The shelf / 7 Asian healing fiction recommendations for rainy days

In my book, Identity of a Muslim Family in Colonial Bengal: Between Memories and History (Peter Lang, NYC, 2021), I focus on the era of pre-Partition Bengal, trekking through old family recollections, oral anecdotes, memoirs, and other available books and documents on pre-independence India, and blend them with the larger history of British Bengal.

A good story is hard to find. Niaz Zaman, the editor of The Demoness: The Best Bangladeshi Short Stories, 1971-2021 (Aleph Book Company, 2021), has found 27 “best” short stories to create an appetite for Bangladeshi fiction.

My late grandmother would immerse herself in the rhapsodic melody of Muhammad Iqbal’s poems in Urdu, recite them aloud while taking a stroll around the house and say, “Eta ek alada shaad, banglay er khoj milbe na—this is a different taste, one wouldn’t find it in Bangla”. A few years later, Shankha Ghosh’s masterful translations of Iqbal’s poems would appear in the anthology, Iqbal Theke (Papyrus, 2013). My grandmother was so delighted to be proven wrong. This is one atop a long list of reasons why I am indebted to Ghosh—for the sweetest memory of my grandma.

A new British Council-funded project, Write Beyond Borders, is set to kickstart its inaugural episode from May-October 2021. The program is designed for “emerging writers” of South Asian background, who can be based anywhere in the UK, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. The deadline for application, which should include a covering letter and a writing sample of no more than 2,000 words, is April 30, 2021.

During the recent weeks of lockdown, these five books—ranging from historical fiction to memoirs to fantasy to romance—allowed me to disappear into stories, to live many lives, and they reminded me how vast the world was and will soon again be.

“This weather app is a life saver, I’m telling you! Look how sunny this weekend will be!” Ruma pointed at her phone with her freshly manicured fingers—donned with diamond rings. As her fingers tap-danced on the seven day weather chart on the phone, her listener got distracted by the new rock on her pointer finger.

Each night, the sea with the moon croons a lullaby.

Purify my life, like dawn let me rise anew each morn.

On January 1, 2021, Maya Angelou posted the following on her Facebook:

I discovered Olga Tokarczuk in 2018 after having lapped up the contents of Flights (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017), a novel, written in fragments, that invites obsessive reading, winning Tokarczuk and her brilliant translator Jennifer Croft no less than the Man Booker International prize that same year.

In Golden: Bangladesh at 50 (University Press Ltd, 2021) edited by Shazia Omar, 23 of Bangladesh’s eminent writers and poets—including Kaiser Haq, Arif Anwar, Shabnam Nadiya, Farah Ghuznavi, and others—find home for their varied expressions of Bangladeshi life, culture, history, love, hate, as well as the lulls that defined our quarantined existence this past year.

Desi Delicacies: Food Writing from Muslim South Asia (Pan Macmillan India, 2020) is a delightful anthology edited by Claire Chambers—no stranger to the lifestyle of Muslims.

It happened on a slow morning during my university English literature class. We had just finished reading one of Roald Dahl’s lesser-known short stories, “Skin”, published in The New Yorker in 1952. The lecturer called upon the class to present their analyses of the short story. When it was my turn to speak, I became tongue-tied as my mind slowly went blank. It had been close to four years since I had picked up a book.

In memory of eminent writer, scholar, academic, diplomat, and freedom fighter Professor Abu Rushd Matinuddin (1919-2010), the Abu Rushd Memorial Committee has decided to introduce the Abu Rushd Literary Award from this year. Any novel published in Bangladesh in the last three years will be considered for this year’s award. The winner will receive one lakh taka and a certificate of recognition.

The Water Dancer (Random House, 2020) follows the life of one Hiram Walker, whose biological mother is a slave and father a slaver. Born as a slave bound to the shackles of a plantation in Virginia, Hiram is unique from the others who work beside him. He has a sharp and photogenic memory. And as he grows up with a pang of grief left by the absence of his mother, he discovers another life-changing superpower: Conduction, a form of teleporting through time and space and inspired by Harriet Tubman’s phenomenal work of secretly ferrying slaves to freedom. His extraordinary powers bring him under the mercy of some privilege—like private tutoring alongside his white half-brother—that other slaves cannot enjoy.

In the American South, until the 1960s, Jim Crow laws legalised racial segregation in every sphere, starting from education to transportation. It took the Civil Rights Movement and a series of Supreme Court decisions and laws passed by the Congress to finally dismantle the nightmarish structure that legally kept African-Americans shackled well into the 1960s. The shadow of these laws loiters even today.

After three successful years of sehri-time storytelling, Sehri Tales is back with their annual month-long “boot camp for creativity”. The fourth iteration started off with the prompt “Mercy” on April 14, 2021.

Bangladesh, the former East Pakistan, may have separated from India in 1947, but the centuries of shared history, society, politics, culture, and religion remain etched in the countries’ fabric. Some decades later, Bangladesh, too, carved out a space for themselves, becoming an independent nation with the help of India’s military operations in December of 1971. Thus, the Liberation War connected Bangladesh and India as historic allies, a relationship that has carried over through the years, with varying congeniality. Fifty Years of Bangladesh-India Relations: Issues, Challenges and Possibilities (Om Publications, 2021), evaluates these “contested” relations between the two countries from various perspectives, from both a contemporary and historical standpoint.

I’ve lost count of the number of people who have recommended Jennifer Mathieu’s best-selling book Moxie (Roaring Brook Press, 2017) to me. All I ever saw about the book were torrents of positive reviews on social media, one following another.

All things colourful make up the Bangla New Year—boisterous celebrations of nature, art work, music, food, the quintessential Bangali warmth, and the Mongol Shobhajatra as its crowning jewel