Star Literature
Fiction / Not talking in a city of loudspeakers
The door didn’t fully click shut. That was an ordinary affair in the house because the door locked to prevent escape. But, by chance or sheer good luck, it didn’t fully lock this time. The click was off. Someone hadn’t done their job correctly. Bloody hell, no one does their jobs correctly in this godforsaken country.
Poetry / If I Speak
Tell me what to say when I need to speak, If I have to say something, So what can I say: look at that
Poetry / IS & WAS
Death dwells between is and was, Riding the final particle of a fading breath.
Tribute / T.S. Eliot and on living in unreal cities
I once again find myself drawn to "The Waste Land"—though this isn’t about just the one poem, not really—where so much of the old world exists in motifs in a tattered landscape.
Poetry / Silent screams
Let us raise our voices, let us be heard, / Justice for the dead, let their voices be stirred
Fiction / 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.
Poetry / 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
Fiction / Terrible tea, terrible life choices
But I guess Ivan did not choose wisely. It was a series of unfortunate events with him and now, he was stuck with Rebecca–and there was still six hours 46 minutes left in this office cubicle.
ESSAY / 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.
RRReading
Even if you are not a film enthusiast, chances are high that you have watched the 2022 Telegu blockbuster RRR. At the very least, you should have heard about it.
A modern love story in translation
I became an ardent admirer of Amrita Pritam, the maverick Punjabi author, an outspoken critic of the Indian patriarchy and discriminating social practices, three decades back in New York when I was putting together an anthology of world feminist poems in Bangla translation.
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
The graveyard in Banani
Love is the enormous mango tree growing directly from an ancient grave, so old that no headstone remains at all.
Black swan
from my blood fangs, disarrayed cold / looting my sore body / that has done so much for me, while I ached
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.
Living a feminist killjoy life
The way we perceive the word “emotion” through the gendered lens contributes to systematic oppression because it dismisses those who fall under the umbrella of the emotional radar and it is easier to silence their voices as emotional beings because they are often, according to the patriarchal society, deemed as unstable, illogical, or disoriented.
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.
