelling the raw pages of an old book my mind went wandering into the sea of nonexistent dreams. I drifted there like a lost sailor. And I hunted for a thousand-year old pale blue star.

The American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” Certainly, Tagore was above this puerile mindset.

So, I was about to slip under my bedcovers to give my back some rest and close my eyes and savour the moment till I fell asleep.

A thorn in the bushes they beat around

During the Pakistan days my father was in the army, and we moved frequently, every few years. Soon after I finished Grade 10 in 1966, we made a big move: from Chittagong to Rawalpindi.

Some weird things happen sometimes. It was just midday when his mother was done with her cooking. She got up from sitting position with her two hands on her knees and went to sit in the yard to relieve rheumatism in the sunlight. On her way, she called out to her second daughter, “Mitu, serve Milu his lunch. I’ll rest awhile.”

I often consider war as a quasi-synonym for memory. After all, memory is nothing but our present in constant war with our glorified, vilified, expressed, suppressed, erased, and fragmented selves floating in past space and time.

Unloved and unnoticed

To aptly celebrate the Birth-Centenary of the Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, one initiative, among others, by Bangla Academy has been to publish Syed Shamsul Haque’s Ballad of our Hero Bangabandhu, together with its translation in English, as part of its grand project named “Birth-Centenary Publications of the Father of the Nation Bangabadhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is widely read as a classic feminist novel. Published in 1953, Villette, however, still resides in a shadowy region.

In the intellectual evolution of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 played a decisive role.

Psychedelic noises – a cacophony so harmonious

Rashida Sultana’s much-admired novel, Shada Beralera has been translated into English as The White Cats, recently.

Asantha U Attanayake’s first exchanges with me were over e-mail. She was travelling across the Subcontinent to collect and develop materials for her forthcoming book.

Things are dark and bleak?

Doesn’t anyone get that my soul cringes for a call?

Aum impatiently held on to his phone, hearing it ring without being answered. He hated having to start the day without hearing her voice. Then again, he also hated going to bed without talking to her. It was going to be a bad day.

To answer this question, let me hazard an analogy -- good writing is much like good food. Good writing tickles our senses the way good food does.

Those haunting lyrics of the British band Eurythmics, “Sweet dreams are made of this…”, followed intermittently by “…everybody is looking for something…”, and “…some of them want to use you…” fairly accurately encapsulate the theme of the dozen short stories that make up Rummana Chowdhury’s slim volume,

The ruby red kite fluttered above head, contrasted against the aquamarine sky, and it all was picture perfect for a split second, so perfect that it was a spoiler to the fact that something horrible was about to follow, like it did almost always.