Shimu and Tushar had grown up together on an alley in the Mirpur area of Dhaka city. Their neighbouring houses were separated only by a brick wall, about two meters high. The branches of a tree growing beside Tushar’s house overhung the wall, its foliage shading a part of Shimu’s courtyard.
Being a woman comes to me naturally If not me, then who? I was never asked to be one I was never asked to cook
What’s life if a sense of darkness/ doesn’t connect night to sunlight
Let us raise our voices, let us be heard, / Justice for the dead, let their voices be stirred
The pavements are hotter in winter, the rain never wets the asphalt and I never tell you to do anything else other than “be”.
And along with our bodies, the rage keeps on, / we chafe and bleed and clot and steer; / we go mad and nude
from my blood fangs, disarrayed cold / looting my sore body / that has done so much for me, while I ached
I wonder where God sits in that tower. I wonder whose cries are louder.
From moon beamed mountains To plains deltaic; In Diasporas–detached
The burst of fragrant marigolds on the blanched porch of our old Calcutta home, free like sand, unbridled like the wind
To sit on thy laurels seems apposite, Yet to dig graves for perceptive pleasure resemble a breach Of lines bridging the things learned, unlearned.
We walk past the singing bells and our chambers, Blind to the perils beyond our walls.
I am from the 19 houses in 15 districts, none of which could become "my home, sweet home"
The motor car is always a thing of darkness, In the sun and lighted roads of day And in the luminous gas at night though
I found a gold pendant which I decided to keep. I wore it around my neck and looked in the mirror. Did my mother ever wear this pendant?
I frolic and burrow myself inside the vastness of the fields And the prairies that stand tall Of spaces heavily concentrated, and then stretched out to infinity
I see you, with whatever half awake, sleep drifting irises, I see you. Dusted in the shelves of unread books, I see you and I know you, They will never know you but I do, in ways you are afraid.
The girl stared back at her and asked a question that made Mrittika’s heart beat faster. “Don’t you recognise me?”
her heart was a two seater unfit for a family so big i grew to be a woman mirrored in her shadow when she was younger