- Dhaka Tribune

D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N DAY, J U LY 7, 2 0 1 3
Poetry
RAINDROPS ON
SUNROOF
Blind
Adrian Husain
Editor
Zafar Sobhan
Editor Arts &
Letters
Khademul Islam
Assistant Editor
Tamoha Siddiqui
Artist
Shazzad H Khan
Amy Huffman
E
yes of the dead
stare in his eyes
where he hunkers
on the kerb
hewn out of stone
yet living:
in a tunic, grimy
yellowed, but still rich
Seat reclined, feet resting on dashboard, I am comforted
by the light patter of liquid landing overhead. I stare
up at a twilight sky painted in shades of gold and red
quickly dissolving into darker hues. From a failing corner,
the sun still catches, glints against iridescent ovals.
In that moment, one drop expands. Its life transforms
from cloud’s discard to planetary body, a vision complete
with reflective rings and comet trails. n
in his loss in a way
that we cannot
be – hoarding a wisdom
mined from patience
his weight leaden
yet ground down
to a lightness: touch
of a leaf, trunk of a tree.
Amy Huffman lives in Florida. She has published six books of poems
n
Adrian Husain is one of Pakistan’s leading English language poets.
as i verb the noun
these days
rifat islam esha
W
onderful
is a tired adjective
i will let it be
and put multiple silences
and breathe them
in smiles
half, restless, curt
sharp, such and sweet
rifat islam
esha is a young
bangladeshi poet.
i will
thank you
over slices of
aam
and stolen
bites of chocolates
you ask me
not to devour-are adjectives
that important?
in time,
adverbly,
you will know
what i mean, noun.
Badray Munir
(Translated by Khademul Islam)
Let it rain all night long – all day and all night.
Who wants the sun’s face – insolent, irreverent?
These insane birds yearning for light,
Employees of sunshine – who are they?
Let it rain all night long – all day and all night.
Huge mounds of waste, ill-bred faces
Have piled up high in one’s mind;
The copper pot scarred with green gashes –
Let the rain scrub it clean!
Let the rain wash Time’s bedcover clean.
Let it rain all night long – all day and night.
n
Announcement
2
Let It Rain
Arts & Letters will publish an Eid Supplement instead of its regular
August issue.
Who wants sunlight’s color, the proclamation of hues?
Why the sun, what’s this insistence
That pierces Night’s stubborn re-birth?
My whole life let it be the rainy months of Ashar, Srabon;
Till the end the rain’s numbing fall –
The rain’s willing downpour
Let it tumble-upend rinse out all bluster.
Let it rain all day and all night
Let it rain my whole life.
n
Badray Munir is a Bangladeshi poet.
ARTS & LETTERS
D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N DAY, J U LY 7, 2 0 1 3
FLASH fiction
Death
Fahim Masroor
I
t came fast when it came after the oxygen was turned off and the sound of
raspy breathing drawn in long rusty
gasps and expelled with a short ‘fuhh’
sound filled the room… hnhheea hnhheea were the inhalations…a tremulous pause a flutter of the eyelids… then fuhh
fuhh fuhh… as the doctor silently left the room
his children stood by the bedside not looking at
each other and a little half-grimace half-smile
drew back his lips and bared the dying man’s
teeth immediately afterwards the tension went
out of his body the cords in his neck went slack
as if the strings of the puppet had been cut and
he was gone… what had that little smile meant
that he saw light what had the grimace meant
that he saw none? n
Fahim Masroor
is a writer and
translator.
Lydia Davis:
Extraordinary Stories
Matt Leibel
S
o, short story:
During my Junior year at U.C. Berkeley, a writing professor
(Ron Loewinsohn) hands me a story by Lydia Davis, the latest winner of the Man Booker International Prize. The story
is simply titled “Story”. Despite the name, it isn’t like any
story I’d been used to. The characters are unnamed. There
are no real scenes. We are given very little conventional information
about the characters. And yet, the story is devastating in its effect. This
is due at least in part to the formal, almost mathematical precision of her
craft: there is a singular logic to the writing that feels both inevitable yet
surprising, and often, like Beckett, quite dryly funny. Here, the woman
at the center of “Story” muses about the man who lies to her about an
affair:
“The fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of
his truth at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he
is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes I can figure out that it’s not
the truth and sometimes I don’t know and never know, and sometimes just
because he says it to me over and over again I am convinced it is the truth
because I don’t believe he would repeat a lie so often.”
Notice the repetitions, the circumlocutions, the way sentence seems to
almost spiral back onto itself, like a dog chasing its own tail. This is the
work of a mind working itself out (even as it, perhaps, deludes itself): a
kind of mental calisthenics we all engage in, but which few writers can
truly capture.
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis includes about 200 stories, a great
many of which are extremely, almost comically, short, and often only
arguably “stories”. One of my favorites is 19 words long – and that includes the eight-word title, “They Take Turns Using a Word They Like”.
Here it is:
“It’s extraordinary,” says one woman.
“It is extraordinary,” says the other.
The subtle italics are great here. Within two brief lines of dialogue, it’s
impossible not to hear these women’s voices, to have a sense of who they
D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N DAY, J U LY 7, 2 0 1 3
ARTS & LETTERS
are, their aristocratic bearing, their haughty, puffed-up pretension – all
delineated in the implied enunciations of a single word.
In addition to writing stories (and a single novel, “The End of the Story”),
Davis is an award-winning translator (Madame Bovary, Swann’s Way,
etc.). She is also (like Thomas Bernhard the Austrian novelist and playwright) an accomplished piano player. Music and translation frequently
appear as subjects in her fiction, but I think it goes deeper: her stories, in
all their concision, precision, humor, sadness, oddness, and intelligence,
are really about the structure and music of language itself.
And it’s on that level, the music of the language, that Davis has long
been a cult hero not just for me, but for a whole generation of younger
American writers such as Rick Moody, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers and others who’ve dabbled in Davis-like fictional approaches. Here’s
hoping that her work (and the strange short, essayistic brand of fiction
she’s pioneered) can now get the even broader worldwide attention it
deserves.
Because Lydia Davis is extraordinary. n
Matt Leibel’s
fiction, humor,
and reviews
have appeared
in a variety of
online and print
journals.
3
Brief Histories
Has the great Indian novel been displaced in the firmament?
Rajni George
T
Rajni George,
is ex-fiction and
poetry editor at
The Caravan, now
is a freelancer.
here is something delicious about the classic 500-oddpage Indian novel that is lost to the iPad reader: the
sheer weight of the book, almost a kind of trophy you
bear in the dense race to the end; fat and glossy, on your
bookshelf, never mind whether you dust your Booker
winners or re-read them. The joy of both over-achiever
reader and writer, the big Indian book has always been our signature
statement.
We do it so well: VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas (1961), Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980), Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy
(1993), Arundhati Roy’s A God of Small Things (1997) and Amitav Ghosh’s
Sea of Poppies (2010) denote a brief history of Indian Writing in English
(IWE) and carry our legacy of huge, sprawling books. We explained India through them, and were happy to do so. But today’s writers are not
always stressed about whether people have the full context, even want
them to do the work.
“They tell me India is an underdeveloped country,” begins Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1993), going on to retell modern Indian history through the mould of The Mahabharata in 423 pages. It’s a sentence
and model you’d be hard-pressed to find in an Indian novel today; books
stories; this, to me, is a sign of Indian publishing’s coming of age, its first
proper engagement with cosmopolitanism, where great stories have less
to do with social, geographical or cultural contexts than with the more
universal themes that affect the human condition,” says Somak Ghosal,
of Mint Lounge.
Indeed, a writer can no longer set out to write the great Kolkata or
Kashmir novel. In today’s abundant writers’ marketplace there are already several contenders, and the reader they are writing for knows
where Shopian is. In The Collaborator (2010), Mirza Waheed wrote of
a young boy co-opted into helping the army count the bodies of dead
Kashmiris; not the likeliest of great Indian novels, but a moving upclose account. “There’s a slow democratization taking place at least at
the level of theme and approach and style, if not in terms of the class of
people who write this fiction,” says writer Anjum Hasan, books editor at
The Caravan. “I don’t know if there’s a correspondence between a novel
that is ‘big’ in the sense that it tries, allegorically or through its scope, to
capture all of India and a book that is ‘big’ in the sense that its author receives large advances and much fanfare accompanies its arrival. Perhaps
considering them the same thing is or has been part of the problem in the
way we think of literature.”
New books in the last five years or so are writing
smaller narratives confident in speaking only for
their small part of the experience
“In a sense, this is a second generation going back to where writer Raja
Rao came from; Rajmohan’s Wife, etc., were smaller narratives, early
on,” says Nilanjana Roy, literary critic and author, whose How To Read
In Indian, a collection of pieces on reading and writing IWE is forthcoming. “My cynical side says this is market-driven.” She refers, of course,
to mass-market fiction that is multiplying post Chetan Bhagat. Local
publishing can now support a local author, without them having to go
abroad to sustain themself, she adds. “The danger is writing a book that
loses its audience, that is too small. But it frees you up from the demands
of the big canvas book.”
y own list of ‘great Indian novels’ form an alternate history: Anita
Desai’s In Custody (1984); Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988);
Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990); Daniyal Mueenuddin’s
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (2008); Rahul Bhattacharya’s The Sly
Company of People Who Care (2011). Some of this is not even obviously or
particularly Indian, except perhaps in terms of taste. Perhaps the quieter
Indian novel has always been there; it is the pendulum swing of personal
taste, popular demand and writerly range which decides when a Sea of
Poppies is highlighted over The Shadow Lines. n
M
4
like Siddharth Chowdhury’s Day Scholar (2011), set in the middle-class,
college-going Patna’s Kadam Kuan neighbourhood, increasingly bring
the lens up close to non-gated community life; in this case, through the
Vicky mopeds, Brilliant Tutorials and Golden Eagle beer of small-town
‘80s India, in 160 pages.
New books in the last five years or so are writing smaller narratives confident in speaking only for their small part of the experience – or that of
Guyana, for that matter. Also, while a blockbuster book still headlines
publishing lists, publishers are also doing more mid-listers without
banking on one big book to bankroll the rest.
Recent releases like Jerry Pinto’s tale of Catholics in Mumbai and a mentally afflicted mother, Em and the Big Hoom, and Tabish Khair’s How To
Fight Islamic Terrorism from the Missionary Position, a witty satire around
immigrants in Denmark, are narratives from within communities which
have been published and released as ‘big’ books, with the appropriate
accompanying reviews and launch attention and sizeable print runs.
Similarly, Difficult Pleasures, a collection of writer Anjum Hasan’s short
stories, is getting the kind of attention a novel traditionally received as
the literary breadwinner. “The general perception of the traditional ‘big’
Indian book has shifted to those telling slighter, less obviously, Indian
ARTS & LETTERS
D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N DAY, J U LY 7, 2 0 1 3
The Arabic Booker:
A quick trip for
‘authenticity’?
Waqar Ahmed
S
tories, visas, and sponsorships lure transmigrant laborers
to the Gulf. Often, successful stories— whether relayed directly from the Gulf or through newly prosperous relatives
on the ground—have the most pull. But they mask harsh
living conditions that greet transmigrant laborers once they
start employment in their host countries.
In Saud Alsanousi’s The Bamboo Stalk, his ground-breaking second
novel which recently won the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the
‘Arabic Booker,’) we meet Issa/Jose, who contemplates a return to his father’s country, Kuwait. Issa/Jose is the product of a marriage between a
Filipino maid and a rich Kuwaiti journalist. He has two names: his given
name, Jose, and, Issa, the Arabic name he must adopt in Kuwait.
Issa/Jose has spent most of the first eighteen years of his life in the Philippines. He has only his mother’s stories to illuminate Kuwait. But his
mother’s accounts are clouded by her affair with the son of her Kuwaiti
host family. Her stories function as metaphor for the promises of a better life that seduce transmigrant laborers to the Gulf. Each mention of
her duties as a maid is quickly smoothed over by captivating details of
the courtship. His mother’s accounts persuade Issa/Jose to move to Kuwait, but the fate of a guest worker welcomes him when he arrives in
the “awaited paradise.” He looks more Filipino than Kuwaiti, and with
his father dead, lacks the cover necessary to make a soft landing in this
foreign country. He does not find the Kuwait of his mother’s letters; Issa/
Jose is an unwelcome foreigner in his father’s country.
At first glance, Mr. Alsanousi’s novel fits neatly into an emerging subdivision of modern literature. This branch is characterized by the author
seeing fit to write a novel about a foreign land with which he has had a
one-off cultural encounter. Troubling, but a critically acclaimed trend:
PEN/Malamud Award recipient Nell Freudenberger meets a Bangladeshi
on a plane, interviews her family, visits Bangladesh, and decides her
novel, The Newlyweds, ought to have a Bengali protagonist. Pulitzer Prize
finalist Dave Eggers takes one trip to Saudi Arabia in preparation for his
A Hologram for the King. Canonized American writer Saul Bellow takes
not a single trip to Africa before writing his somewhat racist Henderson
the Rain King. Mr. Alsanousi traveled to the Philippines just once before
writing The Bamboo Stalk. The work as such may suffer from problems
of authenticity. Yet what the novel might lack in verisimilitude, it makes
up in its humanitarian ambition.
In the The Bamboo Stalk, a disheartened Issa/Jose decides to leave Kuwait, return to the Philippines, and make a life for himself in his mother’s homeland. Many transmigrant laborers in the Gulf—Filipino, Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani—do not enjoy the same luxury of choice. Guest
workers, men and women alike, such as Issa/Jose’s mother, are often subject to what Andrew Gardner in his City of Strangers: Gulf Migration and
the Indian Community in Bahrain refers to as “structural violence.” This
violence against the guest worker by their host company sponsors takes the form of salaries
withheld for several
months,
inhumane
living conditions, and
extended confiscation
of the worker’s passport, so that he remains
a prisoner in his host
country. With his novel,
Mr. Alsanousi takes on
the plight of the transmigrant worker and aims to
shed light on the cruelties
of the sponsorship or kafala system in a manner that
none of his countrymen has
to date. n
Waqar Ahmed
is currently nearing
completion on
a novel and a
collection of short
stories. He grew
up in Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia.
The landscape of post-literary Peru
Theodore
“N
o tropical fruit in the title,” says Rushdie,
“Tropical animals are also problematic.” Fine
advice but so long in coming. And so easy to
give for someone whose fatwa-powered career took off in perfect congruence with the
breaking in America of a sophisticated and
beautifully crafted (French) wave of borrowed post-colonial guilt. Write?
In this day and age? Really? Don’t wait to be crippled by advice. For the
rest of you in a rush, fiction is made of disease. The fiction that is later
made into movies is made of characters and plot and mild disease. Are
tropical diseases fair game? Of this Rushdie dreams no philosophy. But
what of pre-colonial disease? The Dropsy Diaries. You’re welcome, Ms.
Morrison. As someone once said, “Wouldn’t a title just make it worse?”
Disease is unpleasant. Movies make money. Bring a date to a movie and
you soon find yourself with a family, living in a new house. Finally, book
clubs, the last gasp of printed consumption, are identity swap meets
where you go only when your marriage is over and after you’ve been
thrown out of every bar and knocking shop.
No serious person is satisfied with fictions centered on American and
British nostalgia for the exotic. Few writers, other than Nabokov and
Delillo, understand how exotic the United States are in themselves. No
country is more exotic than Great Britain (in Theodore’s experience.) Unfortunately, America remains the best market for rum mango fruit. Rushdie’s wave beached nothing less than the massive whale-corpse
D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N DAY, J U LY 7, 2 0 1 3
ARTS & LETTERS
genre of guilt-lit. Readers baptized in its backwash are no longer readers. They become the read-to. The read-to only want to hear about exotic
identities because they are waiting their turn. They are as brutal as they
are rich as they are polite as they are antsy. But is this breeding? What of
them is worthy of continuance? You have been invited to their homes to
be sold swimming pools, tales of neurotic urban klatches, nostalgia for
their favorite decade or whatever else they are bored of themselves. The
reason book groups spring up in their cat-piss apartments is home-field
advantage to make the sale.
Fiction isn’t about identity. Fiction is about suspense, deception, the
decision which darkens the scruple. It is a lie seemingly made up on the
spot but is in truth well-calculated. The best fiction is born along with
great potential for malevolence. Theodore has a wonderfully literalminded neighbor. “I don’t read fiction,” says Neely. “It’s all made up.”
Neely has no time to spare for fiction. His disease is real. Long ago, when
Theodore aspired to a sort of belle lettrisme, he was often urged to write
“something about Peru.” Thankfully, the internet was invented and such
necessity evaporated. Let inaction be as defining as action. Silence is better than golden and should only be met with applause. Don’t let’s write
about ourselves. Especially if we’re bent on sincerity. Put the cat outside
to piss. Spare the furniture. Spare us. n
Theodore
is a consultant
living in Geneva.
5
Letter from America
Mahmud Rahman
power, below-the-surface resentments and jealousies get channeled into
revenge. This bleak novel is certainly worth reading if you want to see
what civil war might look like in a country like ours.
For another taste, I hunted down one of Khadra’s crime novels featuring Superintendent Llob: Morituri translated by David Herman. I found
myself in 1990s Algiers where Llob investigates the disappearance of the
daughter of a city kingpin.
T
Noir Algeria
I
MahmudRahman
is the author
of Killing the
Water and the
translated novel
Black Ice. Both
were published by
Penguin India.
6
remain preoccupied with Algeria.
This spring when the police battled Jamaat supporters on the
streets and war crimes opponents rallied at Shahbagh, a lot of
easy talk began to fly around about civil war. Having witnessed
1971, I shuddered at the thought of Bangladesh plunged into another war. To imagine what such a war might look like, I searched for
fiction that would bring me to ground level.
Algeria came to mind. In the 1990s, the banning of Islamists triggered
a war that led to the entire country living in daily peril, to the deaths of
thousands, to many writers and artists choosing exile instead of death.
My search led to a writer I had encountered once before: Yasmina Khadra.
Three years ago I journeyed to an artists’ residency in Montana to work
on my novel. I was in a tiny town, 6000 miles high in the mountains,
the nearest bookshop thirty miles away. With reading my only entertainment, I treasured the books left behind by past residents. They included
The Attack by Khadra where an Arab surgeon in Israel discovers his wife
among the victims of a suicide bombing, only to be horrified when he
realizes she was the perpetrator.
Yasmina Khadra is the pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul. He had
been an army officer for 36 years. When the military demanded to oversee his writing, he adopted a pseudonym made up from his wife’s names.
Disturbed by the war, he moved to France and later revealed his identity.
In his fiction, he explores the Algerian war, probes the psyche of fanaticism, and with incisive language plumbs the depths of Algerian society.
I started with In the Name of God, translated by Linda Black, the French
original published in 1998. It traces the descent of the village of Ghachimat into a cauldron of horror. It opens with three young men, friends
from childhood. There is a bit of tension among them since all are attracted to the same girl, the mayor’s daughter. Other characters include
Issa, a former collaborator with the French who lives with daily humiliation, his mechanic son Tej, the wily dwarf Zane, and Dactylo who writes
letters for the public. After Sheikh Abbas returns from prison, self-proclaimed men of Allah begin to take control. Elders are manipulated and
cast aside, the ruins of an ancient temple are destroyed, and those not
on the ‘right path’ are slaughtered. In the hands of those with new-found
he opening page pulls you in as Llob is about to start a new day:
“Minna snores within range of my displeasure, thick like a rancid
paste, a tip of breast unconcernedly deployed at the edge of the sheet. Far
gone the time when the most innocent of touches would arouse me sexually.
That was the time when I had an orgasm close to the surface of the skin; the
time when I could not dissociate pride from virility, positivism from procreation. Today my wife, my poor beast of burden, has regressed – she holds
no more attraction than a trailer lying across the road, but at least she’s
there when I am afraid in the dark.”
Before long, both daylight and dark will make Llob tremble. Driving
with him through Algiers, you can tell more will be revealed than simple
binaries of good police and bad Islamist terrorists.
“I tear along toward Hydra, the most chic neighborhood in the city. Hydra, in these competitive times, is reminiscent of a forbidden city. Never
has a fundamentalist’s beard ruffled its mimosas, never has the smell of
gunpowder violated the fragrances of its felicity. The nabobs of the land live
there as pensioners, with well-stocked paunches, their eye riveted on the
prospect of profit. The wars of Algeria possess this impenetrable singularity that the belligerents are grossly in error as to whom their enemies are.”
With Llob we circulate in a fascinating world of repellent power brokers, weary policemen, drug dealers, pimps, and fanatics.
Many dismiss crime novels as mere thrillers filled with plot twists. But
there is no wall separating a mystery from a work of art. Khadra’s Llob
novels, like those of other masters of the genre such as Jean-Claude
Izzo or Raymond Chandler, are literary creations where puzzle solving
is combined with richly evoked settings, memorable characters, and
Many dismiss crime novels as mere thrillers filled
with plot twists. But there is no wall separating
a mystery from a work of art. Khadra’s Llob
novels, like those of other masters of the genre
such as Jean-Claude Izzo or Raymond Chandler,
are literary creations where puzzle solving is
combined with richly evoked settings, memorable
characters, and crafted language.
crafted language. I reflect on
a soldier turned novelist and
wonder why there are so few.
In Bangladesh, I only know
of one officer, Shabbir Ahsan,
who published the novel The
Peacekeeper. Of course there
is also the general who fancied himself a poet, but the
book memorably tied to his
name is not his own but from
one of his ex-wives: Bidisha’s
Shotrur Shathe Boshobash.
Given the high drama in our
society – the startling crimes,
the twisted intrigues – where
is our fictional Superintendent Llob? I eagerly wait for
the arrival of our own literary
noir. n
ARTS & LETTERS
D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N DAY, J U LY 7, 2 0 1 3
DHAKA BOOKS
meet
Sabreena Ahmed
Gantha, a women writers’ forum in Dhaka, recently organized a discussion of two books: Dawn of the Waning Moon by Jharna Rahman and
Bornandho Raat O Diary by Monika Chakraborty.
Jharna Rahman and Monika Chakraborty at the Gantha event.
Drama Review
Ikhtesad Ahmed
Ikhtesad Ahmed in London finds a Pulitzer Prize-winning play to be a dud
Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced is the story of Amir, a successful New York corporate lawyer of Pakistani descent. He has renounced his Muslim faith,
going as far as to change his surname to ‘Kapoor’, to become the model
American. His prosperous, serene life begins to unravel when he is urged
by his wife Emily to acquiesce to his nephew Abe’s request of assisting
an unjustly accused imam. She is an up-and-coming artist whose liberal
views have made her better understand Islam and embrace its rich heritage by adopting it in her artwork. Amir reluctantly accedes to Abe and
her appeal, thereby jeopardising his career. His assumed identity comes
apart at the seams when Emily and he host a dinner party for Isaac, an
influential Jewish art-curator she is wooing, and his African-American
wife Jory, coincidentally Amir’s colleague who benefits from his misfortunes. The backdrop is provided by Abe embracing extremism as his uncle gives in to what his forsworn faith supposedly expects of him.
The estimable Bush Theatre, committed to its vision of providing ethnic minorities with a podium, mounts a unique theatrical experience
under the admirable direction of Nadia Fall with an unconventionally
structured stage and extraordinary scene changes. The view is of a section through a building, with the walls on either side of a couple’s livingroom having fallen off, inviting the audience to peer into their personal
drama unfolding. Light and sound are used brilliantly to set the tone and
denote the passage of time, and provide the tapestry of a busy cityscape.
The script, however, panders to American notions about Islam and
immigrants and leaves a lot to be desired. The tragic hero’s fall is rife
with clichés (e.g. an angry Muslim arguing with a meek, rich Jew, who
ends up being the villain of the piece in a society that promotes Jews;
said angry Muslim beating his wife when he discovers her infidelity) and
nonsensical contradictions (e.g. the young nephew changes his name to
be accepted by Western society while simultaneously being proud of his
religion and heritage; the wife concludes that she is naive despite being the assured voice of reason throughout the play). A simple story is
compounded by the ensuing confusion, and by tired dialogue and a lack
D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N DAY, J U LY 7, 2 0 1 3
ARTS & LETTERS
Professor Syed Manzoorul Islam discussed Jharna Rahman’s book, a
collection of English translations of her Bengali short stories. He said
that Ms. Rahman is a modern Bengali writer who knows how to draw
psychological portraits, with a pronounced skill in etching details. He
further pointed out the pitfalls of cultural translation, when, for instance, in Bengali we say ‘increase the air conditioner’ when in reality it
should be ‘the temperature has to be adjusted’. He commended the editor Dr. Niaz Zaman for publishing the volume from writers.ink. Faridur
Rahman, a translator and also a reviewer at the event, found colloquial
Bengali words difficult to translate into English. He added that Ms. Rahman’s gift for words made her stories have a poem-like quality.
The second half of the session focused on Monika Chakraborty’s Bornandho Raat O Diary, also a collection of short stories. Writer and critic
Jahanara Nowshin reviewed the book, saying that Chakraborty was a
promising writer. She singled out the story “Gandhari” for special mention, adding that the writer needed to be careful with her word choice
in Bengali. The second reviewer of the book, Nurun Akter, also chose
“Gandhari” as the best story of the collection. She said that the stories
titled “Blue Moon” and “Nirjone Nirobota” revolved around the themes
of women’s empowerment and autism respectively. The best feature of
Chakraborty’s writing is that she knows how to write to the point and
how to turn a simple incident of life into a story with a twist. n
of nuance. The theological discourse debates minutiae using trite arguments, which at times are unintelligible. The play is too short, making
it abrupt and overly dramatic in order to desperately drive home points
which are not developed fully, or are given voice by unsympathetic
characters. It promised much, but laboured in vain, turning out at the
end to be some archetypal, didactic, embarrassingly whiny Muslim diaspora drama.
Winning a Pulitzer has elevated Disgraced to the equal of works by
Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. The resultant
hype seems to have influenced British theatre critics too – otherwise a
grounded, sane bunch. But pace The Guardian, these largely middleaged, white men, at pains to be politically correct, have bent over backwards to review it favourably. But we in South Asia and the Muslim
world should view this work through the right lenses: this in no way
can be ‘our’ Long Day’s Journey into Night, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Seascape. Not even close. The West’s celebration of this slick mediocrity is
merely patronizing condescension. Should we accept this on the same
terms as they do, it means we accept their pat on the head.
Cast:
Hari Dhillon as Amir
Kirsty Bushell as Emily
Danny Ashok as Abe
Nigel Whitmey as Isaac
Sara Powell as Jory. n
Sabreena Ahmed
teaches English at
BRAC University.
Ikhtesad Ahmed
is an aspiring
writer.
7
Serialized Story
Samira - Part 3
Back in time
Awrup Sanyal
T
Awrup Sanyal
is an ex-advertising
professional and a
fiction writer.
8
he breakfast fiasco had changed many things for Samia.
She had left the table and gone back to her room. Her father went back to his newspaper. The uneasy lull lasted all
through the day. Lunch wasn’t a family affair either; Samia
skipped it altogether. In the room that day memories came
flooding back. Those days when she saw the world sitting atop her father’s shoulders. She would wait eagerly for the weekends. Eschewing
the company of cousins and neighbourhood kids, she would wait for
the surprises that her father would have in store for her. Unless he was
overloaded with work or had to go out of Dhaka, he would have one new
surprise or the other for her on the weekends. It was with her father that
she had explored Old Dhaka, street food, Haji’s or Fakruddin’s biriyani,
the national monuments and the history of the country, the Sangshad
Bhavan – it never had ceased to fascinate her, that building with its
circles and triangles cut out in its walls – Dhaka University, where her
father had spent some of the most intense period of his life, where he
would announce with pride, “See that, Samira, you are now standing
in front of the Oxford of the East!”, and how it had been the center of
resistance during the movement against Punjabi authoritarianism and
led the fight for freedom during the later Liberation War.
Sometimes, it would be of a more exotic kind when the three of them
would go out of Dhaka for a ride in their red Toyota Publica. That car had
a special place in her heart, since much of her ‘firsts’ revolved around it.
Though in those days every other car was a Publica; theirs, she thought
was unique, because it was one of the few red ones on the streets and
her father, normally a frugal man, had splurged on a great sound system specially shipped from Japan. He was a music buff, mostly into
old-time Bangla film songs, when things were black-and-white in many
ways. At times, if the mood was on him, he would slide cassettes of Nat
King Cole, Paul Anka, Pat Boone and Judy Collins into the player and
hum along. She smiled at the memory: he wouldn’t recognize the music
Samira hummed to, he wouldn’t know Radiohead and Guns ‘n Roses
from his elbow. Those melodious voices would sing as the car glided
through a pastoral Bangladesh. Her parents would sometimes play-act
and pretend to be matinee idols Uttam-Suchitra or Babita-Razzak, singing along to ‘Kay prothom kachay ayshaychi...’ or ‘Eeyi poth jodi na shesh
hoy...’ or ‘Jay chilo drishtir shimanaye’. Oh, those were happy days for the
family. From the car’s backseat they had seemed the most fun people in
the world!
As her father’s business grew he changed, became busier and rarely
had time off on the weekends. He was increasingly grumpy and tired. He
would come home late looking stressed out. She had noticed then how
the crease lines on his face shifted, from around his lips to his forehead.
His business had stolen her father away from her, and there would be
tension between her parents more often than not. She would hear her
mother say, “Badal, you have to stop running after money. We don’t need
so much money. Look at you. At this rate you won’t live long!”
But her father would rarely bother to reply, and when he did it would
be a terse, “There’s no coming back, Dolon. There’re too many debts.”
Laughter disappeared from the house. Samia would back off to her
room and be disconsolate, sometimes crying in the dark. She would lie
in the dark and pray to God to give her father back. She wanted her rides
back, her discovery of the city and its surrounding green lands, the little
picnics trips, the laughter, the food and the fun. But, the hands on the
bedside clock didn’t start ticking anti-clockwise.
I
n the evening she went out of her room, wandered through the house
aimlessly, rediscovering the nooks and corners—they were from a different time. The house was very quiet and empty. Even Rahim, their
trusted help, was nowhere to be seen. The door to her parents’ bedroom
was locked. “Keep away, emotion running high,” it seemed to say to her.
After much dithering she knocked on it. Outside it was dusk, the sun, like
a low-voltage bulb, was about to be snuffed out, any moment now. Her
mother opened the door. Her father was lying in bed with a book, and he
looked up at her from over his reading glasses and smiled. She threw her
arms around her mother and wept, then snuggled beside her father—his
smell seamlessly bridging the time from her childhood to now. After her
hasty return from the US, this was the first time she had hugged her father.
Exhausted, she turned over on her side and fell into a deep, dreamless
sleep. n
n
n
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