Arts & Letters Vol 1 Issue 7

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POETRY This Poem is Going Nowhere Nor is Life Keki Daruwalla

Editor Zafar Sobhan Editor Arts & Letters Khademul Islam Assistant Editor Pushpita Alam Artist Shazzad H Khan

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his string of events that is life this string of cells that is the body

this string of moments that is time do they ever sit together, have a chat, come to a sort of a modus Vivendi ? does it matter if they don’t? we focus on ourselves, a dream that floated in last night, the stream of thought that inhabits us and keeps up its murmur; grief at finalities, when death and oblivion take things in their hands, as they always do. but through its sidereal rounds the earth moves at sixty seven thousand miles per hour; what are we in front of such phenomena: as gravity cracks its whip, planets orbiting, always in ellipses, remember Kepler (?) and comets that keep to their lanes and never honk? who are we to be obsessed with puny us, with some frigging feeling that flickers on a jangled nerve-end?

God said let there be light instead there was the big bang am told the guy was startled ‘who did this, I wanna know?’ then realization dawned (there were no dawns till then, mind you in a gaseous universe --as in political speak— there can’t be any dawns) this wasn’t some kid lighting a fire-cracker! the universe had gone bust, damn it!

Let’s face it solace comes with poetry a rhyme that clangs against a tin can insistent, but moves into memory,

a haiku that flies off a page

and turns into a bird. n

The Human Condition

Kwame Dawes

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fear the day I will say to you I write about the human condition – of course I have said it

jet-lagged and impatient for words to stop the hungry stares of an audience that came to see the jive band and stuck with me; they say, entertain us, and I say, I write about the human condition, as if there is such a thing, as if, as if there is, I don’t know – enough there to write about. And most people are polite, no one thinks to ask if I ever tried to write about anything else – the monkey condition, say, or about ants and the ant

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condition. Well, this is the messiness of the minstrel’s condition: the song and dance.

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Poems here are republished from Bengal Lights, Autumn 2013 issue - reviewed in these pages.

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Bengal Lights Autumn 2013 Publisher: K Anis Ahmed, ULAB, Dhaka.

M A Qasem

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t is pleasing to note that the third issue of Bengal Lights (Autumn 2013) is out. The English language literary journal made its debut exactly a year back, announcing that it would be published twice a year – in November and in February to coincide with the Hay Festival Dhaka and with the Ekushey Boi Mela. Literary journals, especially English language ones, have come and gone in Bangladesh. It is therefore noteworthy that this journal seems to be on a steady course. As has been a feature of issues in the past the writing line-up consists of an international and regional presence besides the Bangladeshi authors. This continues to give a proper wider context to local authors. This issue, perhaps in line with the upcoming Hay Festival Dhaka to be held shortly and which has the graphic novel as its central theme, has devoted quite a few pages to two remarkable graphic short stories. The editor’s note states that there is going to be more emphasis on nonfiction narratives in the future, and given Soniah Kamal and Zeenia Shaukat’s contributions here it seems to be the way to go in the future. Nonfiction books have been enjoying widespread popularity among readers and this should be reflected in the journal. Among the notable poets are Keki Daruwalla, Daljit Nagra, Kwame Dawes, Adrian Husain, as well as the emerging Amit Majmudar.

The cover art is by the well-known Bangladeshi artist Ranjit Das. All in all, it is a fine volume that should make its publisher and editing team proud. However, the inclusion of a translation of the famous ‘Cannibal Manifesto’ by Jose Oswald de Andrade Souza is somewhat debatable. This sly, polemical and satirical 1928 aesthetic credo made the argument that Brazil must ‘cannibalise’ other cultures in order to create its own, like the Tupi, a native tribe that practiced cannibalism, and had thrown its bishop into the cooking pot. It kick-started the modernist age in Brazil. However, the context is not made clear, nor the reason why this translation had to be published while so many others abound. The production values of the magazine, one has to say unreservedly, is sumptuous. The showcasing of notable Bangladeshi artists goes a long way in producing the overall loveliness of the volune. n

M A Qasem works in the public sector.

He hopes to be a bookstore owner someday.

Carnival:

Post Colonial Taxi Driver?

Waqar Ahmed

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awi Hage’s new novel Carnival takes as its premise the adventures of a taxi driver named Fly in an imaginary Western metropolis much like the author’s adopted city, Montreal. A former taxi driver himself, Mr. Hage has said that he consciously tried to not write a clichéd novel about the rigours of being a Third World driver in a Western city. To that end, he borrows from magical realism by deploying a character raised in a circus with a flying carpet operator for a father and a trapeze artist for a mother.

Fly is “tossed” out of his mother “to the applause of elephants and seals.” Growing up, he has a knack for guessing peoples’ weight and how long they are going to live. Despite the novel’s promising beginning, Mr. Hage fails to transfer the most compelling elements of this enchanted childhood to Fly’s adult life as a taxi driver, which remains wholly unexceptional. This is unfortunate insofar as it constitutes about ninetynine percent of the novel.

On a broader note, Carnival counts itself as a post-colonial novel in the literary family tree of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North. In that novel, the protagonist, a bright Sudanese student, both adopts and reverses the trope of traditional Orientalist narrative, seducing English women who then commit suicide because they cannot possess him. In Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a precocious Pakistani re-enacts much of Season of Migration to the North’s plot in an American context by earning a scholarship to Princeton from Pakistan, becoming a Wall Street banker, winning the love of a Caucasian woman, only to reject it all to serve his country. But Mr. Hage cleverly inverts this equation.

Fly was not the cream of the crop of his country and does not glide as effortlessly between segments of American or English society. Because he cannot assimilate into imaginary Montreal, Fly, through books, fantasizes about living gloriously in bygone eras of Western history.

Where Mr. Salih’s protagonist leads English women to their demise, Fly rescues abused Caucasian women, and in a remarkable scene, lustily imagines himself being stabbed to death by a Visigoth princess.

Sadly, the novel’s inventiveness ends there. Although the scenes and rhythms of Mr. Hage’s book provide a carnivalesque atmosphere, they are housed in a picaresque structure of short chapters that suffocate

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rather than enhance the creative possibilities of the novel, reducing it to a series of stand-up comedy acts. Some of these contrived comedy pieces are genuinely humorous like Fly’s description of a fellow taxi driver: “And here is the Sleeping Spider, ladies and gentlemen! Also known as Mr. Green, he takes a very short nap at every red light. He wakes up just as the light changes. Some drivers say he shuts his eyes and doesn’t sleep but stays aware of everything around him; others say he has a colour sense in his eyelids. But the truth is that he is back home in the lush jungles of the south. It is said that once, in Café Bolero, he fell asleep in the middle of the meal, his head hanging over his plate, but when the daughter of the owner brought a green salad to the table, he was awake again.”

But most of the novel’s punchlines fail. And ironically, many of the early chapters do, in fact, focus on the mundane life of drivers that Mr. Hage was assiduously trying to avoid—how they call each other by the numbers of their taxis, pick up drunks who pass out in their vehicles and can only be identified by their wallets, and their arrangements with porters and prostitutes for passenger collection and drop-off.

Two other stylistic weaknesses plague the novel. The prose is packed with clichéd references to a multitude of disciplines, including history, religion and pop culture. Secondly, Mr. Hage has neglected to endow his characters with the idiosyncrasies of speech that would give them unique voices, and thereby flesh them out as unique individuals. Consider the following dialogue by Fly and a minor character: “Stars eat each other, wolves eat the pigs, and Grandma screws over Little Red Riding Hood.”

“A waft of smell stronger than a thousand filthy Crusaders would ravage you, and you would be begging for mercy and clean air, you would be on your knees changing five Hail Marys and six Our Fathers.”

Such testosterone-filled lines are Fly’s speciality, but are also common to several other characters in the novel, and not as a result of shared friendship, similar upbringing, or social class. For all his promise, Fly is nothing more than a well-read taxi driver who runs into colourful personalities, none of them magical. n

Waqar Ahmed is currently nearing completion on a novel and a collection of short stories.

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LETTER FROM LONDON Ahsan Akbar

Dhaka Hay Festival 2013: Karrie Fransman and Pankaj Mishra

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Ahsan Akbar’s book of poems, The Devil’s Thumbprint, is due in November 2013.

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he wonderful Dave Eggers tried to draw me once – his way of signing my copy of his book You Shall Know Our Velocity. He failed miserably. Karrie Fransman, who I met in a café just off King’s Cross, had no such problem. A smiling presence, she is an accomplished comic creator whose debut work The House That Groaned (Random House) is currently a best-seller in the UK. Karrie is pleased bookshops now have a separate section for “graphic novels,” a term quite possibly coined by Art Spiegelman of Maus fame. “That’s huge for us because less than a decade ago only specialist shops would stock comic books.” Graphic novels have come a long way from their uncertain beginnings and The House That Groaned is a complex narrative that deals with society’s anxieties and how they are played out on the human body.

She studied psychology and sociology at Leeds University. Art came later. “It was when I came across Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World that I was inspired to draw. I always loved telling stories, anyway, and what better way than to aid the words with pictures.” Other influences were Maurice Sendak, Kit Williams and Paula Rego. When I ask her why it has recently become popular in the UK, Karrie exclaims, “Manga!” Manga is the wildly popular Japanese graphics comic book artwork style. “You can literally find manga for any subject – cookery, erotica, superhero,” she said. “Everything is covered in manga.” Karrie, while teaching at the London Print Studio, is also working on her next book: Death of the

Artist (Jonathan Cape; 2014).

Karrie is excited about her participation in the Hay Festival Dhaka.

She will be conducting workshops, along with other comic artists from Bangladesh, India and the UK. To her the critical value of a graphic work lies in it being “a narrative which doesn’t have international boundaries, in the same way language does. Comics surpass national, educational and racial barriers.” A good comic creator should keep the visualising “simplistic” and should never “over-explain,” i.e., leave space for the reader’s imagination to flow. At the end of our meal, I can’t help but bring Batman into the conversation. As a die-hard fan of Batman from childhood, I always saw Bruce Wayne/Batman as a comic book superhero, and one with no superpowers. So could that be the reason I always think of Batman comics as graphic novels?

Karrie nods gleefully: “Graphic novel is really a posh way of referring to a comic book.”

Pankaj Mishra tells me that he is no fan of literary festivals. “At literary festivals, the published word is somewhat replaced by the personality of the writer; something is lost in the public nature of these events.” I am stumped. But not for long.

We are sitting on the rooftop of his office, beneath open skies. It’s at his suggestion, to catch the light of the afternoon sun, precious to Londoners. To meet Pankaj I took the Northern Line on the Underground and got off at Archway. From the bustling main road, I duck down an off-street to an imposing block in the midst of suburban quiet. It is a set of working studios that houses various professionals, and I recognise the names of some writers and journalists on the intercom panel. Pankaj’s office is lined with books on two shelves that run the length of the walls. A Mac sits on the desk.

“But you have never been to Dhaka. The Hay is an opportunity to be in Dhaka,” I say. It is a line I have used successfully with another writer, equally opinionated.

Pankaj agrees. “I’m interested in your festival because I have always wanted to visit Dhaka.”

Pankaj Mishra’s latest book challenges most Western assumptions about intellectual traditions – usually its considerable lack – in colonial-era China, India and the Muslim world. From the Ruins of Empire is a fluent, erudite and at times combative explication and celebration of thinkers who lived within an intellectual tradition of their own. It is a combativeness – perhaps a necessary assertion of an intellectual vigorously opposed to latter-day imperialism – that Pankaj has displayed in his very public wars with the likes of Salman Rushdie, the conservative historian Niall Ferguson, and writer Patrick French.

Cricketer turned politician Imran Khan too came in for a few telling swipes. Bangladeshis will delight in his review of Gary Bass’s book on US policy in 1971, The Blood Telegram, in The New Yorker. Pankaj divides his time between London, New Delhi and Mashobra, a small

village in Shimla. It’s oddly mysterious to him that New York got enlisted in his bio. Indeed, he frequents the Big Apple, enjoys the city and its many bookshops, writes for The New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, n+1, etc., but doesn’t spend any more time than is required. What is it about Dhaka that interests him? “I’m really interested in connecting with the young people there, whose views are not accessible via newspapers, or the Internet.” For someone who grew up entirely in India, and enjoys travelling, it’s an anomaly that Pankaj hasn’t visited Bangladesh. “It’s a neighbouring country you think is easy to get to and you end up not visiting, which is a shame. I haven’t been to Sri Lanka either.”

He does not speak Bengali, but does understand it when he hears it, a pleasant surprise since he grew up – far from Bengal – in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh (and briefly Kanpur), before finishing his studies in Allahabad and Delhi. “We – my sister and I – had lots of friends who were Bengalis, and we would spend summers in Ballygunge in Calcutta to visit my maternal uncle. Tagore and Sharat Chandra were the first two authors I read when I was very young.” And what about Bangladeshi writing in English? “Unfortunately not, only because I haven’t come across any, except a book with Kissinger in the title … ” As Pankaj struggles with the name I help him: Good Night, Mr Kissinger & Other Stories (by K. Anis Ahmed). It was recommended by Nadeem Aslam, a friend, who is also a guest at Hay Dhaka this year.

I ask him what he thinks of the books he read on our liberation war.

“The ultimate book on 1971 has not been written yet, and it needs to be written by a Bangladeshi, because only a Bangladeshi can bring all the narratives together.” There is a warmth and friendliness about him that belies the intellectual pugnacity. Again I return to the subject. Pankaj – not one to beat around the bush – immediately paraphrases Chairman Mao: “Writing isn’t a dinner party; if you compromise the truth and write to make friends, to open doors, to go places, your output won’t ever be any good.” n

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Graphic Novel about 1947 and 1971 Partitions This Side That Side: Restorying Partition published by Yoda Press in partnership with Goethe Institut Delhi.

Farhad Ahmed

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he volume under review is an original attempt at re-telling the story of the Partition, updated to include within the central narrative of 1947 the ‘partition’ of Pakistan in 1971. It is original in the sense that it is a graphic narrative – the first one to my knowledge – that deals with its subject primarily in visual terms, and because it gives a renewed force to its curator Vishwajyoti Ghosh’s words, “Whether based on reasons of faith or economics or family, partition is still happening.

Across all the three countries, it is tucked permanently under our collective chin and we are all negotiating with it in very many ways.”

Truer words were never spoken. The 1947 partition made two hostile political entities out of what is a common civilization and culture, where since then the unifying threads are constantly being snipped and re-woven, in a constant web of laceration and healing, in a constant reminder of past wounds that drip on to the present. The bitter war of independence of the Bengalis in 1971 in many ways was also a civil war in which many unresolved issues – of which its ongoing war crimes trial is a foremost example – continue to cut into the social, political and cultural fabric of a nation otherwise considered to be singularly homogenous.

A graphic novel is the comic book of old made into long form – enhancing its artwork with many of the devices of the novel and short story. It came into being in the early 1960s, and in a world that since

Sanjoy Chakraborty’s ‘An Afterlife’

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then has exploded in terms of visual content – from television to Japanese manga – it was to be expected that the graphic novel would evolve and come to stay here for the long term. Though India was initially slow to catch on – wedded as it was to the oral and the written text – over the last few years they are catching up. Restorying Partition – whose curator Vishwajyoti is himself an accomplished graphic artist who grew up in a refugee colony for Bengalis in New Delhi – is a vivid example of the trend.

The book itself is symbolic of the unifying trends that undercut both the partitions of the subcontinent – 47 artists and writers of all hues from across the subcontinent (as well as subcontinentals residing in the UK, the USA and in one case, Germany) collaborated to bring this project to successful fruition. Vishwajyoti’s master-of-ceremonies work was no easy dalliance in a primrose park: “(I) … sought … new (artists) who would bring a new visual idiom to the book. And since the idea was to open the call to every form of storytelling and not necessarily graphic novelists or comic makers, it was important to pair up a writer with the right artist/illustrator for that piece and then work as a team.

This phase was particularly interesting as both had never met, neither were they aware of each other’s work.” All sorts of ‘stories’ – including poems and translations – are collected here. They range from the highly symbolic and abstract (such as ‘An Old Fable’ by Tabish Khair and Priya Kuriyan, or ‘Make It Your Own’, a translation from Hindi by Shveta Sarda and artwork by Cybermohalla Ensemble and Amitabh Kumar) to the concrete and the literal (such as ‘90 Upper Mall’ by Ahmed Rafay Alam and Martand Khosla, or Nina Sabnani’s ‘Know Directions Home’).

Here I have to confess that my taste definitely veered to the ‘real-life’ stories, perhaps due to a hunger for ever more ‘human’ stories about the partitions.

Out of the 28 separate narratives, six were by Bangladeshis – ‘Border’

by Kaiser Haq; ‘The Exit Plan’ by Khademul Islam; ‘Making Of A Poet’

by M. Hasan; ‘Profit And Loss’ by Mahmud Rahman; ‘Little Women’

by Syeda Farhana; and Sanjoy Chakraborty’s ‘An Afterlife’ – all taken together, present a rather astonishing diversity of tales and sensibilities from here on the themes of separation, anomie, alienation and reconciliation on a grand scale.

With the book being launched at the Hay Dhaka, Bangladeshis have a chance to pick it up and read for themselves. n

M Hasan’s ‘Making Of A Poet’

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Mahmud Rahman’s ‘Profit And Loss’

Farhad Ahmed is an occasional critic and translator.

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Letter from America Mahmud Rahman

FICTION FACTORIES

I Mahmud Rahman is the author of Killing the Water (Penguin India) and the translated novel Black Ice (HarperCollins India).

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took a journey back in time. At the local library, I wandered to the children’s section and spotted a neatly stacked row of hardcovers with familiar blue spines: The Hardy Boys. I was transported back to the library on the second story of the old St. Joseph High School building in Narinda, Dhaka. I was again eleven, beginning to devour the juvenile books the Brothers had stocked there.

That year the school moved to its current Mohammadpur location, and I continued my frenzied reading of the adventures of the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and Tom Corbett. My classmates and I soon consumed the entire stock. Then we came to grips with puberty and moved on from the chaste world of these boys to sexier material: James Bond and our own Bangladeshi superspy, Masud Rana.

I decided to loiter in my childhood by borrowing two Hardy Boys novels.

I added a Nancy Drew, familiar to my young self through my sister who studied at Holy Cross. What would it feel like to read these books again, so many decades later?

As I began, I could see the appeal these books had to my younger self: teenagers solving crime mysteries ahead of adults; the camaraderie of close friends; and encountering new technologies. The settings were exciting: I accompanied the boys around the bay near where they lived.

And to far flung places.

I didn’t remember most details. These were thrillers I enjoyed – I hadn’t thought too much while reading them. Re-reading brought new discoveries.

One book I picked up felt too modern. I went digging. It turned out that many of the original series were revised. In school, we mostly had the older editions. The originals were written from 1927 onward, and after a while they received some criticism for racial and ethnic stereotyping.

From 1959, the enterprise behind the books decided to bring out new versions: some were edited down while others entirely rewritten.

Finding a few original texts, I did some comparing. The older versions somehow felt more interesting. While the main characters of these books were white, there had been some minority characters. They tended to be drawn cartoonish – with unattractive faces and thick accents. Foreigners came off as suspicious. The strategy behind the revisions dealing with stereotypes was to remove dialect and eliminate most of the diversity.

The original protagonists also felt less polished. They had an ambivalent attitude towards the police. In the newer revisions, the youth were made

more law-abiding. The older Nancy Drew carried a gun; the later version drove within the speed limit.

But it was the class aspect that stood out the sharpest, in both old and new. The Hardy and Drew families belonged to the elite of their towns.

The boys had cars and boats. When they travelled around the country, they were never short of cash. And there was a tendency to look down on people who were not well off.

Whether my teenage self noted these details I cannot remember.

America was a distant place and I knew it was not just home to whites; but I didn’t stop to think much about a world where society was divided between upright bourgeois and dastardly criminals. I doubt I read these books as realism. They were adventure stories set in a far off, exotic place.

The picture of America I received would soon be complicated through what I read in the news, and once I arrived in America, I faced a society quite unlike the world of The Hardy Boys. I hadn’t expected it to be.

But how did a black boy or girl, say in Detroit, react to such books? The world of juvenile literature was populated by white privileged people and children who were black or Latino or working class could not see themselves there. In the absence of anything else, they might have read the series books – but what did they feel when they lived in the same country as the Hardy brothers or Nancy Drew and never saw themselves reflected as active characters? In distant Dhaka, I could ignore questions of detail but I doubt they could be so easily in Detroit.

I made another surprising discovery. The authors of these books, Franklin W. Dixon or Carolyn Keene, were not real people. They were not even pseudonyms of real people. They were brand names created by the Stratemeyer Syndicate.

In the late 1800s, Edward Stratemeyer began writing what were called dime novels (stories sold as booklets for 10 cents) and he worked with the author Horatio Alger. As education spread, the demand for popular fiction exploded. In 1906 he founded his Syndicate and farmed out the writing to others. He may have been inspired by Alexandre Dumas who published around 650 books. Dumas hired dozens of assistants and Stratemeyer followed mass production methods. He provided his crew with plot outlines, set deadlines, and paid standard rates.

When he died in 1934, Fortune magazine noted, “Oil had its Rockefeller,

I made another surprising discovery. The authors of these books, Franklin W. Dixon or Carolyn Keene, were not real people. They were not even pseudonyms of real people. They were brand names created by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. literature had its Stratemeyer.” This Fiction Factory was immensely successful, both when it worked under Stratemeyer and his daughters and later after it was swallowed up by publishers. Some of the key series are still being churned out, and tens of millions of books have been sold.

There are other fiction factories, and Bangladesh too can claim at least one.

Sheba Prokashoni began in the mid-60s. Qazi Anwar Husain started the publishing house, writing detective and spy books like Kuwasha and Masud Rana. They proved so popular that he could not keep up with the demand. His name remained on many covers, but other writers were contracted to do the writing. Sheba came up with its own formula: transplant fiction. In this model, they take plots from Western thrillers and process them through Bangladeshi characters and settings. Some books combine plot elements from multiple books. Sheba too has provided a wealth of reading to young readers, and to date there are over 400 Masud Rana books.

In both the U.S. and Bangladesh, such juvenile literature has often been condemned by adults. The Boy Scouts of America campaigned against the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Librarians and teachers have looked down at the books. They find the books to be low-brow, meant to arouse cheap thrills. In Bangladesh there is a prejudice against ‘out’ books, books outside the school curriculum.

It was fun travelling back in time and rediscovering where my lifelong reading addiction began. Now, onwards to something that suits my adult tastes. When I return to the library, I spot another Inspector Llob book from Yasmina Khadra. n

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Reading Alice Munro Z Mahboob

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ome writers take the world as their canvas, while others confine themselves to a narrow slice of earth, ploughing it over and over, extracting new stories and layers of meaning out of each iteration. Think of Chekhov’s characters, wasting away in the languor and ennui of provincial Russia, or Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor mining the tortured baroque of the Deep South. To this list, we can add Alice Munro’s Canada – not the glitz and glam of Toronto or Vancouver, but rather the small towns and farming communities that dot the vastness of the Ontario countryside.

In a dozen collections of short stories, Munro has anatomised the region and its people so thoroughly that her title to this patch of literary soil is as secure as Chekhov’s and Faulkner’s were to theirs. The tight focus is not to be mistaken for a lack of ambition, though. Rooted in the specific, the stories, the characters aspire to an abstraction of humanity itself.

Dear Life (2012) is Munro’s latest work. The 14 stories range from short autobiographical sketches to longer pieces such as ‘Train,’ ‘Amundsen,’ and ‘To Reach Japan.’ The last-mentioned is the first story in this book, a tale of casual infidelity whose climax hinges on a single word, leaving the reader poised on a cliff-hanger. The key themes recur: ordinary people, their loves, marriages, infidelities and divorces. Everyday problems of the heart and the coping mechanisms of regular folk. Often, Munro shows the scars left by emotional injuries that are decades old.

In ‘Amundsen’ a young schoolteacher is assigned to a sanatorium for tubercular children during the war years. Her seduction and eventual abandonment by the older doctor in charge leaves permanent psychic damage, painfully excavated by a chance meeting many years later. In

‘Gravel,’ a woman recalls witnessing her sister’s suicide as a child, leaving her suspended forever between guilt and doubt.

Elsewhere, Munro hamstrings the central character with a physical impediment – a harelip, maybe, or a limp – before throwing them into complicated situations that test all their pride and emotional resilience.

Still others are barely concealed critiques of gender attitudes that are thankfully long past. The timespan of ‘Dear Life’ ranges from the depression-struck 1930s right up to the social upheavals of the 1970s. Munro has stated that she was always just a few years too old to benefit from the counter-culture revolution, having become a young mother of three even before the Sixties got properly underway. These stories show the narrower confines of her generation and its adaptive methods.

Admittedly, not all the stories work equally well, but those that do linger long in the reader’s mind. The book closes with four sketches from her childhood which, Munro says, are “the first and last things I have to say about my own life.” Having won the 2013 Nobel Prize for literature, the 82-year old author has hinted that she may finally be ready to hang up her pen. This collection gives readers ample reason to hope for a change of heart. n

Z Mahboob is a

London-based economist.

Cricket World Cup 2011: A Tour Book Vaibhav Vats, Triumph in Bombay: Travels during the Cricket World Cup; (hb), pp. 240; New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2013.

Khademul Islam

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approached this book warily.

Indians on cricket can be wearisome. The ceaseless ‘Team India’ boosterism of its cricket literati and commentariat (led by the ever-grating Ravi Shastri) can make one reach for the vomit bucket.

Vaibhav Vats, in his Triumph in Bombay, however, at least until the end when he gets slurpy about Sachin, has no truck with such jingoism. In fact, he goes the other way, quoting Cricinfo’s Sharda Ugra on India’s role in international cricket – “the game’s loudest bully, ready to flex its muscle and flaunt its wealth.”

Freedom from vacuous cheerleading means he has written a very readable book about the 2011 Cricket World Cup. The tournament was played over six weeks in fourteen venues in the three host countries – Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and India. The cricket books of my childhood, written by Englishmen, would depict games drenched in high Edwardian summers, balmy and decorous. Test tours used to be leisurely affairs. Not today, not the tournaments taking place in the chaos and frenzy of South Asia. Vats gives us the full Monty here, from the moment the Moitree Express to Dhaka lands him “in the midst of a human gale; everywhere a moving, heaving humanity,” through to the mother of all traffic jams in Chandigarh, where the Pakistan-India

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gladiatorial combat takes place. Travel in South Asia “by road, rail and air” is no cakewalk. Waking up one morning in Colombo he feels “as if I have been chained to the bed … Three weeks of breakneck travel … are finally beginning to tell.”

Cricket in the book takes a decided back seat to the “contexts in which the game” takes place – the cities, fans, press boxes, stadiums, taxi drivers, cricket officials, the conversations. The centrepiece of the book is undoubtedly Sri Lanka, as Vats vividly explores its school cricket, its grounds and cricketers, the Tamil relationship to cricket, the country’s post-civil war march towards authoritarian politics – as his “friend C” warns after talking about Sri Lankan politics, “You fucker, you better not quote me in your book.” In contrast, Dhaka, though portrayed with warmth and empathy, comes off as musty and earnest. There are the obligatory visits to the Shaheed Minar and the Liberation War Museum, a talk with a communist professor at Dhaka University who speaks of “counter-revolutionary forces, false consciousness – it’s been a long time since I heard these terms being used without irony,” and no riposte to Virender Sehwag’s contemptuous “We will come very hard on (Bangladesh). We are looking for revenge.” But the whole arc of the book, underpinned by the author’s liberal and generous temperament, is something very enjoyable to read.

At the end, I suppose I should clear up something. Vats mildly disputes me over an article I wrote for Cricinfo, but the “conclusions” he refers to were not mine, but of certain BCB officials deeply concerned about the future of Bangladesh cricket.

Read the book and the article (http://www.espncricinfo.com/thestands/ content/story/477943.html) and make up your own mind. n

7

Serialized Story

Samira - part 6 On the Job Awrup Sanyal

The sixth installment of our serialized story.

We hope to bring in other writers soon for future segments. – Editor

Awrup Sanyal is an ex-advertising professional and a fiction writer.

8

D

haka Log: Two Tomorrow is a new beginning. I am both excited and scared.

Excited about the possibilities but scared of people – who knows what lies in store for me. One can never know what is going on inside people. When the sun rises tomorrow everything will be illuminated!

Sam wanted to go to bed early – be well rested. Dinner was done, mails checked; she had informed the New York recruitment agency that she didn’t want to receive any more leads. GOMB, man, and pronto! Online addas with the old Dhaka network done – she had caught up with her old gang but in this impossible traffic for the time being Facebook chatting was the way to go. She caught up with Lori, Anna, and Sasha.

All of them stateside, and while A and S were moving fast up the career ladders, Lori was now a full-time mommy. Before shutting down she checked up on Brian; he had unfriended her. Really? She left a little message in his inbox.

She eyed tomorrow’s attire draping the back of the armchair— traditional chic, a purple cotton sari with printed mauve sleeveless blouse. It felt odd to wear a sari to office, but what the hell! That would both blend in and stand out. Something understated for jewelry duty … a silver something perhaps? She foraged through her stuff. Nothing. Arms akimbo, she stared at the open cupboard.

That’s when it struck her that her mother’s junk jewelry box was on the top shelf. Stepping on the lower shelf she pulled herself up, groping with her one free hand on the known contours of the carved walnut box. She tugged at it. Two old albums came tumbling out and the floor became a collage of old photographs.

She drifted into a monochrome past—her father and mother, young, posing in front of a stage in Ramna Park (looked like Pohela Boishak), decked up in their wedding fineries (I know this sari, a bright vermillion, Ma must have looked gorgeous), at Trafalgar Square on their honeymoon, looking into each other’s eyes (so in love!), at a party with friends (our old Dhanmondi house), her father at his desk, cigarette in hand, long hair, beard, in the old Gameplan Advertising office near Shapla Chottor (good looking man!).

At 2 am her iPhone buzzed – a Facebook notification. God, so much for going to bed early! She collected the rest of the photographs and was putting them back in when an old envelope slipped out from one of the albums. About to put it back in, she noticed the typescript on the envelope – Matri Hridoy Homes, Adoption Services – addressed to Mr. & Mrs. Murshid, the Dhanmondi address, in blotchy old typewriter print, with a 50-paisa postage stamp of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s profile in watercolour, post marked 1982. She fished out the large 5-by-7 inch photograph of a child. Flipped it over– handwritten in blue ink was this:

Name: Baby Arzoo Born: 31.05.80 Age: 1 year 5 months old Weight: 8.6 Kg. She looked at the photo a few more times. No … No ... Can’t be! Is this what I think it is? God! Am I … ? Are they not my real … ? Beads of sweat broke out on her body, in defiance of the air conditioner’s assurance to keep things cool. n She walked into the office still shaken from last night’s discovery– a piece of flotsam adrift from a wreck. She still had no exact idea what had hit her, but nothing seemed ordinary anymore. Truth can terrorize but it also brings you closer to who you are, said the voice. She rode up the elevator to the eleventh floor, and walked past the reception desk to enter the office. The receptionist’s voice brought her up short.

“Excuse me! You can’t go in. Who do you want to meet?”

“I am Samira, I am supposed to join today.”

“Oh! Please wait.”

She stood there, waiting.

“Ok, you can go in now. Please meet Ms. Shahin first.”

Pushing through the glass doors she walked into a maze of modular cubicles in lime green, orange and black. Shahin handed her a large brown envelope with the essential Gameplan stationery, business cards, notebooks, pencils, etc. She noted the order-in menu booklet among the things. The business card looked cool.

Samira Murshid – Account Executive.

She was directed to meet Jon, the Vice President – Account Management, in one of the corner offices. Jon sported a goatee, a thin tie, with pointy tan shoes, brown trousers and a pink shirt. He said, “So, you are the Samira Murshid?”

“What’s with the article before my name?” she smiled.

“Oh that! Hahaha! Let’s just say that your interview made the rounds of the office! Anyway, welcome to Gameplan! Find your nest, settle down, get a cup of bad coffee and meet up with Rumi. New pitch! How does that sound?”

“Swell! Looking forward to working with you, Jon ... er … Bhai.”

“Hahaha! American habits, hmm. Just Jon will do – no need for that Bhai thing.” He shook her hand.

That went well. So now the whole office knew about the interview.

Samira wondered that was good or bad! Her ‘nest’ was at the other end surrounded by similar cubicles. People were on their phones, or browsing the net; some were in a huddle having an argument. Some of the guys shot her a brief sideways glance. Her desk had a Samsung LED monitor and a phone. The walls were lined with soft boards. There was a poster that read: NO BULLSHIT ZONE in big red type. She decided to leave it there; it had attitude. I do need a potted plant.

She found Rumi at a cubicle larger than hers. Hmm, the real estate hierarchy! Rumi Jalal, Business Head. My immediate boss?

“Hi! Samira …”

“Hi!” Rummaging through stuff on his heaped up desk he picked up a plastic folder, which he flicked to her across the table. She stopped it before it fell off the edge. “Go through it … creative team meet in an hour.” His head ducked back in like a turtle.

Back in her nest she went through the folder. She soon was back at Rumi’s desk. “I don’t see a creative brief. Won’t we need … ?”

“Huh?” Rumi said. “Oh! Well, why don’t you give it a shot?”

“All right.”

She turned and walked away, thinking at the same time, I need to say hello to Shadab Sattar.

At his designer fish bowl she straightened her anchol and knocked lightly before walking in. To her shock, Shadab Sattar was turned away facing the wall, on the phone and sobbing, “Doctor, please do whatever needs to be done. Save my son. Please …”

She backtracked out as noiselessly as she could.

At the rooftop café, she got herself a sickly-sweet Nescafe, and locating Rumi deposited herself across from him. “To the pitch!” she said, raising her paper coffee cup. n

ARTS & LETTERS

D H A K A T R I B U N E S U N DAY, N OV E M B E R 3 , 2 0 1 3