As the mangy fingers of fascism grew out of the copper earth,

Maybe you forgot, or dementia possessed you before our union—how else could you keep aloof from your soul, your other soul, your eupnoea?

Hajari Biswas was sitting leisurely in his spice-shop. It was around noon and the market price of spices was not going well. There were not too many buyers even though one could detect quite a few foreigners in the market. Hajari was fanning himself with a palm leaf and was dozing off. Suddenly, he woke up at the sound of a familiar voice.

As a tiny five-year old in the ’80s, I first discovered and liberated an Archie comic from a teenage cousin the way oil rich countries are liberated: by force. I used superior tactics of crying, pleading, whining and bargaining.

Two strange events took place in November 2016; Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 48th President of the United States, and George Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, suddenly became a best seller again.

I picked up this book while trying to find a good therapist in this dreary land.

Bengali writer, educationist and pioneering feminist activist, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880-1932), popularly known as Begum Rokeya, was born at a critical juncture in South Asian history when hostility and bloodshed between Hindus and Muslims was a recurrent experience.

It was a big window, like an arched doorway. It creaked loudly the first time I opened it. It sounded angry, upset. I wondered why?

A fading comet trail of snippets from the halls of the Mughal Kings remain immortally enshrined in memory’s space.

Twelve years ago, Suzanne Collins introduced us to The Hunger Games (Scholastic Press), a dystopian world where children fight to their televised deaths in a brutal annual competition.

Instead of the thrill of meeting friends and professors in a bustling, energised campus, going back to school only involves a computer this September.

As humans we teeter on the oddest of precipices. We are only animals: apes unusually adept at surviving Earth’s harsh playbook for life. Like the multitude of organisms we share it with, we live, multiply, and without exception, we die.

During the long lockdown in early 2020, I took stock of my shelvedunread books. A mint-green hardback covered book-spine caught my eye;A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

They say that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take But by the moments that take our breath away.

She knocks on the door, The door-bell is broken; a sculpture of unknown figure hangs on the wall, The door is solid, but not made of Mahogany wood.

Korean literature has been enjoying a literary renaissance for quite some time through translation, from the likes of Hang Kang’s beguiling yet gruesome novel, The Vegetarian (2007) to Yeonmi Park’s heart wrenching memoir, In Order to Live (2015).

When The Fault in Our Stars (2012) first released, it brought on a powerful surge of change, not only in our reading lists, but in our perception of terminal and mental diseases and even to the genre itself.

When we think of migration, the images in our collective narratives are constructed primarily with masses of people on the move, leaving places they belong in for foreign lands. In her latest book, Sonia Shah, an American science journalist and author, critically takes apart the boundaries around human wandering both in our lands and our mind-sets.

Migration of Bengalis from South Asia to the outside world started with taking up jobs as lascars (sailors) in the British East India Company's ships which carried precious goods from the Indian subcontinent, such as spice, tea and cotton. In addition, from the second half of the nineteenth century, Bengali educated and wealthy gentlemen began travelling to England mainly to pursue higher education.

Last November, our elderly maid servant Fatema’s ma who works full-time at our house, wanted to take leave to get her son married. Of course, I agreed immediately. But she would be gone for about two weeks and hence she proposed that her eldest son’s wife might work in her absence.