Like a reptile emerging from the dust of centuries, Kolkata’s Ballygunge Down tram is snaking its way towards Rashbihari Avenue. Ghon! ghon! chimes its bell, ringing out in the last of the fading afternoon sun. Sitting at the counter of Jolkhabar stand,

Zahid sat in a tiny room cramped with men. A ventilator was the only source for its occupants to get air from the outer world. The last time he had talked to his father had been at the Istanbul Airport. He still had his cellphone from Bangladesh. It was the only physical connection he had with his country.

Nobody tells me to search for you as if there’s a timeframe for undertaking such quests! My voice sounds like yours, and often, looking at my arms, I get puzzled,

It is so cheap like it is everywhere- on the highways, under the bridges, disappeared

She lies on the bed, a broken canvas. Fragments and splinters of an old frame, Faded colors of painted priceless picture, Greys and white, crooked dark veins, wrinkled paper skin.  Frames abound on the wall’s fortress,

We stopped talking earlier. Yet there was a chance that I’d run into you. There was a chance of seeing you on the Gollamari bridge buying vegetables.

Countless people cross our path as we walk through this temporal life; but only one or two strike us as people with no darkness within. Mohiuddin Ahmed was one of those unique humans. He radiated pure light, and for those within this light, time always moved peacefully because life seemed to have met all his wants and needs, and as a man so at ease with the ways of life, he effortlessly smoothed out the many negative thoughts of his visitors and friends, just by being who he was.

Younger people might find this too dated, but I will stick by what  Jorge Luis Borges once said: “I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of a Library!”

I have journeyed long and journeyed far looking for sunflowers in the rain — fresh blooms, unwet, singing a song of freedom. 

[Casa di Romeo, Via Arche delle Scaligere: Historians say this was the house of Cagnolo Nogarola, a Guelph supporter, like the Capulets, Juliet’s family. But according to legend and literary texts, the Monetcchi family, or the Montagues, lived here until the 14th century, and the V-shaped battlement was the ‘swallow tail’ symbol of the opposing faction, the Ghibellines, which Romeo’s family supported.

tears tasted salty when i was little sometimes i would inspect a drop against the light-

One intriguing question in Albert Camus’s philosophical novel “La Peste” (The Plague) is the idea of death perceived through the sense of rationality.

The year Dadi died, monsoon came early. Days of incessant rain, nights with loud thunderstorm. And when there was no rain, my friend Mira and I sang rain songs and floated paper boats in the puddle.

My first reaction to the knowledge that someone would attempt to re-tell the story of The Illiad appeared to be a foolhardy venture- one that was doomed to failure because it seemed too challenging and gargantuan a task, but within the first few chapters I could see Pat Barker’s skill in bringing the story of the Illiad to a modern context.

Meanwhile I looked for space, for a new frontier.

This dawn is unvarying, lovely, peaceful, dewy, Morning sky has opened its store of breathing clouds,

About 122 years before the Covid-19 pandemic Bengal was struck by bubonic plague, which has left its traces in Bangla fiction and life writings.

An abrupt noise woke Obhoy up in the middle of the night and throughout the rest of the night his eyelids would not shut. What was the matter with him? He had been sound asleep; then suddenly he woke up as if someone was battering at the gate of his senses.

With the onset of the new millennium in the 21st century, there seems to be a revival of interest in the space, in the eastern part of South Asia, historically known as Bengal, and the people who inhabit this space, the Bengalis.

I had decided to write a brief review of Selima Chowdhury’s book when it was first published, but what with one thing or another making me put it off, a couple of years rolled by, and we found ourselves caught up in a pandemic with no end in sight.