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Jharna Das Purkayastha is very well known to Bengali readers. She has written numerous short stories. She won the Annanya Shahitya Puroshkar in 2008. The Blue House is a collection of twelve short stories which have been translated by different writers and edited by Niaz Zaman. As I was reading the stories an all too well known picture of my surroundings, indeed the surroundings of most Bangladeshi women, came alive in the writing. The trivial events that we seldom take notice of, the humiliation women of this country face with no one taking note of them are the subjects of Purkayastha's stories. It seems as though these happenings are not important enough to be noted but Jharna Das Purkayastha does just that, makes readers see them. She depicts very ordinary events in such a way that she de-familiarises them, makes us see them anew. That is her expertise, her talent. She makes use of it in all her twelve stories. 'The Blue House' tells the story of young girls disappea...

The word Oshtorombha is in fact zero. It is Papri Rahman's third collection of stories and her fifth book. Papri Rahman carries the banner of a writer, an editor and a critic, quite comfortably. She doesn't write about the issues related to women which we commonly see in other contemporary writers, as she claims. Whenever she finds a story that is out of the ordinary, she tries to colour it in the canvass of story telling. This makes her somewhat different from other female writers that we come across. The book Oshtorombha has eight stories, six of which are in a rural setting; and the remaining two are narrated from an urban point of view. One of the stories, Shodh, depicts how a village woman takes revenge on her husband's second wife by urinating on her bed. It is a tempestuous night when the first wife is given shelter at their place. Everything is going on as usual, except that when she leaves the bed it is wet with a pungent smell. Both Hasna and Mohor Ali were asto...

Syed Shamsul Haq is unquestionably a pre-eminent intellectual personality in Bangladesh. He is a writer, playwright, poet and critic all rolled into one. He has won numerous awards for his writing at home and abroad, including the Bangla Academy Award and Ekushe Padak, two of the most prestigious accolades in Bangladesh. His writing career has earned him the honorific “ambidextrous writer”, meaning someone who can work with both his hands. Haq has been one of the most prolific writers of recent times in the field of literature for more than fifty years now. A number of his plays and novels have been translated in many different languages.The Blue Sting is a novella by Syed Shamsul Haq and translated by Kabir Chowdhury, a scholar of repute and translator. The slim book has a heavy message to convey. It is about a man named Kazi Nazrul Islam, a name that gets the Pakistani army into believing that the owner of the name is the famous Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam. The whole novella is a...

Jackie Kabir Zaitoon, a young girl of sixteen, is going to the hilly regions to be married to a “tribal” whom her father has chosen for her. She has been brought up by Qasim since the partition of India in 1947. As the British fled the country after ruling for over 200 years, they sowed the seeds of communalism. The Muslims and the Hindus have since been rivals. There were riots in every part of the subcontinent in order to make it their respective strongholds. No one knew which part would belong to whom even till the last minute while the country was being demographically changed. Lahore, a stronghold of the wealthy Hindus, was supposed to become part of India. But it went to Pakistan. Jullander, Sikh territory, was allocated to India. Qasim flees from Jullander; on the same train travel Sikander and Zohra with their two children from Ludhiana. When the train reaches Lahore men squatting on both sides torch the train and kill as many people as they can. Munni loses her parents and ho...

Jackie Kabir As the name suggests, it is a book about the Islamic community in Britain. The West has long been intrigued by the Islamists of Asia and the Middle East. Set in the 1980s, the book will definitely quench the desire of those who wish to be enlightened about the radical Islamists of Asian origin. It is about a young Muslim of Bangladeshi origin, a British boy brought up in the UK. It aptly deals with his dilemma of being a Bangladeshi as well as a Briton at the same time. We have seen writers like Monica Ali, Zadie Smith and Manzu Islam dealing with Bangladeshi second generation immigrants being torn apart by their need to hold on to the traditional values and the need to be assimilated in their new-found home. A very few writers have shed light on the history of young Muslims turning into radical Islamists. Ed Husain has written an autobiography describing the plight of a young Muslim boy who gets into the whirlpool of one Islamist organization or another. He unveils the wa...