The loss of essentiality
Be a tree
THE OTHER WAY ROUND
My scarlet incarnation
My London: An immigrant story
You land in London with £210 in your pocket. It is the year 2009. You are able to pay the first month’s rent for the room, but not the deposit. You have to share it with an acquaintance from Dhaka. He arrived a week prior.
Not everyone looks at the sky with the same weighted heart
Once, I believed there was a crown on my head. The heart was brimming with life and light Brimming with boundless force to surpass any spread. Among the crowd, I was always one
The matriarchy of food
It is a truth universally acknowledged that food is the undisputed sixth love language that Gary Chapman forgot to mention in his 1992 book. Or maybe it’s just the gastronome in me speaking.
The alterities of hunger
In two of the more prominent fictional works that are part of the diasporic South Asian literary production, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, food is presented as a conceptual apparatus that makes palatable the tensions of ‘multiculturalism’ and offers a critique of class barriers—if not always at the level of economics, but at the level of consciousness.
Pandemic Nocturne 1: December Dirge
Ask me not of Grief. For I have been burnt by its friendly fire with blood and bits of oozing mortal flesh spun flaky and ashen by its biting cold breath.
jani dekha hobe
that single spot, shunyo, a hole that is filled to its circumference, I drive and the sun is bigger than I’ve ever seen and orange, look directly into it or, i had to write a poem to go along with the first
In the sand dunes
His face was growing warmer, it seemed as though the intangible entity that was stinging his closed eyes was growing stronger.
Remembering Melville in his bicentenary year
Melville's critics, inevitably, panned him for what he had characterised self-deprecatingly and in his frustration as his fictional "botches," although his works were rarely that.
The Rakshushi by Kazi Nazrul Islam
‘It’s been two years today, a full two years, and it continues to amaze me that people run for their lives the moment they see me.
Why Nazrul was at loggerheads with language purists
I proposed a panel at a North American Bangla literary conference. ‘Is translation itself a form of activism?’ I queried.