Every once in a moonlit midnight

Cricketers are accustomed to hearing about cricket balls being caught but not of a ball being brought into Court. Appeals concerning a ball at Lords, home of cricket, are familiar enough but an Appeal in the Lords? In 1951 cricket figured in a landmark legal decision in the House of Lords.

I stood before the door of the house where my grandmother once lived. Age and infirmity had jaded what might have once been a proper door.

Shutters clicked away. Flashes dazzled eyes. News reporters jostled with each other to hold out their mikes as far as their arms allowed. Busy fingers gripped their ballpoints tighter.

Year 2060: I was a lonely kid. Sometimes I felt as if I lived my whole life alone. There were different people here and there, flittering in and out, at the intersection where our lives crossed, before the roads untangled and moved apart.

I think I’ve always loved mathematics in my own ways.

As the mangy fingers of fascism grew out of the copper earth,

Maybe you forgot, or dementia possessed you before our union—how else could you keep aloof from your soul, your other soul, your eupnoea?

Hajari Biswas was sitting leisurely in his spice-shop. It was around noon and the market price of spices was not going well. There were not too many buyers even though one could detect quite a few foreigners in the market. Hajari was fanning himself with a palm leaf and was dozing off. Suddenly, he woke up at the sound of a familiar voice.

Bengali writer, educationist and pioneering feminist activist, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), popularly known as Begum Rokeya, was born at a critical juncture in South Asian history when hostility and bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims was a recurrent experience.

It was a big window, like an arched doorway. It creaked loudly the first time I opened it. It sounded angry, upset. I wondered why?

A fading comet trail of snippets from the halls of the Mughal Kings remain immortally enshrined in memory’s space.

During the long lockdown in early 2020, I took stock of my shelvedunread books. A mint-green hardback covered book-spine caught my eye;A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

They say that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take But by the moments that take our breath away.

She knocks on the door, The door-bell is broken; a sculpture of unknown figure hangs on the wall, The door is solid, but not made of Mahogany wood.

Last November, our elderly maid servant Fatema’s ma who works full-time at our house, wanted to take leave to get her son married. Of course, I agreed immediately. But she would be gone for about two weeks and hence she proposed that her eldest son’s wife might work in her absence.

The river wept, as we left But its tears were not for us.

Flowers on Facebook — Violet, red, yellow, orange — splashed a welcome into a garden never visited

I’m telling you amidst the whispering cropped-headed paddy field, in the lore of these reeds, in the orchestra of these auburn after-harvest field by the seedlings that crack this soil-- I am their spokesperson.

How Freedom Became Our Own Word