Shaheen Akhtar

Wasi Ahmed

Moinul Ahsan Saber

Salma Bani

Bipradash Barua

Akhteruzzaman Elias

Parvez Hossain

Syed Manzoorul Islam

Rashida Sultana

Anwara Syed Haq

Dhaka may be one of the most densely populated cities in the world - noisy, grid-locked, short on public amenities, and blighted with sprawling slums - but, as these stories show, it is also one of the most colourful and chaotically joyful places you could possibly call home. Slum kids and film stars, day-dreaming rich boys, gangsters and former freedom fighters all rub shoulders in these streets, often with Dhaka's famous rickshaws ferrying them to and fro across cultural, economic and ethnic divides. Just like Dhaka itself, these stories thrive on the rich interplay between folk culture and high art; they both cherish and lampoon the city's great tradition of political protest, and they pay tribute to a nation that was borne out of a love of language, one language in particular, Bangla (from which all these stories have been translated).

A City in Short Fiction

The Book of Dhaka

A quarter-century after the war that was meant to bring liberation to Bangaldesh, Mukti, a young researcher, comes into Mariam’s life, armed with a set of questions that have no easy answers. How did Mariam, and women like her – Biranganas, the raped women, touted as the new nation’s ‘honour’ but treated quite otherwise by their families and society – survive the war? Why did Mariam send her young brother away but stay on herself in Dhaka as the city became increasingly unsafe? How did the Pakistani army deal with the women they found in homes, in offices, in colleges? Did the Muktijoddhas, the freedom fighters, protect ‘their’ women? For Mariam, these questions are almost irrelevant. Instead, she is haunted by different demons: she tried so hard to save Montu, yet the war swallowed him up even before he could fully understand its meaning. How did this happen? What happened to the men in her life: Jashimul Haque, Abed Jahangir, Ishtiaque I and II - where did they all go? What does freedom and independence mean? Is there any place for her and women like her in the new nation? Shaheen Akhtar’s mesmerizing and moving novel, set against the background of the Bangladesh war of independence, skilfully explores the violence done to women, their courage and heartbreak, their search for love and their betrayal. Akhtar’s is one of the younger voices to explore this hitherto hidden dimension of the history of Bangladesh. The Search (Taalash) was awarded the Prothom Alo Literary Prize in Bangladesh in 2004. Published by Zubaan.

Shaheen Akhtar

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