Creative nonfiction / Growing up with a new nation: The Dhaka we once knew

Everyone had them on their bookshelves. Everyone read them and fawned over them. Online stores were getting creative with the contents of these young-adult fantasy books, coming up with themed candles, beautifully designed bookmarks, and exclusive sticker packs. It was almost as though the genre had developed a cult following of its own.

Three years before Maloy Krishna Dhar’s death, his memoir, Train to India: Memories of Another Bengal (Penguin India, 2009), came out. Born in a sleepy village of Kamalpur in the Bhairab-Mymensingh region next to Meghna and Brahmaputra, Dhar had an illustrious career as a teacher, journalist, intelligence officer, and writer.

A good book stays with a reader long after they’ve read the last word and placed it back on the shelf. It leaves an impression on the mind, whether because the action was exhilarating, the characters raw and real, or because reading it felt like coming back to a home you never knew you had.

One day many years ago, discovering my cousin’s tattered copy of a Give Yourself Goosebumps book completely changed my ideas about what books could be.

A damp siren screamed at the rushing wind. Black and thick smoky clouds slowly clotted in a grey sky, as if preparing for some kind of a ritual.

I can’t sleep anymore Piano. Storms. White noise Nothing works.

It’s already been several months since we’ve been hurled into the vortex of the coronavirus. The virus lives among us, silent and invisible.

On the first day of this month, 76 years ago, Anne Frank wrote her last diary entry. Three days later, on August 4, the building she was hiding in with her family and four family friends was raided by the Gestapos.

Shirley (2020), directed by Josephine Decker and adapted by Sarah Gubbins from the 2014 eponymous novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, interweaves fact and fiction into an imagined narrative about the time when author Shirley Jackson was writing her second novel Hangsaman (1951).

“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.”

“Happily, the Web is so huge that there’s no way any one company can dominate it,” wrote Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1999.

On the Daily Star Book Club last week, we asked members how they organise and look after their book collections at home. Here is what we learned:

Diversity can seem jaded when it is employed for the sake of appearing “woke”.

Humans are a storytelling species. Yet history, which is but the stories of yesteryears, is taught like a chain of facts and dates.

The Routledge Diaspora Studies Reader (2017) co-edited by Klaus Stierstorfer and Janet Wilson made significant observations about the increase in global movement of people, capital, products, cultures and ideologies;

I hold stares - I sing to the moon Rigid, motionless - senseless woes

The human race is doing quite well. There was a possibility of a climate catastrophe in the early 21st century but they came to their senses soon enough and managed to deal with it by 2050.

Before my mother bought me a copy of Sarat Shahitya Samagra (2003) one fateful summer back in high school, my exposure to Bangla literature had been limited to Feluda and whatever my textbooks offered.

For me, Amar Chelebela (1991) by Humayun Ahmed would not only be a summer read but also a comfort read, a holiday retreat, a walking tour of a Bangladesh unheard of today, and also a sneak-peak into the daily bustle of a family who redefined literature, science fiction, caricatures, humour and so much more.

Come June, the season of light reading arrives with the promise of filling lazy afternoons freed from school work or, for adults who can’t manage a vacation, escape in the form of relaxing books.