Nadeem Zaman

Dhaka, 1857          

She woke up to milky streetlight spilled on the bed, his exposed neck in its creamy glow. The dark dip between the wings of the collar bones a misshapen waking eye. Keeping watch. She shifted the weight off her right shoulder to turn to the other side. The shoulder was pulsing a heart-beat rhythm of pain. Pain unlike the kind he had brought on a million of his people. A million pairs of hands that would swim oceans, leap mountains, brave war-zones, to switch places with her. For access to that throat. She landed softly on her left. It was time for the other shoulder to share the pain.

North Avenue beach was crowded with the Gold Coast moneyed, the downtown young and rich, the tanned, tight-bodied volleyballers, all of them white, and a healthy portion of the rest of the city’s masses, a United Colors of Benetton sampler, among which numbered the five of us. School was out for the summer, the next three months sprawled before us like the city from the Skydeck of Sears Tower.

Bangladeshi writing in English has seen an encouraging surge over the last couple of years. In the arena of South Asian literature,