Creative nonfiction / Growing up with a new nation: The Dhaka we once knew

This year, both Eid-ul-Fitr and Eid-ul-Adha came as they should, celebrated across many countries.Yet while joy filled some homes, in others it arrived with a heavy heart.

In 1970s Azimpur, the two Eids and Durga Puja were the punctuation marks of our year—days when stairwells, verandas, and a single playground turned many flats into one home.

While many rush back to their village homes to spend Eid with family, others finally begin to exhale. Exams are over, friends are free, relatives are home, and the city itself seems to soften into celebration. Once the moon has been spotted, there is a strange kind of ease to it all. It comes with cattle trucks rumbling through narrow roads, hay scattered beside apartment gates, and children trying not to grow attached to goats they have already named. And somewhere between all our own scrambling over how to spend that final night before Eid, it feels fitting to let a few literary characters inherit the chaand raat moments many of us already know so well.

Pias Majid, born in 1984, is a gentle yet prominent voice among Bangladesh’s poets of the 2000s generation.

One thing the season of sacrifice whirrs though the air is the reminders of the story behind it. The intention behind the willingness, the grief behind the bravery and the miracle of God’s mercy.

Nazrul’s “Rebel Poet” identity is too constrained to limit him within a single frame. Nazrul’s poetry moves, shifts beyond even its historical significance. They take rebirth, vertebrate, enter speech, then public conscience, and Nazrul returns as chant—becoming the primary language of people’s struggle for rights, carrying an unyielding spirit in every movement when people most need him.

Raja Rammohun Roy was a trailblazer in South Asian and, arguably, Asian culture, literature, journalism, and education. He is often described as the “Father of Modern India,” the “Prophet of Indian Nationalism,” a pioneer of the Bengal Renaissance, and a founder of Asian Anglophone literature.

Famously known to Bengalis as the rebel poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam in most of his poems and verse-lyrics raised a strong voice against every form of oppression the British colonisers, representing the capitalist West, systematically unleashed on their subjects in India.

History rarely remembers how revolutionary times actually feel. It remembers slogans but forgets the trembling hands that first held the placards.

How do you contain something you can’t record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you’re at war?

The bilingual poetry collection Adivasi Premikar Mukh: The Portrait of an Adivasi Beloved, (Oitijjhya, 2026) by journalist, poet, and fiction writer Ehasan Mahamud was launched on Monday, May 18, at the Kabi Shamsur Rahman Seminar Room of Bangla Academy, Dhaka. The event was organised by Oitijjhya Publications and moderated by Mostafa Mushfiq.

Adivasi Premikar Mukh: The Portrait of an Adivasi Beloved (Oitijjhya, 2026), a bilingual poetry collection by journalist, poet, and fiction writer Ehasan Mahamud, is set to be launched today, Monday, May 18, at the Kabi Shamsur Rahman Seminar Room of Bangla Academy, Dhaka. The event is organised by Oitijjhya Publications and begins at 4:00 PM.

The only problem in our ‘Shahebiana.’ Is our complexion, that’s not ‘White.’ Still, we don’t stop trying; use ‘Vinolea,’ Powdering our skin in layers, with might. We are back from the West: a few, We destroy the Congress in a chew. Although our Shahebs are our God, We make them angry on a nod. Whereas, we walk like the Shahebs. And give speeches in perfect English; But in the time of crisis: steadily we run, Like every other Bengali son.

Amazon is preparing to end support for Kindle devices released before 2012, cutting affected e-readers and tablets off from the Kindle Store and limiting their ability to access new content after May 20, 2026.

Bengal Shilpalay in Dhanmondi, Dhaka hosted a two-day literary event on May 15 and 16, consisting of a memorial lecture and a discussion session organised by Bengal Foundation and Kali O Kalam. The event, organised with the participation of prominent researchers, writers, and artists of the country—brought up literature, culture, social thought, and various contemporary issues.

And the crocodile cuts through the burbling rapid, mossy snout blinking with sun.

The plane begins its descent past the customary carpeting of sepia clouds,

At the beginning of “A Day Eight Years Ago” (originally published in 1954) by Jibananda Das, we learn that a man has been taken to the morgue.

Published during the 2026 Ekushey Book Fair, Daaknam Bhule Gechi follows a city-bred teenager whose life changes when he moves with his family to a deserted palace in his father’s village.

On April 25, The Reading Circle celebrated its 20th anniversary with the launch of Stories My Grandma (Never) Told Me at Ajo Idea Space in Gulshan-2. Published by Nymphea Publication, the anthology brings together stories exploring family secrets, memory, and women’s histories.