FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

Around 14 years ago, I left my life behind in Nigeria. After almost half a decade spent in a land far from home, leaving felt crushing.

In keeping with the spirit of Partition of 1947, we have compiled a list of stories that deal with movements and migrations,

The burst of fragrant marigolds on the blanched porch of our old Calcutta home, free like sand, unbridled like the wind

The map is part of an exhibition arranged to mark the revival of the Cambridge Majlis, a society (dating from 1891) designed for students from all over the Subcontinent to meet socially to enjoy their commonalities and discuss and debate in a civil way their political differences.

As he had actively protested against Ayub's dictatorship, and was indeed jailed, he felt compelled to protest against Ershad's dictatorship through his poetry.

A young white officer asks her in heavily accented Bangla, “What’s the purpose of your visit?”

Their apartment was located on the ground floor of a three-storied building whose yellowish paint looked as if it was peeling off on its own.

'In Extreme Need of Guidance', the book being serialised here, captures the first 16 years of writer Sultana Nahar's life. This is the Afterword by the author.

Textbooks in Bangladesh tend to be written by foreign authors. Those that are written by Bangladeshi authors, emphasise on examples in a non-Bangladesh context.

Colson Whitehead’s sequel to his novel Harlem Shuffle (Doubleday, 2021) is a continuation of the exact same order.

“Can one break a country...Will the earth bleed?” asks eight-year-old Lenny in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1988)–a tale about Partition. “No one’s going to break India. It’s not made of glass!”

In exchange for the presidential suites at the Ritz and so on, the men holding our city keys have already opened our skies to all that may come.

To sit on thy laurels seems apposite, Yet to dig graves for perceptive pleasure resemble a breach Of lines bridging the things learned, unlearned.

The novels are small revolutions, each seeking to energise and awaken the language. Together, they offer startling portraits of the current.

His words convince the listener that the world is actually a beautiful place where truth, honesty, and simplicity are the quenching clouds above a desolate desert of dry despair and monotony.

Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, written between 1907 and 1909, reveals the ways in which Tagore addresses the all-important issues of his time—national identity formation, the coming together of people over time, and obstacles or barriers put in the way of the progress of a nation. The novel captures Tagore’s fascination with envisioning a future based on human amity or moitri, one where the powerless and the dispossessed transcend the barriers of division and distrust.

Truth and beauty reign supreme in the domain of mirth, in the realm of ecstasy. Thy glory resounds within the vast heaven, And the entire world lay at thy gem-bedecked pes. The stars, planets, sun, and the moon are impetuously

One can find Rabindranath anywhere—he’s there in the words we whisper, in the tunes we hum, in the ethos we believe in, in the ideal of the human we wish we were. 

“Who am I? “

Listening is stretching beyond ourselves and another, and if we were to listen to printed words on paper as non-verbal cues of communication, it too emits lower frequencies that moves us, beyond the I, towards new modes of knowledge.