FLASH FICTION / Chand raat at Mohakhali

“What Men Live By” opens like a children’s story—the way Matilda or most Roald Dahl books would start out—with simple, everyday events and straightforward descriptions. Eventually, though, one line caught my attention and I couldn’t help but smile:

For women looking for answers in Bangladesh, abortion is not legal, but menstrual regulation is. You will face questions about your marital status. You might be turned away if the status is not right.

A long time ago, when I was a young writer who had just published his first collection of short stories and had just been married to a young and lovely woman, I wrote a love story in the first person, which created two unanticipated problems.

The stories occur in places deeply etched into many of our memories—from rooftops to buses to benches in the park to the digital world of emails and texts.

In a break from last year’s partially virtual format, this year’s event will be held at ULAB’s Permanent Campus in Beribad and its Research Building in Dhanmondi, Dhaka.

The novel opens with a photographer, the eponymous Maali Almeida, who has woken up dead in a celestial visa office, while his body sinks in the Beira Lake in Colombo. Maali has seven moons to find the man and woman he loves and lead them to  "a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka".

The movie tells the classic love story from the perspective of Juliet's cousin Rosaline, who happens to be Romeo's recent ex-girlfriend. Crushed when Romeo meets Juliet and begins to pursue her, Rosaline schemes to foil the famous romance and reclaim her man.

To me, Wilde’s novel articulates the deepest anxieties of the late Victorians and continues to offer us ways to interpret our own experiences.

Four of Arefin’s novels have been published so far, alongside three books of poetry and critically acclaimed translations of the Iliad and of Kafka’s short stories. 

The familial bond portrayed in the novel makes it easy to sympathise with the characters and they rarely seem woven in a piece of fiction; rather, their attributes are more lifelike and one may just find someone like Franny or Gillian Owens among their kith and kin.

“War is vast. It reaches across the horizon, loftier and older than peace. Killing came before war, but it might also be that refuge preceded war.

He spoke of women on equal terms at a time when women were not even people in the country where he lived (and they still are not—neither in the land of Lalon nor in the world that we proudly claim as ours.

After a two year hiatus caused by Covid-19, the 10th edition of the Dhaka Literary Festival will take place from January 5-8, 2023, at the capital’s Bangla Academy.

A portion of the donation has been given to Sanjida Akter of Natore for the treatment of her eyes. Akter was the victim of an acid attack in November last year. 

“Its insights into history and realism make it as enjoyable to the reader as it is deep into the subject”, UPL stated about the 21st edition of Porarthoporotar Orthoniti. 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once famously said, “All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”

A series of poems also reflect his ecological sensitivity to the machine in the garden and snakes and hyenas imperiling forests and rivers and Dhaka—the city he has lived in for most of his life.

The 22 stories are written by popular, contemporary writers with big names such as Muhammed Zafar Iqbal, Ahsan Habib, and Mehedi Haque.

A strange experience by the sea-shore.

The Penguin Classics edition of Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag comes in a paperback, ebook, and as an audiobook narrated by Priya Ayyar, a television and film actor and award-winning audiobook narrator with a BFA and MFA from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.