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2 3ARTS & LETTERS DHAKA TRIBUNE SUNDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2014

EditorZafar Sobhan

Editor Arts & Letters

Khademul IslamArtist

Shazzad H KhanStaff Writers

Ahsan SajidSayeeda AhmadSamira SadequePhotographers

Q P AlamNashirul Islam

Rajib DharSyed Latif Hossain

Prabir DasFarhad Kaizer

Mahmud Hossain Opu

Festival of Gop

The Hay festival in Dhaka has grown in size since it first made its maiden appearance at the British Council grounds three years back – plumper around the waist, with a bigger carbon footprint. There’s more events and sessions, more bling and flash on the counters, and a swelling number of

authors, writers, poets, book stalls and publishers. Surveying the scene for work on this Arts & Letters Hay issue, I felt a bit like Haroun at the City of Gup in Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories. The city was “…all excitement and activity. Waterways criss-crossed the city in all directions… thronged with craft of every shape, all packed with Guppee citizens.” Its “three most important buildings were the Palace of King Chattergy… the Parliament of Gup… and the towering edifice of P2C2E House, a huge building…in which were concealed one thousand and one Machines Too Complicated to Describe, which controlled the Processes Too Complicated To Explain.”

The media’s daily coverage, by necessity, focuses on the main attractions – mainly the Too Complicated Processes of the Main Stage, the P2C2E House – and the picture that emerges tends to be a fragmented one. So we had to try to give a more composite view, and, if possible, bring into focus some who might have fallen through the cracks.

We missed a lot, of course. It would take an army of writers to cover this thing from tooth to tail. There is a particularly big hole where Zia Haider should be – we had notified in advance to the Hay people about a sit-down with him but it didn’t happen. Another miss was coverage of

Bangla events – the session on little magazines, Joy Goswami, a Bangla poet’s broody musings, etc. But those write-ups, though we had lined them up, also failed to materialize, which is particularly unfortunate since the persistent notion of Hay Dhaka as a plaything of the smug English-ed elite should be dispelled. And we couldn’t get the masala column we wanted. A festival like the Hay Dhaka is not just the ‘outer’ events and the high-flying lit chat – it also has its backroom boys, its basement murders, even its own fashion parade and dress codes. We needed a Shobha De for that, but Dhaka doesn’t have one. All in all, it’s a crapshoot. But that’s the nature of the beast – you win some, you lose more. Some writings came in by pure happenstance – on Dalrymple, for example. And it was only much later that it struck me that we ought to ask some of the ‘foreign writers’ to be in the mix. That is how it goes in Dhaka!

In conclusion I wish to thank the three Tribune reporters assigned to me: Samira Sadeque, Ahsan Sajid and Sayeeda Ahmad. They gave their all under trying conditions. Thanks also to our layout artist Shazzad Khan, whose pulse stays steady even under fire, and to Zafar Sobhan, Tribune’s tolerant editor. Much thanks are also due to all our contributors, who graciously took time out from very busy schedules to respond to my request to pen some lines on their Hay experience.

So here is the Festival of Gup. Or perhaps, since we are Bengalis, the Festival of Gop! n

– Khademul Islam

2 3DHAKA TRIBUNE SUNDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2014 ARTS & LETTERS

Kemosabe Brother Allen, wherever you are if anywhere, and kemosabe again even if nowhere,for here I am, a lone scribbler, long meaning to pen a tribute to your hirsute genius, your shaggy poems bristling with thoughtful lice that will live

as long as we have minds that love to scratch the bottoms of juicy syllablesand now that the years are a burden and tomorrow the throw of a dice, today’sas good a time as I’ll ever get, and with the lit ed of a local paper askingyes asking, just imagine, for a poem, if I can knock it off prontomeaning right away it’s now or never Brother, so here goes

The monsoon’s over and the sky like a blue helmet snug over the horizon’s temples,a season you knew well loved well just across the border up the Jessore Road, in Calcutta, O Kolkata,the paddy’s been harvested in all the villages and the festival of new rice is on,straw burning in happy hearths sending up acrid-sweet smokeas pounded rice gets steamed or baked to make tasty cakesand fresh Hay is heaped up high on Haystacksfragrant and welcoming sending secret lovers into a tizzy

I imagine all this from still-warm memories of childhood village holidays,I imagine you joining in the joyous feast eating your fill lying down on Hay beneath clear-eyed stars filling lungs with ganja smoke,Spouting freshly-coined lines,I imagine another world, while sitting amidst tilting concrete in gridlocked traffic,try to see which way your beard points

I too long for the cool of understanding, accepting perishability,head for the fully air-conditioned supermarket guaranteeing a range of organic foodsand start looking for you, avatar of organic poetry, orgasmic guru of distended lines of perverse free versecheerily serving an obscenity or two free per verse,close eyes tight and snap open to will you into the being of an apparitionby a stall of fruit and flowers, O what bananas, what sapodillas, what dates, pomegranates, tangerines, what a pile of lotuses you offer chanting

OM MANI PADMA HUM OM MANI PADMA HUM20% off, free home delivery on orders from dedicated seekers,30% surcharge for charlatans of all hues

Apparition or real flesh-and-blood Zen-Sadhu-Fakir, what are you?Whatever, you are much needed here and now in this world of literary Hay-nonny-nonny tamashas,I’d have you hoisted on a house-high Haystack, chanting your ‘Howl’,your ‘America’ so true still, your ‘Kaddish’ for all the dead and dying. n

A Supermarket In Dhaka: A Tribute To Allen Ginsberg Kaiser Haq

n

Kaiser Haq is a Bangladeshi poet.


Even though this was the fourth Hay festival in Dhaka, it

was my first time there. In today’s world, given the imperatives of work and employment, one can be away too long from the city one was born in and grew up in. I was wondering about all this as I sat at

Bengal’s launch of their magazine Six Season’s Review and their prestigious art magazine Jamini ( Winter 2014 issue), which I was given to understand is being published after a hiatus of some years. As I sat in the sunny air, I looked around, at this boi mela, at this Dhaka, this city in which the festival is held, its earth, air and people – all that give us the vivid context for the Hay. Later, leafing through two publications I saw how the city figured at the festival. Directly. Indirectly.

Jamini has a substantial focus on Dhaka. Making Cities is the issue’s title, which meant the editorial said, “Based as we are in Dhaka, the endlessly sprawling, increasingly unsightly megalopolis, we decided to invite the Dhaka-born, Hawaii-based visionary architect Kazi Khaleed Ashraf to assemble on our behalf a collection comprising of texts, photographs and illustrations that would enable our readers to imagine how we can draw on the best and the latest ideas about redoing cities beautifully.” And the architect himself articulates a vision of the future that is participatory and egalitarian: “What needs to be celebrated are design of spaces that engage the civic realm, from the larger scale and monumental to micro operations, and from the planned to the spontaneous.” But it’s not all about the future – about ‘synthscape’ and ‘dispersal’! The past was present in Naeem Mohaimen’s glance back in a complicated way at the old Dhaka in his article ‘rankin street 1953’ – my uncle had once lived in Rankin Street, and none of his family is there now, everybody has fled abroad! I still remember the sound of rain on the rooftop there, and my uncle recalling in clear tones the communal riots there during the Partition. “Rankin Street,” Naeem wrote. “The rooftop. A clean, clear unobstructed view. The clearest sign that it is 1953. In these first images, there are many roof shots… There were seven sisters and three brothers all

City – Dhaka – Jamini – Capital

Sajid Imam

living inside that one house on Rankin Street. There was an eighth sister and a fourth brothers, but they died very young…” But what makes the article come alive are its sepia-toned photographs of the city from a different age, taken back when by his father.

And then Rana Das Gupta blew in to the city with his Capital, his book on Delhi. I had never heard of him before but I liked the book cover so I bought it. On the first day there had been a session on cities he had starred in, but I hadn’t been able to make it since I had to pay a hospital visit to see someone. And now, with the festival ended, sitting again in the hospital room, on page 21 I read a passage that very well could be Dhaka, is Dhaka, since roads in South Asia recognize no boundaries, acknowledge no sovereign – “Cars, though ferociously dominant, transport fewer than 20 percent of road users. The majority travel by auto rickshaws, buses and motorized scooters. A significant proportion of urban travelers, however, navigate these packed roads on bicycles or on foot. These are overwhelmingly from the lower rungs of the economic ladder, and motor vehicles give them scant consideration; it is they, therefore, who supply the majority of Delhi’s impressive number of road deaths. For while vehicles bump into each other all the time, they are rarely travelling at speeds high enough for their passengers to sustain harm. The speeds are sufficient to do a lot of damage, however, to the ones who put their unarmoured flesh in the way of all this steel…”

Here and there, I thought, if one looked hard enough, one could find Dhaka at the Hay, in the air, in print. Connections! Maybe I will be back to Dhaka next year. Maybe I ought to go take a look at Rankin Street, see what’s left of the Old Lady. No, not maybe. I shall. n

L to R: Samira, Samia, Rumana, Khademul, Zeeshan

There was a special email from Bengal inviting me to do a reading of my work at Hay Festival this year. The poem I chose is a recent piece a – one inspired by the story of a friend. The 2014 Hay became memorable for me as I got to be on stage to present the verses that reflect my feelings; a personal narrative being out in the open and appreciated. It is a lucky feeling that I am a writer/poet in a very good time in Dhaka, given the exposure I was getting. Later when a stranger stopped to talk to me and commended the reading, I felt my words do touch people.

- SamiaTamrin Ahmed

n

Sajid Imam lives in Minneapolis,

USA.


L to R: Rubana Huq, Fakrul Alam, Shahidul Alam

Photo from Drik book titled Hasan Azizul Huq, A Reconciled Litterateur, taken by Farhad Kaizer

Drik launched its sumptuous Bangladesh: seen from within: Ways of Life volume of photographs at the Hay festival. The rationale for publishing it is

articulated by Drik founder Shahidul Alam with missionary zeal in his editor’s note. It should prove to be an instructive one for Bangladeshis, inundated as they are nowadays with photographs from every corner of the country, where point-and shoot-cameras, or even their more sophisticated cousins, have come to be considered to be the easy way towards artistic expression. But hardly anybody from the above crowd can actually articulate what the complex art of photography is, or has become, or how it is evolving in this modern world. What photography means in the context of Bangladesh. We Bangladeshis simply look at ‘beautiful’ or ‘pretty’ photos, without being able to place them within contextual frames, or an aesthetic discourse.

Shahidul Alam can. And does. Reading his two-page introduction to this volume, if you read carefully, is to open a door to a world where complicated dialectics of aesthetics rage and swirl.

What is a professional photographer? One whose, writes Alam, “success depends not so much on her aesthetic sense or insight, but on her ability to please the sitter… (a work) driven by an external agenda.” Whatever the permutations, whether one is a famous portraitist or unique stylist, the crucial factor of what the client/sitter desires and pays for determines the act. Or, in some cases, as latter-day marxists would say, overdetermines it.

In contrast, there is the amateur, “freed from such inhibitions, liberated from the need to preserve a public persona.” Who answers to no call except her/his, and given the technological advances made in terms of cameras, has also been freed from “dark rooms, the heavy lens…and the empty wallet.” In turn, these amateurs have transformed the way Bangladesh is looked at, from those fashioned by “visiting photojournalists or NGO workers” to something rich and strange. Or to something comparatively richer and stranger. No longer are we the subject of “hackneyed set pieces,’’ victims of “tech-loving salons”, or the lab specimens of “super saturated imagery typical of special effects gurus.”

Bangladesh is unchaining itself in this respect, freeing the shackles of old ways of representations and even of some new ones. This charge of the lens brigade is being led by keen amateurs rewriting the history of a nation’s images. This book by Drik celebrates that emancipation.

And what is special too is that it was in this

spirit of liberation that Shahidul Alam chose the photographs – pahari women grimacing happily in a tug-of-war, action-blurred photo of men hauling in a fishing net, the leanly muscled body of a villager weaving a basket, a rickshaw along a backlit village road where the leaves are like stars on the ground, boats on the river shore, or the writer Hasan Azizul Haq, moored in contemplation, young men and women banded in protest – in sections titled variously ‘work’ or ‘living’ or ‘children’. What one sees here predominantly is space, amplitude and volume, open skies and vistas, with even the fish seller’s grin as he sits in his enclosed space with wide-bodied fishes opening up expansive stretches of cultural and food mythologies.

Yes, of course, as Rubana Huq hints at in her

delicately-worded introduction, these photos do show one side of the picture(forgive the pun!) while yet more radical critics may point out that in any form of representation, ideology matters. That such photos, like the writing of sonnets during the Elizabethan age, provide the underpinnings of a ‘happy’ bourgeoisie state order where the absence of the dark side is the suppression of truth. One is sure Alam is aware of these points. Quite aware. Yet, and yet, it is undeniable that with his words providing guidance, and his eye its expertise, the book is a joyous, flamboyant, extravagant, celebratory paean to Bangladesh. And hidden, covertly grinning, in the subtext of these images can be glimpsed Bangladesh’s lithe, blithe band of amateur photographers, freely roaming this green land of ours. n

Drik’s Bangladesh:Band of the Lithe and Blithe Khademul Islam

While the frames and stories in this collection are open for interpretation, a message holds true throughout the narration: the portrayal of the land and its people celebrates the victory of hope over despair, dawn over dark, and freedom over oppression.

– RubanaHuq Introduction

Events such as the duet between Vidya Shah and William Dalrymple were riveting. Bumping into old friends and meeting long-awaited ones was a treat. The eclectic mix of suggestive hijras and mystic bauls was alluring, and the kachchi biryani watered down by boroirosh amidst poetry and song was the perfect nourishment for body and soul. The talks went well and our new book sold out. What more could Drik want?

– Shahidul Alam on how the Hay went for him and Drik

n

Shahidul Alam is founder, Drik, Dhaka.


6

SI: I must say that reading your last book Return of a King about the First Afghan War of 1839-1842 was like experiencing the event itself.WD: Thank you.

SI: Obviously you have many reasons for writing a book, but did this seem like part of a trilogy for you? What really impelled you to write it? WD: It’s a trilogy only in that it covers that period of history, the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century, this transition between the Mughals and the British which is I suppose now my special subject. I’ve written three books. White Mughals which covers 1790s to 1805; this one in the middle which is 1830 to early 40s, and then there’s The Last Mughal about the events of 1857. So this book fitted in very well. I knew where the archives are, I have a wonderful Persian translator who’s good at taking on the Persian material so in a sense it was an easy thing to put into operation. It’s a car I know how to drive.

SI: Yes. WD: But there is another reason. I knew the story of the First Afghan war from reading the works of people like Peter Hopkirk , who wrote a wonderful series of books, The Great Game and Foreign Devils on the Silk Route. So I knew and loved that story. There is something very visceral about an entire army being wiped out and only one man surviving. In a sense you can’t go wrong with a story like that. It has a sort of perfection to it; even before you lift a finger to begin researching it, it’s got a lovely narrative shape. And I realised that this was of course becoming a parallel with the present. Even in 2008 I suppose, when I first hit on the idea, this was clearly a bit of history that was repeating itself. The British were back in Afghanistan, beginning to mess up again, the same old tribal configurations were reconfiguring, the Gilzais against the Durranis, weirdly in this case the British and Americans put back on the throne, Hamid Karzai, who is the direct descendant of Shah Shuja! (Note: The British invasion’s main purpose during the First Afghan War was to install Shah Shuja as the puppet ruler of Afghanistan.)

SI: That comes out beautifully in your new book Return of a King, and it’s another of these really striking features of the book that make it impossible to put down really. WD: What you do with a story like this in a sense, you play with it a bit, you read around it, you write to people and find out if anyone is writing

about the same thing. Also whether there are any new sources.

SI: But you had the original sources.WD: I didn’t have that to begin with. I mean, obviously I started with just the secondary sources like Hopkirk’s The Great Game. I then wrote to all sorts of scholars on Afghanistan and the region who assured me that there were no archives in Kabul, that there was nothing surviving. I mean none of this turned out to be true.

SI: But you found them by accident almost didn’t you?WD: No, no. I went out to look for them and the man who helped me find them was the man who was then the Chancellor of Kabul University and is now the President of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani. My very first morning in Kabul I went to see him at the university and he said “Go to this shop in old Kabul and there’s this old book seller who’s bought up a lot of the families’ libraries in the 1980s when everyone was emigrating.” I went

off there, spent about two or three hundred dollars buying up these wonderful, old Persian writings about the British invasion of 1839. I knew at that point I had my book! There is a moment with every book when you go from flirting with an idea to beginning to think seriously about an idea and then, as with every relationship, there’s a moment of having to actually commit, and I knew when I came back that morning with those five personal texts that, yes, this is go, green light.

SI: But also, the other thing that you mention is that the history of that period is still very much alive in Kabul, because, say, Alexander Burnes, he is unknown today in the UK, but in Afghanistan everybody knows his name, though as a hated figure.WD: It’s their big freedom struggle; just as everyone in Bangladesh will remember 1971 a hundred years hence, so in Afghanistan they remember 1839, because what Garibaldi is to the Italians, what Robert the Bruce and Bannockburn is to the Scots, this is to the Afghans. This is their great triumph.

SI: And apparently Captain Mackenzie’s a relative of yours and he comes across, I don’t really know why, he just comes across as a wonderful person. (Note: Captain Mackenzie was a young British officer who played a key role in the invasion) WD: He’s a nice man. I mean what you do when you research a book like this is that you end up reading, wading through a lot of very boring imperial histories, full of racist comments about the natives, and Mackenzie, I’m glad to say – he isn’t a direct relation, his wife is my relation – Mackenzie just stood out as being smarter.

SI: Did you know about that before you started to research?WD: I didn’t know it at all. About a month in I remember talking to my brother, maybe when I came back from Kabul, and I said I think I’m going to write this book, it’s all coming together, and he said, “you do know Mackenzie was married to our great, great grandmother?” So yes, it was nice to have a family angle in the history. But what you need when you’re writing a book of this sort where you need detail to bring it to life, it’s not a novel, every sentence has to be based on primary sources, and what’s lucky about this is that not only the British but also the Afghans have written about this extensively because it’s hugely important to both of them in different ways. And there’s this weird, weird thing where after the great massacre of their troops, the British sent back the Army of Retribution and it’s a very sinister thing as its name implies. It destroyed the country, burned down

William Dalrymple: “I knew at that point I had my book!”

William Dalrymple was one of the – nay, perhaps the biggest name at the Hay Dhaka. His latest book is Return of a King – the subject of which this talk with Salahdin Imam centered on.

Photo credit: Nashirul Islam

n

Salahdin Imam is a writer based in

Dhaka.


7

villages, cut up innocent families, and what is important as far as the writing of history is concerned, was that they came back through the massacred valleys as the snow was thawing. In other words, the bodies of the British soldiers which had been under the snow for winter, and had been preserved by the cold, were just newly uncovered…

SI: It must have been a surreal scene.WD: It was hideous. And so when the Army of Retribution was marching into Afghanistan to take revenge, they were having to march over the bodies of their killed comrades and it was like they had been killed yesterday, because, you know, the snow preserves. The skin goes white, the eyes maybe disappear and decay but the main body is there and so a lot of these guys would recognise their friends, and they would harvest from their pockets letters or diaries or last notes to loved ones.

SI: This is all in the sources?WD: So a lot of this stuff, you’d be sitting in the British Library and you would go on to the computer and there would be some very grey entry saying, Diary of Ensign Stapleton 1841 to 1843 and you would type it up and you would call it into the computer. And so you’d order up some very grey sounding military thing and you’d type in the access code, XA331, whatever, return and half an hour later from the bowels of the British Library a little plastic packet would emerge on the desk and you’d take it over to your laptop, unwrap it and there would be this thing covered in blood, with a knife mark through it and with some incredibly emotional last thing saying, “darling I don’t think I’m going to get through, my feet are black with frost bite, my left arm was hacked off yesterday, I think my time has come, I don’t know if this will ever reach you, but if it does...” But the letter doesn’t make it. A year later some brother officer finds this thing, puts it in his pocket, and sends it back to England and it duly finds its way to the British Library. So you have incredibly immediate sources which bring this story to life - it’s not just some distant political act that took place some time ago in a foreign country - you know, if you can bring out the human story…

SI: One other parallel I see is the graveyard of empires concept which is the way the British, the Russians, everybody failed to survive Afghanistan. The East India Company also seems to have, you hint at it, faced its own doom in Afghanistan. After the invasion and the massacre of their troops the Company was bankrupt and that ultimately led to the Great Uprising of 1857 and the end of Company rule in India. WD: Well, that’s true. Afghanistan is not impossible to conquer. Everyone has conquered Afghanistan, the Greeks, the Persians, White Huns, Mongols, Persians…

SI: A lot of invasions …WD: It’s a whole succession of invasions. It’s a crossroads, it’s like the centre of the Risk board where every army that passes and has to cross! What people find is that while they can conquer Afghanistan - the British did and the Russians did, you know, the Americans have done - while you can do that and you can defeat the armies in the field, every successive army finds that you cannot hold Afghanistan! Although it looks wonderful and strategically important on a map, it’s a very, very poor country. And while if you conquer Bengal, as the East India Company did, you can rip off all the rich merchants who are making wonderful textiles and you can rip off and plunder the rich farmers who’ve got the lovely rice fields. But in Afghanistan there are few merchants, there are few farmers. And they’re very war-like and its very mountainous territory. So what every successive army finds, is that they are spending a huge amount of money trying to keep the Afghan tribes in order and they have to build roads, they have to build forts, train up troops, they have to pay troops, but there’s nothing coming in, there’s no income to pay for it. It’s the exact same problem faced by the current government. Ashraf Ghani can only contribute from tax ten percent of the cost of administering Afghanistan. So what always happens is that sooner or later the accountants of the invaders blow the whistle. And all these

people who do succeed in conquering Afghanistan, find that they have to withdraw. The Russians, it broke their economy, East India Company, it broke the company economy, and it hasn’t helped the Americans balance of payments one little bit over the last ten years. America hasn’t been broken by it, but it’s certainly lost its edge against China.

SI: I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean the way the US finances are in deficit now is a direct result of their excessive military expenditure. WD: It’s at a trillion dollars I think at the moment. A trillion dollars is a lot of money. You know if they’d just gone into the country and offered every Afghan a line cruiser, a course at Harvard, and offered to build five-lane highways in every corner of the country, it would have been cheaper!

SI: And that is the thing that comes out in your book, too, that you mention the Afghans would have welcomed the British if they had come as friends in 1839 but the fact that they came and they tried to stay is what undid them. As you note, the Americans made the same mistake. WD: Yup. So it was lovely and it was that strange sense of knowing what would happen next in the story because, you’ve seen it before! The big question now is obviously whether the Americans will continue supporting the government … and they’ve already cut the aid by half.

SI: White Mughals, what a beautiful book that was …WD: That’s going to be a movie… the producer is the guy who produced the Game of Thrones, and the Director’s Ralph Fiennes. And they’re filming in January 2016.

SI: What about Return of a King? Could this be a movie too?WD: The rights are available, so if anybody here wants to buy them, they’re for sale!

SI: So is there anything that you’d like to mention, anything I’ve missed out?WD: My festival, Jaipur, which I do with Namita Gokhale. And it’s free and open to all, just turn up - but it makes it easier if you register in advance. And that is now the biggest literary festival in the world. Quarter of a million people. The book fair in Calcutta has two million or something but in terms of festivals, with writers performing publically, that’s now one of the biggest.

SI: What else makes Jaipur special?WD: Jaipur was the first and it’s still the biggest. We’re the only ones who bring in large numbers of international authors. I mean here at Hay Dhaka we had ten international authors, whereas at Jaipur we have sixty and it’s two hundred and sixty authors in all, speaking to a quarter of a million people. The feeling is very like this, it’s all in tents in the open air. And it’s in late January. Well it’s very nice to be back here. I have a little Bengali blood in my veins… from the White Mughals period. I have a great, great grandmother from Chandraghona.

SI: You are always very welcome to return to this land of your forebears! Thank you very much for talking with us William. n


When asked to write something short but meaningful on my recent experience of the Hay Festival in Dhaka, a few

words sprung to mind – rigorous, a tad bit slapdash at times, but ultimately gratifying. In its fourth year, Hay Dhaka has been gaining

speed and momentum and is an increasingly authentic place to meet authors, editors, and publishers from all over the world. There were at least four or five panel discussions on different topics going on at the same time every day and while that meant missing many of them, it also meant there was something for just about everyone. There were sessions on poetry, fiction, nonfiction, journalism, politics,

and even science and math, and in so many ways, the richness of the demanding three-day schedule added to the literary exchanges that continued far beyond the sessions, on the old, dusty grounds of Bangla Academy, by the green lake with the ducks or under the food tent over a cup of tea. The entire Bangla Academy pulsated with a vital energy and open

curiosity that are hard to come by in the breakneck speed of daily Dhaka life.

Even though I attended the festival in the capacity of an invited author, having published my book earlier this year, I felt that I had a slightly different experience from fellow writers who had come to attend from abroad. Each morning when I walked into Bangla Academy, I was greeted by a throng of familiar faces – old school mates, family friends, and relatives – people I had not seen in years but had known most of my life. I saw them in a different light than I’d had before. They were warm, engaged, and genuinely interested to hear more about my work and others,’ and to reveal their own selves as readers and thinkers. It also posed a somewhat exhilarating challenge to talk to so many fellow Dhaka-ites about my

book in Bangla, our shared mother tongue. This was not an exercise I’d done before and it was surprising to see what was lost and gained in translation. It was a rare gift to be able to re-connect with the people of Dhaka without the dictates of a homogenous past and at the threshold of a more malleable future.

I am well aware that the other side of the picture is also true at any literary gathering of

this caliber, wherein the more humane and humble moments need to be forsaken. The more famous personalities are highlighted, coveted, and ultimately sheltered from the masses. An unfortunate and perhaps unavoidable disconnect invariably ensues between those who are in the limelight and those are not. But because I was in Dhaka, the place of my birth and the place where my book happens, I was able to experience everything from a nuanced standpoint, less apparent but more evocative.

On the last day of the Festival, after my panel, I walked over to the Bengal Lights Stall for a book-signing session and one Bengali gentleman came up to me and said, rather shyly, “Ma’am I did not expect you to write this book.” It was a weighty statement and there was a queue behind him. As I signed the book for him, I asked him, gently, if he had expected me to write a different book. “Yes, I think so,” he said, smiling from ear to ear. He disappeared quickly and I never had a chance to clarify what he had really meant. Yet, it didn’t matter. Something about my panel discussion and my book had made him consider possibilities that were out of his comfort zone, and this perhaps is the best thing we can expect from a literary meet of such a scale. There will be logistical mishaps, differences in perception, and just not enough time to make all the personal connections we would like to make. Still, something happens to us during such festivals, at these places where thought and feeling flourish. Time stops a little, we forget our respective roles for just long enough to evolve beyond them, and we actually take the time to look at others as if they were real. n

Thoughts On Hay Dhaka Maria Chaudhuri

n

Maria Chaudhuri lives in Hong

Kong. Her memoir, Beloved Strangers,

was published in 2014 by

Bloomsbury.

Q: You studied in England for ten years before moving back to Pakistan at the age of 19. Where did the two lives intersect for you?

A: In a way it seems to me that if you’re brought up in two cultures, it’s a kind of double whammy. Because both cultures were essentially patriarchal; in each culture there is a set of rules that marginalise with their own ways. So you get both of them. Furthermore, because I had this only one language, I had this great hunger to read books about this part of the world which represented my part of the world. I started looking out for South Asian English literature after I came back – which is very relevant to my current work.

Q: How did you get to writing?A: That’s the story of my life! Having

studied in England for ten years, I was kind of disconnected from my life in Pakistan. I’d wanted to be a scientist – but of course I was eventually told there was no such thing as a woman scientist in Pakistan. I started writing after my marriage because I had nothing to do. My friend encouraged me to write, and I began with a book review of a friend’s wife. After I was done, I gave it to my friend – not to the newspapers or any publication. I was writing in secret because I was so terrified that nobody wanted to hear what I had to say. Eventually,

I wrote an interview of a cousin who was making a film, and sent it to the newspapers. My future editor saw it – he didn’t use it, but he remembered me. And contacted me later.

Q: So you had a connection of journalism with literature.

A: Everything depends on a good editor. I had this amazing man as my editor who not only recruited me, but found out I loved books. So he started sending me out for literary interviews and assigning book reviews to me. Because of my love of literature, I was also friendly with many poets and so used to go to poetry meetings. All that began to make a path for my writing.

“Now Censorship Has Also Changed”

Samira Sadeque chats with Muneeza Shamsie

It’s the third day of Hay. The end of the festival has begun, and I sit down with Pakistani writer and critic Muneeza. She is the author of Hybrid Tapestries: The Development of a Pakistani English Literature, as well as the managing editor of The Oxford Companion to the Literatures of Pakistan. She is currently at work on a book about the roots of Pakistani writing in English.

“Live so that when your children think of fairness, caring, and integrity, they think of you.” – H. Jackson Brown, Jr.


Back in Dhaka Aamer Hussein

What takes us to distant festivals? The desire to discover new places? The pleasure of seeing old writer friends, or making new ones? The compulsion to peddle your wares? All these influence your decision, but it’s when you’re there that you realise

how most of us rarely have a chance to meet our readers abroad. At a festival you have a captive audience, not only of fans and admirers, but of those who may have heard of you once or twice, wander into your reading out of curiosity, and decide to buy a book to remind themselves, with your signature, of the moment they spent in your company.

A memorable festival moment is of a member of an audience asking me how I had learnt to “spin magic with my voice and words.” That was in Hay Dhaka in 2013. I burbled something about love and appreciation. Actually I was tongue-tied. To add to my frustration, I couldn’t see the young man. He never did introduce himself.

If I said I was back in Dhaka for that young reader I wouldn’t be lying. Last year I was returning to a city I’d first seen over 30 years before: I was visiting after nearly 14 years. My younger sister had married my schoolmate; they’d brought up three children here. I’d visited them over the years. In 1993, just after publishing my first book, I was back with a new frame of reference. After reading divergent accounts of the city of Dhaka, I asked a journalist acquaintance to take me by daylight to the old town and to the Hindu temple. The city acquired new dimensions; a dynamic, burgeoning, protean identity, distant from the peaceful green neighbourhoods I visited and dined in with the cosmopolitan elites of the city.

A later millennial visit broadened my horizons. I met academics and poets; caught a glimpse of an intellectual Dhaka that implicitly asked me for my credentials as I was someone of Pakistani birth, though I’d left Karachi forever in late ‘67 and seen ’71 unfold from London, in the company of friends who were now Bangladeshi. I’d even taken part in their victory march.

History is a burden we carry on our backs. In 2014, I watched poet Fatema Hassan, who now lives in Karachi, effortlessly walk across the bridge of languages in Dhaka where she grew up, addressing her audiences in Bangla under the bottola tree, often interrupting her recital to translate a particularly poignant verse. A few days before, I’d been reading Carolyn Kizer’s version of Faiz’s love song to Bangladesh:

We who are strangers now, after our years of easy friendship;How many times must we meet, before we are reacquainted?

Aamer with Rajib

Q: What about your current project of tracing the roots of Pakistani writing in English?

A: For Pakistan’s golden jubilee, Oxford University Press asked me to put together a retrospective collection of Pakistani English literature – which I did. And it began with Shaheed Suhrawardy, and went up to Nadeem Islam, who was very new then. That was my first such work, and I’ve done 2-3 anthologies since. As a result of my journalism career, I got more into doing criticism. I’ve been working, for several years, on a literary history of English language writing by Pakistanis. I trace it back to colonial times, to Sake Dean Mohammad, the first Indian writer in English. He worked in East India Company in Bihar, and then went to Ireland, and had to explain India to his English friends – so he wrote a book about his travels in India.

Q: What have you discovered in this journey made by Pakistani writers in English?

A: Many interesting things. For example, the earliest English writings come from Kolkata. Shaheed Suhrawardy, and even Zebunnessa Hamidulla, who was one of our very early short story writers, belonged there. The Muslims learnt English later. But then you get works of Ahmed Ali, who, I realised after reading, was trying to get the Indian sound into the English language. He was very politicised.

Q: Has there been any change in how historic facts and political issues are portrayed in the form of fiction?

A: During the early times, one of the reasons why Indians were writing in English was because they wanted to explain their work. So they thought it was alright to write history books and journalistic pieces. And then there were all the problems of style, and getting your voice. What happened then was that people began to find their place within the language – Salman Rushdie did a great linguistic breakthrough, getting that South Asian sound and that kind of hybrid English in his work. So that was a breakthrough. Otherwise people only wrote of English literature as the literature of England or America. And in the wake of that, you get Pakistani writers coming in, Bangladeshi writers coming in.

In Pakistan, this literature has developed and become highly political despite the walls of censorship, and has expanded the discourse. Now, censorship has also changed. People won’t come down on a writer and try to shut down his/her book if s/he really “offends” someone. n

For me many of the “easy friendships” were anterior, anterior, after renewed offers of the “reconciling word” Faiz called for, the “ease” still inflected with historical nuance. In an after-session conversation I told Rahman how Pakistanis of his generation, aware of the autonomy of a nation that’s no longer new, want to visit Bangladesh and make new connections beyond the platitudes of re-acquaintance and shared histories. He had met many Pakistanis in Cyprus, he said: they sang beautifully, couldn’t understand the pleasures of fish and plain rice, and said inshallah-mashallah in every other sentence. We laughed.

Let’s say the young reader whose face I hadn’t seen embody those readers I want to reach in Bangladesh. Coming to a festival with a new work to introduce is both a challenge and pleasure; when the book is published in the city you’re visiting, and the stories selected by a Dhaka-born poet (Ahsan Akbar), still better. It was inspiring to be in the company of Bangladeshi writers, some coming home from distant places to launch their books. We had conversations by the duck pond, all too short. We signed books for each other in the open spaces between stalls under the mild Dhaka sky. By the pool at our hotel, between commitments, I read Anis Ahmed’s exquisite novella, 40 Steps. Aasha Mehreen Rahman told me her mother, Razia Khan, had once briefly lived in Karach: I read her poems in my hotel room one jetlagged dawn. Back in London, I devoured Maria Chaudhuri’s Beloved Strangers, the best memoir I’ve read from our region since Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days a quarter of a century ago. The conversations we began at Hay still continue. Oh yes, my friends Laksmi and Mimi and I also agreed that meeting the volunteers who led us around with such enthusiasm was among the best of experiences. n

n Aamer Hussein is a South Asian writer based in London. He writes both in English and Urdu.

Photo: Dhaka Tribune


Dhaka Tribune talked with the exuberant and gregarious Amina Rahman, who runs Bookworm. We started to chat via email and sms – one way to beat the scheduling nightmare of city traffic,

right? – talk about books and Hay and Dhaka and stalls and sales. One query elicited a reply that stands out for its directness: ‘counting money now, will chk back later’, she sms’ed back. Of course, we responded, later is fine. After all, counting money is not only more fun, but important for bookstores in Dhaka, where a lot of them struggle and wheeze uphill with tortured lungs to make ends meet. But at the Hay festival Bookworm seemed to be doing all right. Their stall was the envy of the other booksellers. Crowds swirled around it at all hours of the day well into the evening, pressing against the books piled high and deep and hither and thither all over the stall like books in some damp basement of a lefty bookshop in London. This stack-up – the result of late arrivals of shipments, hectic unpacking and frantic hauling to Bangla Academy – had its own charm, a sweet disorder. And which we mention since it gives us a marvelous excuse to drag in Herrick:

A sweet disorder in the dressKindles in clothes a wantonness:A lawn about the shoulders thrownInto a fine distraction--An erring lace, which here and thereEnthrals the crimson stomacher--A cuff neglectful, and therebyRibbands to flow confusedly--A winning wave, deserving note,In the tempestuous petticoat--A careless shoe-string, in whose tieI see a wild civility--Do more bewitch me than when artIs too precise in every part.

Tribune: Hi Amina. We know you as the proprietor of Bookworm - the sign over the bookstore is prominently there next to the old airport. Tell us a little bit about it.

Amina: Bookworm was the labor of love of my father-in-law, Group Captain Taher Quddus, who had the vision of opening an English bookshop in Dhaka. This little bookshop by the old airport has withstood the test of time. It has seen many a large chain retail store come and go, yet this little bookshop goes on and on and on. It is a testament that a good product, honestly sold, will reap benefits. The very principles my late father-in-law lived by.

T: You are the official bookstore of Hay. What does that entail?

A: We need to be stocked with the featured writers. This entails getting the list as soon as possible, researching their books, their publishers and of course, the writer themselves. Painstaking but rewarding. Next step: ordering the books, estimating how many numbers of each to bring, getting in touch

with publishers – all via emails and most important – my distributor. This means there is a lot of back and forth with all parties over a considerable amount of time.

T: We understand that hassles occur with books not arriving on time, or arriving slowly. What is the primary cause?

A: The primary cause for this are co-ordination issues with Hay organizers, publishing houses and often the authors themselves, some of whom may have unrealistic expectations. Last-minutes cancellation and bookings can throw a major spanner in the works. Similarly publishers cannot get some books through to us on time due to a number of reasons starting from lack of stock to books being out of print. Prints from other countries are not always available to our regional distributors and are simply too costly to fly over so sometimes authors have to bring their own books. Add to that hartals, oborrodes, transport strikes, delays at customs, etc., and things can get hairy fast.

Q: Do you contact with the authors beforehand to ensure that they will do book signing at your stall?

A: No. It’s been totally spontaneous so far but authors are very compliant and happy to support us and their customers. It would be hard to plan signings before they arrive in Dhaka but it would be a good idea to inform them so we can stock up on their books and synchronize their panels with customers. We have noticed that after a good panel, audience swarm to our stall in droves and books sell out in a matter of minutes.

T: Do you think it is imperative that bookstores here begin to establish networks with publishers, authors and other booksellers abroad?

A: It is vital for the existence of a bookshop to establish networks with the book world including local and foreign publishers, authors and booksellers all year round. They keep us informed of new releases, reading trends and major happenings around the globe. It is a pure symbiotic relationship.

Q: If so, what are the chances for English books written and published in Dhaka to be at lit festivals in South Asia?

A: That’s a very good question. India and Pakistan are both way ahead of the game in terms of having globally established authors. So why is Bangladesh behind? Events like the Hay Fest gives publishers the chance to see homegrown talent first hand. We hope more exposure like this will help in promoting our local authors globally.

T: Are more books selling as the Hay expands and settles into its Dhaka base?

A: Yes, without a doubt. T: Who is your ideal customer?A: Since I’m in the business of selling the best product

in the world – books, everyone is my ideal customer.T: Thank you.A: Thank you, too. n

Amina Rahman on Bookworm Tribune Report


Hay Dhaka (in Banglish) Ahsan Akbar

Hay today, I going and becoming new reader,I like English books very much, also burgerAnd I will having photos with many famous people

Is today no dreaming-thinking my dear.

Look, MP sir now here, with MP shaheb, Indian,I try to be in newspaper photo, with this one – Snap! Click! Snap!, oh I lucky, got my head in cornerNow look, I shaking hands with very important writers.

Everyone busy-busy with make-up and big sunglassAsking when next session, Where? When? Where?Why so much confusion, I not understandingAll sessions here on poster, inside also colour brochure.

Outside auditorium, big dais with Bangla ‘rape’ music singingYoung boys with boots, jumping, shouting, and again jumpingWhat big noise, what is this? No music, no, no, this EbolaI better enjoying dangerous ghost stories under fine Bottola.

I like very much the foreign writers, so friendly They show no mood, always so free-frank with meThey love my city and I telling I love ShakespeareThey so impressed now, their eyes becoming bigger.

I don’t like very much deshi people who acting so foreignJust because they only got lucky passports to heaven.Flying down here, talking English, Banglish, EnglishAnd this category so funny – the brown shaheb!

But brown shaheb forgetting always he actually localWhy so much show-off, he not grow up with rice-daal?In our heritage we saying crow trying hard, becoming peacockPossible never, ever, never, he will be so much pain and shock!But if he write a book winning the English language matchI will giving my honest salam, so much respect for that. n

Intense is the word that springs to mind when I thinks of Dhaka and the Hay Dhaka experience. I loved the wild beat of the city with its gorgeous cycle rickshaws and mile-long traffic jams. It was in those

jams that I had delightful chance encounters with writers – in particular Manju Kapur and Michael Puett, who I look forward to reading. The festival echoed the intensity of the city with its dynamic panel discussions and engaged and enthusiastic audiences. Highlights for me were two Bloomsbury author firsts: listening to Maria Chaudhuri talk about her debut Beloved Strangers

and witnessing Sandip Roy’s maiden event for his forthcoming first novel Don’t Let Him Know. And of course watching William Dalrymple enthrall a huge audience is always an event in itself. Bangladeshi hospitality is second to none. It’s impossible to leave Dhaka and not to miss it, the Festival and new friends made there. n

Wild Beat Alexandra Pringle

n

Ahsan Akbar published The Devil’s Thumbprint, a book of poems, last year.

n

Alexandra Pringle is Group Editor-in-Chief of Bloomsbury, UK.


Electric Shadows: Selected Stories Aamer Hussein

The author was born and raised in Karachi, moved to London in 1970 at age fifteen, and has been writing since the mid-80s. Hussein writes both in English and Urdu. His eight acclaimed works of fiction include the collections Mirror to the Sun (1993), Insomnia (2007), the Commonwealth

Prize-shortlisted novella Another Gulmohar Tree (2009) and the novel The Cloud Messenger (2012). His short stories are poignant tales of loss, longing and separation, about a constant search to locate the self in a changing world. Aamer’s characters are ever in flux, their inner lives based on memories, and engaged in a constant dialectical movement with their future and past. Family relationships feature prominently in the stories but with a diversity of action and setting that lends a unique quality to each tale. n

bengal lights books (blb) published four books in 2014 timed with the hay festival dhaka, where all four had a good run and it was a success that blb hopes to better with each succeeding year

publIcaTIons from bEngal lIgHTs booKs

The Lovers And The Leavers: A Novel In Stories Abeer Y Hoque.

Hoque is a Nigerian-born Bangladeshi-American writer and photographer. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships whose works have been published in Guernica, ZYZZYVA, Wasafiri, The Daily Star, India Today, and the Commonwealth Short Story Competition, among

others. The Lovers is a set of twelve interlinked stories, where the lives of its characters intersect over the years and continents. Komola, for example, is a maid from rural Bangladesh working in Dhaka who falls in love in one story, with her story continuing ominously in ‘After the Love’ while in ‘Alo,’ her nephew is a preternaturally gifted little boy with a terrible secret. The book is about the ways we build each other up and break ourselves down, no matter who we are, where we live, or whether we know better. n

Forty Steps (Bilingual Flip Book)

K Anis Ahmed

ahmed is a Bangladeshi writer and publisher based in Dhaka. His first book of short stories, Good Night, Mr. Kissinger, was released in November 2012, while his first novel, The World in My Hands, was published in December 2013 (Vintage/Random House India). He is a frequent contributor to

international magazines, and has launched multiple initiatives with regard to English language writing in Bangladesh. Forty Steps is about Mr. Shikdar, who may or may not be dead… As he waits for the angels Munkar and Nakir to begin their interrogation about his life, Mr. Shikdar leads the reader on a journey of small-town life in a now-vanished East Bengal, of goings-on beneath a monsoon sky, taking us into a ‘compounder’s’ inner life, a British art student gone native, a beautiful but unfaithful wife, and a rather worldly religious leader. The book format is a first for Bangladesh, with a Bengali translation coupled with the English original for easy access in both languages. n


bengal Lights Autumn 2014 issue is out – guest edited by David Shook and C.P. Heiser, both based in Los Angeles.

David is a poet, translator and filmmaker who became a familiar figure to festival-goers at the last two Dhaka Hay shindigs. He is also the

editorial director of Phoneme Media, a not-for-profit publishing house for literature in translation. Phoneme plans to publish books from over ten languages in the coming year, will produce short and feature-length films, and as per David, has “got big plans for everything from enhanced content e-books to iPhone apps.” He is writing a book of nonfiction titled MEGA and a novel called White Lobster – the latter, he tells us, is a term “for packages of floating cocaine that fisherman find after they’ve been thrown overboard by cartel speedboats being chased or dropped from airplanes for later pick-up, off the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua.” C.P. Heiser is the publisher of the Los Angeles-based Unnamed Press as well as being associated with Phoneme Media. He was deeply involved with helping start up the Los Angeles Review of Books, where he is currently an Editor-at-large. Unnamed Press, C.P. told us, is about publishing “the most exciting new voices we’ve discovered from around the world. The world no longer revolves around the colonial axes of the past, and I don’t think its literature should either. What we’ve called ‘world literature’ is today just literature, no descriptors necessary. I’ve found that much of the most innovative work being written today comes from places like Bangladesh, Chile, and Hong Kong.”

This guest-edited issue, alliteratively enough, centered on the theme

Bengal Lights Autumn 2014

On The Side Of The Enemy: Stories In Translation Khademul Islam

Islam is a Bangladeshi writer, translator and editor based in Dhaka and Bangkok. He brought out The Daily Star Book of Bangladeshi Writing in 2007 and his short stories – both in the original English and in translations – have been included in numerous print anthologies and online journals. He is

currently working on a non-fiction book due to be published by Bloomsbury, UK. This collection of short stories translated from Bengali is a portrayal of both Bengals, but especially of Bangladesh from the time of its bloody war of independence in 1971 to the present day. Some stories depict a country wracked, both personal and political, by the conflict, while others are about the different horrors of peacetime. Dhrubo Esh has a sly take on the Ekushey book fair, while Andaleeb Rushdi savages the body politic. The title story reveals the effects of the corruption of political ideals while Wasi Ahmed gently explores the face of modern Dhaka. In between are authors from West Bengal, with the masterful Narendranath Mitra very much in the mix. An unforgettable collection. n

of guests – very broadly defined all the way from guests at state-run institutions (incarceration in plainer words, thank you very much!) to guest workers (migrant labor) to poems on loneliness and alienation to the tale of a visiting ethnographer. The layout and presentation is extremely visual, and is an attractive example of the current American – or generally Western perhaps, we in Dhaka are not hundred percent sure! – trends in such publications for multiple media interactions within a single volume, for effortless leaps from text to photos to aphorisms to poem fragments to illustrations. Life, it seems to wink at the reader, is fragmented; consciousness (that temple of high modernism!) is not only a joke, but parodies itself in infinite ways, an agnostic dragon chomping on its own tail.

One can say without hesitation that this issue of Bengal Lights is unlike anything that has previously been published by any literary journal from Dhaka. Go buy it. Take a gander at it. Available at Dhaka book stores. n


Mirza Waheed: “Novel is an everyday slog!”

Ahsan Sajid on a writer with Kashmir in his bones

“The dusk here does not arrive on the shoulders of golden sunsets any more, but on the heels of long, encroaching shadows of untraceable trees in the distance, gloomy parallel patterns that cascade over the undulating landscape of unevenly dispersed corpses and other things.

– Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator

In his Guardian article “The importance of place in fiction” Philip Hensher had puzzled over the difficulty of writing about spatial arrangements. Possibly due to a self-inflicted car parking mishap, he asked: do the overworked actions of the verbal half of the brain, which any novelist is familiar with, prohibit the full development

of the spatial-awareness half? “Astronauts,” he noted, “are very good at parking in three dimensions; none, so far, has been any good at writing.” For most readers, it is the setting that springs first to mind when they think about a book they’ve read.

Mirza Waheed’s debut novel, The Collaborator, set in war-torn Kashmir, was an international bestseller. It won him all sorts of awards and

recognition - shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhat Prize, on the long list for the Desmond Elliott Prize. It was also Book of the Year for Telegraph, New Statesman, Financial Times, Business Standard and the Telegraph (India), among others. His new novel, The Book of Gold Leaves, also set in Kashmir (in the city of Srinagar) was just released in October.

I sat down with him at the Hay and asked him about the importance of place in his novels. The mild-mannered Waheed is soft-spoken, and sometimes I had to strain to hear him. “I start a character, and think of the space they inhabit; place is very important to me because I need to be able to feel my way around. In my two works I write about the place I grew up in. It helped that I knew the place where these characters are, where they die, where they love,” he answered. “With the second novel, place is even more important than the first one, because the entire narrative unfolds in one locality. It’s an old city, in Srinagar, where there is a shrine, which occupies the central place in the city. This shrine is almost like a character, because the two main characters have lived next to the shrine all their lives; they fall in love by the shrine. I like to think of place not as an inanimate

thing but take into account their particular histories. And you know what novelists do, we add texture and colour and sound...”

I can tell that this is writer who has taken the time to deeply inhabit, in his mind, the setting of his novels. So, how much of the struggle we see in his characters is informed, if at all, by his own early life in Kashmir?

“Yes and no. Yes in the sense that I saw things as a teenager in Kashmir, and some of these things you carry for the rest of your life, disturbing and upsetting things... I saw things when I was around 15-16 living in Srinagar. But the first novel is not set in Srinagar, it is set as far as possible from it. It’s set on the border. I transported what happened in the city, which I witnessed, to this place on the border. A no-man’s land. Only army, and combatants, militants, freedom fighters. I carried my impressions based on what I witnessed in Srinagar, such as sieges that lasted up to three days, being homebound for two months at a time, curfews. These things come into it, but I invented this place –this valley of corpses, and this boy narrator finds himself in this dark job, which is to go down to this dark valley and collect IDs.

“The first novel was about what must happen in war, in the wilderness. What must happen in the mountains, where there are no witnesses. The place is fictional. However, later document writers, historians, and activists actually found mass graves in the mountains.”

In The Collaborator, a close reader will not miss the attention to detail the writer places while describing the setting. Out of curiosity I Googled him, to find out, unsurprised, that he is an experienced journalist! And asked him the question most artists working on multiple media dread – how does being a journalist affect novel writing? – which is a nicer way to phrase the question of whether one activity seeps into the other.

“Oh God! These are two completely different genres! Of course as a journalist there is instant gratification, it’s nice to see a byline, it’s nice to see your name in print the next day, while a novel might take three years or more to write and it may not even work.” Which makes me wonder if he has personally experienced this, but decide not to frustrate him further. “As a current affairs person youz are expected to sum up a situation in a five-paragraph story. But, can you do nuance in those two minutes? Can you build complexity? Can you look at the story beyond the sub-head? Can you deal with multiple narratives and conflicts within people? You cannot do justice to a complex story.”

There is a pause. And then, “However, with that said, that is not my reason to write novels. That cannot be it. The impulse to write fiction, the desire to tell a story is something else. At the end of everything, I want to write the stories I want to write. And these stories will be informed by my sensibilities based on where I grew up. And also what I do.

“Journalism and novel writing are just two different media and it’s difficult to switch, to pace, and wrap up. With journalism, you go home and within the same day your work is right there, public. With writing a 100,000-word novel you are slogging every day! You also worry that it may not come to anything.”

What about customer reviews on Amazon for Waheed’s first novel – it seems to me that the few negative reviews there are, are from people who don’t appear to have read the text, seem to have rather missed the point if they did, and are instead writing reviews based on political beliefs. But Mirza Waheed does not rise to the bait – he is way too even-tempered.

“I don’t think about it. It’s a lot of work to constantly follow what is being said online, in comment sections. As a wise man once said to me, you should not look at the bottom half of the internet! But sometimes you want to know what people are saying. This is a very important question because they’re not talking about the text. It’s very satisfying for a writer to discover that someone has read your book. That’s what you want. Can that happen all the time? No. It’s not very healthy for a writer to look at every review, every negative comment, every 2-star rating on Amazon because then that’s what you’re going to do all the time and when do you write?

“Unless it’s very upsetting, and someone is being particularly nasty or personal, you find ways to insulate yourself. Having said that, my first novel was very well received in India and given the novel’s unfavourable depiction of India – (and “Indian characters” I interject) –

And here for the first time he is emphatic! “No! India. The state. People and state, we always have to remember, are not the same thing. People are capable of the greatest kindnesses and cruelty. State has a structure. I was surprised by the reception in India. Yes, there are detractors here and there but that’s okay. You’re not the in the business of making people happy or unhappy.”

This prompts a talk about happiness.“I’m happiest, as happy as can be, when I write fiction. It is days and

days of hard work, and misery; there are days when nothing happens, but when a sentence comes out the way you want it to be, that’s what we live for. Someone once asked me when I am the happiest and my answer is, at the end of a good sentence.” n

Mirza Waheed


What I’m hoping foris a lesson that comes

from the surfaceof things, poised

in stop-gap motionreal in transition.

Would that I create somethingfrom the so-called skim

from the outsidein

(Riffing off Isaac Fitzgerald’s panel on Buzzfeed’s top ten lists, here is my take on the fourth annual Hay Festival Dhaka.)

10. First, I’ll get the shameless self promotion over with: The wonderful new press, Bengal Lights Books, published my first book. My novel in stories, The Lovers and the Leavers, was launched at BLB’s shining new offices in Dhanmondi, and again at a panel at Hay. I autographed almost 200 books during my time in Dhaka, and it was such a treat talking to people about reading and writing.

9. Since poetry is my first love, I was especially taken by three phenomenal readers at Hay. First up, Cambodian spoken-word artist, Kosal Khiev, whose extraordinary life story left his listeners in shock and awe: “I don’t write for the healthy, the wealthy, for those who are well.”

Second, poet Sabrina Mahfouz, whose very voice embodies velocity: “and so her whisper wets the air.” And last but not least, famed Bangla poet, Joy Goswami. Unfortunately, my Bangla isn’t good enough to understand everything he said, but it didn’t matter. “Mad woman, I will spend my life with you.” Indeed.

8. The sprawling dust-hazed grounds of Bangla Academy at Dhaka University, where the Hay Festival was held. I’ve visited this place many times in years past during the annual month-long Ekushay February Boi Mela (21 February book fair), and it is a perfect spot for a literary festival. The sprawling bot gach, the tree-lined pond, the grounds dotted with book stalls, the multiple stages, and the incredible juice cart with dozens of fresh squeezed juice from almost any fruit you can think of, and several I didn’t even imagine. Olive juice? Why yes, though the servers had to persuade me to try it. Yum.

7. Writer and filmmaker Nupu Press’s presentation on storytelling through film. She used funny, clever film clips to make each of her points, and it was so smart and engaging, I didn’t want it to end. She is a born teacher, wise and winsome, and while we wait for her to finish writing her novel, I recommend you read her blog.

6. Aamer Hussain’s session in celebration of his newest book of stories, Electric Shadows (also published by Bengal Lights Books). Self -deprecating, witty, generous, and thoughtful, Aamer is a pleasure to listen to. I can’t wait to dig into the collection.

5. The volunteers that each of the Hay authors were assigned. Mine was a sweet, young man called Faisal, and he was solicitous, friendly, and eager. What a lovely idea, especially for those who were landing up in Bangladesh for the first time.

4. The Q&A at Zia Haider Rahman’s panel celebrating his celebrated debut novel, In the Light of What We Know. I now officially hate Q&As, which (especially in Bangladesh) appear to be an excuse for people to get up and talk about their pheelings. Even though Zia explicitly said he would ignore any such “comments,” they still came a-pouring. Say what you will about his self-proclaimed “undiplomatic” delivery, I was thoroughly entertained by his biting reply to that tiresome question about whether the protagonist is a version of the author: “Your question is Zia=Zafar? You’ve read my bio, and you’ve read my book. So now you know how we’re similar. You have no idea how we’re different.” Or this response, as he refused to descend into a Pakistan v Bangladesh brawl: “Your question was, why did I have to make the protagonist Pakistani. I’ll answer that literally. I didn’t have to. Your question never gets off the ground. Next.”

3. The translation panel with Kaiser Haq (poet extraordinaire, and director of the brand-new Dhaka Translation Centre), Shaheen Akhtar (famed Bangla author), Arunava Sinha (translator of over 30 books), and moderated by Kate Griffin (from the British Centre for Literary Translation). The best part was getting a behind-the-scenes look at what went into this panel. I sat in on a bit of the 5-day translation workshop (which preceded the Hay Festival), featuring 10 young translators led by Arunava, who translated one of Shaheen’s stories from Bangla to English. I find translation to be such a mystical task, fraught with the challenges of translating dialect and voice and mood and spirit and other semi-intangible qualities. I am awed by those who attempt it, let alone their considerable accomplishments.

2. The Woman as a Writer panel, which featured writers Nilanjana Roy, Manju Kapoor, and Muneeza Shamsie, and chaired by Tahmima Anam. This panel was lively, and surprisingly moving, with stories of grandmothers who had written in obscurity, of partners who supported their wives in their writing lives - both financially and emotionally - the striations of gender bias in literature and publishing, as well as how hard writing is, no matter who you are. I especially loved how Manju counts her age in books (she’s six-books-old now), and that her first book took 8 years to write, almost all of her 40s. Inspiring.

1. William Dalrymple’s incredible monologue about his latest book, Return of a King (which makes me think of Tolkien’s Middle Earth trilogy). Willy, as he was introduced to me, is a sparkling storyteller. It didn’t matter that the AV team couldn’t find his slideshow, and even projected the cover of a different book for a hot minute. It was 45 minutes into his talk that said slideshow finally surfaced, but it didn’t matter. Every last one of us was enrapt. I am not usually one for lengthy historical narratives, much less for talk of war, but you wouldn’t have known it from my countenance. Like everyone else sitting, standing, and crouching in the main stage audience, I would have kept listening for another hour or more, with or without pictures. He’s just that good. n

Top Ten Highlights of the 2014 Hay Festival Dhaka

Abeer Hoque

Abeer Hoque signing her book

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Abeer Hoque is a Nigerian born Bangladeshi-American writer and Photographer.


The title of Rana Dasgupta’s book is deceptively simple, yet remarkably appropriate. Ostensibly, it is a book about the ‘Capital’ of India, Delhi. Then

again, it is a critique of political economy of India; it is Dasgupta’s Das Kapital. Rana Daskapital, the joke went at the Hay!

Ever since India chose to embrace the principles of free enterprise and open markets in 1991, Rana Dasgupta observes, the social fabric of Delhi has begun to come apart. Delhi—developed under the fond eyes of the Mughals and made a capital again by the British at the expense of Calcutta-Kolkata—stood the test of time. It remained

a witness both to prosperity and to violence. The seeming harmony in which the Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs have learned to live together after the Partition in 1947 is based on hushed-up narratives of violence. Now, Dasgupta feels, the liberalization of economy has unleashed forces that are affecting the very basic human foundations of Delhi. He notices a mutant version of anger and avarice in the metamorphosis of the capital. Based on which, Dasgupta proffers a second thesis: the aggressive pursuit of wealth by the immigrants contributed further to the deterioration of various social norms in Delhi. No wonder, the subtitle of the book is “A portrait of twenty-first century India.” These theses, albeit interesting, demand serious critical engagement. It is over-simplistic and does not really take into consideration the multiple layering of the issues into account. Not everyone in Delhi can be driven by greed, for example.

Dasgupta’s method of writing is part journalistic, part ethnographic. He interviews billionaires and bureaucrats, drug dealers and metal traders, slum dwellers and psychoanalysts to forge his narrative about capitalist transformation of Delhi. This method of writing falls under the category of auto-ethnography. Carolyn Ellis defined auto-ethnography as “research, writing, story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social, and political.” The literary portrait of Delhi is thus theoretically informed and objectively researched.

Having lived in different cities, Dasgupta returned to Delhi at the end of 2000, to finish his novel that he could not write while working as a corporate consultant in New York. He grew up in England, where his parents had the difficult experience that is common to the migrants of their generation. Dasgupta came to Delhi “with one suitcase and a box of notes and articles” (36) to be with the woman he loved, hoping that he would be able to convince her to bring her back to “sparkling Manhattan”. He returned to “the beautiful city” in which his father would “borrow a bike and ride ...on those enormous, empty roads” (31); a city to which his father never could return, giving his a sense of incompleteness. His plan for a short creative outing lasted way longer than he expected. In these years, he has experienced “an all-consuming plunge” (36) in a city that he both loves and hates.

Dasgupta found Delhi going through an interesting phase that can be identified as a “vortex of prophecy and possibility.” He was sucked in by “the churns of the age,” by the charms of witnessing “the turbulent preparation” of the city for becoming a megacity. His experience of living

in the West made him realize that the economic boom was but a phase that each megacity goes through in its developmental matrix. The future that he foresees contradicts the development myth that Delhi exudes.

Dasgupta’s first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (HarperCollins, 2005) explored the impact of globalization in the manner of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. His second novel Solo (2009), which earned him the prestigious Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, depicts the daydream of a 100-year-old Bulgarian man. Capital started as a long essay that he was commissioned to write for Granta. He then expanded it into a survey of the nouveau rich, the money-hungry bourgeoisie His visit to an automobile store gives him an interesting insight into the new craze for expensive cars. He wonders where these sports cars could be driven given the gridlock that plagues Delhi. The answer was baffling. The car owners, he was told by the pretty sales representative, gather at night and drive these fancy cars in the street near the PM residence. The noise is so loud that it keeps the PM awake at night. “So he calls us to complain, but obviously there’s nothing we can do,” the salesgirl tells him.

“As I drive away, I cannot help thinking of Prime Minister Manmohan

Singh tossing and turning in bed, his snowy hair unturbaned on the pillow, his dreams interrupted by the rich boys’ Ferraris screaming up and down the roads outside. Manmohan Singh is of course the man who, long ago, as Finance Minister, opened up the economy and set the course for a new market elite.”

Dasgupta is very good at detecting irony. He has a knack of expressing it in powerful language backed by his keen sense of observation. But the irony is, he is not the only one. The post-traumatic behavior responsible for the barbarism that Dasgupta notices is not unique to Delhi. As a Dhakaite, I can see glimpses of Capital in Dhaka. That’s make the narrative relevant—for us. n

Capital: Marking the Marks of Woe in Delhi Shamsad Mortuza

T J Dema, Shamsad Mortuza and Sabrina Mahfouz

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Shamsad Mortuza is Professor of

English, ULAB.


she loves artworks and food. She is a translator, traveler, bookstore owner, art gallery director. She is Indonesian writer Laksmi Pamuntjak. Raised by bibliophilic parents who owned their own publishing business, it was natural for her to take up writing. In 2001, her love of books led her to co-found

Aksara, a bilingual bookstore in Jakarta.Pamuntjak writes both in English and Indonesian. The latter, she says,

comes “naturally” to her. “I’ve always loved both languages and I’m obsessed with them. I’ve always loved to just look at ways sentences are constructed in both languages.” She has published two poetry and prose collections: Ellipsis in 2005, and The Anagram in 2006; an experimental short story collection, and the work closest to her heart, The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art, as well as Perang, Langitdan Dua Perempuan (War, Heaven, and Two Women), a treatise on the relationship between man, violence, faith, and the Iliad (2006). Her first novel, Amba (2012) was a national best-seller. It is a modern take on Amba and Bhisma from the Mahabharata, and is set against the bloody communist crackdown of 1965 and the penal colony on the island of Buru. Its English version, The Question of Red, came out earlier this year. She wrote and published her second novel, Aruna Dan Lidahnya, in Indonesian and is currently at work on its English version, Aruna And Her Palate. She has translated the poems of the well-known Indonesian writer Goenawan Mohamad.

And like Aruna, her title character, Pamuntjak is into food. In fact, she started her writing career as a restaurant and food reviewer for The Jakarta Post. Why was she such a foodie? “I think it’s because I grew up in a household where good food was always available. My mother has a cook, in our house, somebody who has been with her for 45 years. And she still cooks so wonderfully today. And my parents also love to travel and have taken me to restaurants from an early age. I just love going out to restaurants, and assessing them, and seeing them not just as a place that gives you food, but everything else: The service, concept, ambience, the total experience that you are involved in.”

In Bangladesh, we keep saying that there are too few writers in English. In Indonesia, however, there are far fewer. That’s because, she says, “We don’t have much of a shared history with the English except for their

brief occupation between 1811 and 1815; our so-called historical foreign link is with the Dutch, who colonised us for 350 years, and isn’t, unlike the British, a world linguistic power. So very few Indonesians see the need to communicate in English save as a modern business language. The relatively small size of our Diaspora in English-speaking countries has also resulted in very few Indonesians writing in English beyond the imperatives of an overseas education. I’m not saying that this won’t be changing, in five, ten years’ time, as Indonesians become more global. I think I am one of a few, which is a bane and a blessing. The bane being of course that hardly anyone reads you at home when you’re writing in English, so you have to bring it to another audience. You have to bring your work outside of Indonesia to be appreciated when it’s in English, but then when it’s in Indonesian, you really have to tone down your foreignness, so it’s like the double Other sometimes. So it’s like when you’re overseas, you’re accepted as Indonesian, and when you’re in Indonesia, you’re expected to be more Indonesian also.”

She likes a diverse bunch of writers, from the poems of Nirwan Dewanto, and Joko Pinurbo from her generation, to Chairil Anwar, “who is the most famous probably of the post ’45 generation of Indonesian poets.” She loves Alice Munro, Anne Enright, A.L. Kennedy, A.M. Holmes – “she’s probably one of my favourites at the moment or has been for a while” – and Jeannette Winterson. Aleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian-American poet, is up there, as is Elena Ferrante from Italy.

Pamuntjak is quite familiar with Indian writers as well: “Amitav Ghosh, Bharati Mukherjee, and Salman Rushdie are among my favourites. I also love Manju Kapur’s Difficult Daughters and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. So yes, I read a lot. I read deep, and long, and variedly!”

And what did she think of Hay Dhaka? “I’m having a very, very good time. I feel there’s just so much warmth and affection in the air around you. It’s a lovely, generous place. I think my three days at the Hay Fest Dhaka were among some of the best three days I’ve had for a long time … almost everybody I met was generally just lovely. There was also a sense of a collective appreciation of literature that I felt went way beyond the superficial, like you see in other festivals.” n

The Double Otherness of a Bilingual Writer Sayeeda Ahmad talks with Laksmi Pamuntjak

Laksmi Pamuntjak


on day two of the Hay Festival, when I walked into the auditorium to catch the ‘A Love Divine’ seminar, I frankly didn’t know what to expect from Patrick Laude, or the seminar itself. My first impression of the scholar, professor, and author was that he seemed austere and aloof.

But first impressions are famously deceiving. His response to his fellow panelist David Burrell’s thoughts on love and suffering brought out Patrick Laude’s warmth and intelligence. “I want to go back to what David said about suffering. There’s a very beautiful quote in the medieval mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp’s Book of Visions: ‘The sweetest thing about love is its violence.’ And so we go back to the paradox of suffering. The sweetness involves that which takes us away from ourselves, and therefore involves violence and suffering, and in the process we become

transformed. The human heart involves suffering and this journey is like a ladder to climb towards God. And through the face of the Beloved, we awaken to the wide universe of all love. Our natural impulse is to love, and we see this in Christianity, Sufism, etc. We yearn for this love, which is why we suffer.”

His audience seemed quite taken with his words.How did Dr Laude come to specialise in so many subjects, ranging

from comparative mysticism and comparative religion (including Christianity, Islam, and Sufism), to French language and literature, and

mysticism in poetry? On the many links between religions and cultures? To doing research on symbolic imagination in religion and literature? His response was simple: “Well, because, from as early as I can remember, I was interested in learning why I was in this world. I was not only curious, but I was intent on understanding what does this mean, this life? What is the significance of who we are ourselves? What is this existence? Is it a dream? Is it reality? Is it something between dream and reality? All these are basic questions that have always been at the back of my mind. One cannot truly live this life without understanding its purpose, and what it means.”

Patrick Laude was born in 1958, studied History as an undergraduate, and in Philosophy as a graduate student at Sorbonne. He obtained a PhD in French literature from Indiana University in 1985 and began teaching at Georgetown University, Washington DC, in 1991. But his quest began from his teenage years – “I came from a Christian Roman Catholic point of view, and I felt that the religion that I lived was too humanised or too personalised. I believe that the principle of religion must be also transcendent, and that’s when I started becoming interested in spirituality. I went to the opposite on the spectrum, Zen Buddhism, which is mostly about nirvana, the infinite, emptiness. Later on, I discovered how the various traditions of the world have the same common metaphysical experience or core … of course I had to study, so that was the discipline I chose.”

Currently he teaches at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar, where he is also editor-in-chief of Religions-Addyan, an inter-religions journal published by the Doha International Center for Interfaith Dialogue. The journal provides a platform for inter-religion dialogue and discourse; as Patrick Laude puts it: Religions-Addyan promotes general communication between religions in order to gain a better understanding.” Undoubtedly, in this time of global turmoil and extremism, interfaith discussions and discourse leading to finding common ground are more important than ever.

Patrick Laude is engaged in a vital task for us all. n

On Love and Suffering Sayeeda Ahmad on Patrick Laude

Patrick Laude (extreme right)

on the third day at Dhaka Hay an interesting session took place on the intricacies and difficulties of translating literary works from Bengali to English. It was moderated by Kate Griffin of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT) based at the University of East Anglia. The other

members of the Hay session were Dr Kaiser Haq, Shaheen Akhter and Arunava Sinha.

The session grew out of a workshop organised by the Dhaka Translation Center (DTC) in collaboration with BCLT, Commonwealth Writers (the cultural initiative of the Commonwealth Foundation), and English PEN. Emma D’Costa, representing Commonwealth Writers, was in attendance. The Dhaka Translation Center has been newly set up in affiliation with Bengal Lights Books under the University

of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. It took place in the week preceding the Hay Festival. The workshop was conducted by Arunava Sinha, who

is perhaps the leading translator of Bengali works into English. His celebrated translation of Shankor’s Chowringhee has won awards and accolades from all.

The workshop included 10 participants, who had been selected from across the country. Dr. Fakrul Alam, Professor of English at the University of Dhaka, Kate Griffin, and Khademul Islam, Editor of Bengal Lights Books, also addressed the participants during the workshop’s plenary sessions.

On the final day of the workshop at BLB premises, I talked with Arunava. “Translation work interests me because it’s in the strange area where it straddles both mathematical precision as well as creative expression,” he said. Kate Griffin from BCLT said, “Translation workers mostly work in isolation. But we thought this would be a good platform for them to come together. We wanted them to think about the fact that there never really is the right answer, but that there are the possibilities that you have to take into consideration as a translator.”

The participants were given five days to translate Bangladeshi writer Shaheen Akhtar’s short story Bhalobashar Porithee through a process called “consensus translation” wherein the translators collaborate and come up with the translation together to present to the hosts at the end of each day. “I was very interested when I heard Arunava would be translating my work,” said Shaheen. “Although my story is called Bhalobashar Protithi, they haven’t decided on an English title yet. They’ll do that at the end.”

“In this case, you’re translating across cultures. When you translate

Dhaka Translation Centre on KKTea Stage Samira Sadeque with Arunava Sinha and Kate Griffin

Arunava Sinha, Shaheen Akhtar, Kaiser Haq and Kate Griffin


Quiet, graceful, with a lovely, soothing voice that reminds one of the rolling hills of England – this is the impression the Iranian-born British poet Mimi Khalvati gave when she recited her poem, “Writing Home,” at this year’s Dhaka Hay Festival. The poem drew from Khalvati’s experience

of writing to her mother from the Isle of Wight. Her parents had put her on a plane at the age of six, and sent her to boarding school there. “It wasn’t unusual, of course,” she told me, “to send your kids to have a good English education, but I think it was unusual at that age.” Her mother separated from her father soon after, and times became difficult – Khalvati’s visits were sporadic at best, though occasionally her mother would visit her in England.

When Khalvati was 14, she visited Tehran, but by then there was a yawning gulf between her and her family – though they showered love on her, they saw her as English person. She, on the other hand, couldn’t speak Persian, and had no idea who they were. At 17, she moved to Tehran and went through an eventful phase – worked as a secretary to save money to go to an English university, married an Iranian, and divorced. Later she went to the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, attended the Drama Centre in London, and worked in the theatre as an actress. She married again, an English actor, went to Tehran on a summer holiday, and as can happen, stayed for four years. A daughter was born there.

This was pre-revolution Iran. Khalvati worked as a director at the Theatre Workshop Tehran, translating plays from English into Persian, working on new plays, and co-founded the Theatre-in-Exile group. It was difficult, at first, because while at first she could barely speak Persian, she soon re-learnt it working closely with Iranian theatre folks. Iranian society “seemed almost secular to me then,” she said. “We weren’t aware of any religious pressures, only political ones as the Shah’s regime was so oppressive, and we had to be careful of the constant presence of Savak members (secret police). But the Shah was pouring money into the arts in a bid to put Iran on the international cultural map, and in many ways it was a very creative and innovative time – artists such as Peter Brook and Robert Wilson, the experimental theatre director, were producing theatre works at the Shiraz Arts Festival, for example, and Western artists were made very welcome.”

Has she gone back to Iran since that visit? What about artistic freedom in the Islamic state? “After the revolution, I only visited once, in the mid-‘80s during the Iran/Iraq war, on a brief visit after my grandmother’s

death. I found Tehran wholly changed, almost unrecognisable to me after an absence of more than a decade. Sadly, I have very few connections – if any – at the moment with Iran or with family members remaining there, since my mother’s death – and am unable to comment on artistic activity there now through any first-hand experience.”

Though Persian, she is essentially a British poet who calls London home, and teaches at the London Poetry School, which she also founded. Khalvati mentions William Wordsworth as a major influence on her works, along with prose stylists Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf. Her first book, In Written Ink, came out in 1991, with several other collections since. Her latest is a book-length series of poems called The Weather Wheel, which came out earlier this year.

How does she start on a poem? “Most poets have a way, a line, an image, but I don’t usually start with a subject. When writing this book, I was completely blank. I had nothing.” At some point, weather became a sort of springboard. “I took the vaguer subject of weather in England, which itself is vague, because one minute it’s rain, and one minute it’s sunlight! I’m very hypersensitive to weather. I took that not as a subject but as a starting point, and then I just followed the word. And then one ended up as a poem about a mouse, and one ended up as a poem about a boat. You know, I don’t know where they’re going to go. And I like the idea of letting them go where they want.” During this time, her mother passed away. It brought in an elegiac, “darker undercurrent. I think of this book as much more light, more celebratory, more fun actually than my previous books were. But then my mother’s seriousness came into these occasional poems.” n

An Iranian-English Poet Sayeeda Ahmad in a conversation with Mimi Khalvati

Sayeeda with Mimi Khalvavati

from one European language to another, there are certain similarities,” said Arunava. “But here, you’re translating across vastly different cultures – both in terms of space and in terms of frame of reference. On the one hand you don’t want to normalize your translation to the point where the reader thinks it’s happened in a far-off land; on the other hand you don’t want to create complete alienation.”

“This is a new experience for me. There are some things we don’t write consciously – we write from our subconscious, without giving a lot of attention to a particular detail,” said Shaheen. “So, some of the questions from the participants about why I wrote what I wrote make me think and pay attention to some details in my own works well.”

“If you think of literature as a conversation, it tends to be one way– with English writers who write in English talking a lot without having the opportunity to listen to what writers in the other languages are saying,” said Kate. “A lot of literature in English goes around the world very easily. And the focus of BCLT is to encourage translation of other

languages into English, so that the UK readers get to read a greater range of literature and also for the UK writers to understand what their fellow writers are writing about, to understand other literary traditions.”

Arunava, winding up the conversation, opined that “There is such a great wealth of literature in Bangladesh and it’s a pity that the world hasn’t read most of it. And I just hope that changes. Today, translation is very important as a national literary strategy for Bangladesh.” n


a Qayyum Khan was on a panel at Hay Dhaka with journalist Salil Tripathy to talk about the latter’s book on Bangladesh, The Colonel Who Would Not Repent. And the “repercussions of the Bangladesh war,” according to the program

notes. It is a war that Qayyum knows intimately, having fought as a Mukti Bahini guerrilla. He has written about it in a book titled A Bittersweet Victory; A Freedom Fighter’s Tale (UPL; November 2013).

There are two distinct parts to Qayyum’s memoir. One is the account of his wartime experience as a freedom fighter, plus his time in the Bangladeshi Army after independence. The other part charts his growing sense of disillusionment with the country he fought to free. He builds a case for the disenchantment, going through books and compiling a dossier of betrayals, lies and corruption of many notables of the Awami League in 1971 and after. The severe indictment is woven throughout the book. It is a measure of Qayyum’s courage that he does not hesitate to speak freely during these fraught times – evidence that the old fire still burns in his belly. There are also chunks devoted to the international context of the war, all of which are rather old hat. On balance, therefore, this recycling of other texts makes this the less interesting part of the book.

But his recounting of his time as a Mukti fighter is electric. Mukti Bahini organization and strategy underwent changes over the nine-month period of the Liberation War, from the initial low-level attacks to the second phase of organizing itself into a guerrilla force. The last phase was the formation of a regular army with an officer corps, which was ongoing when the Indians intervened directly, and everything came to a swift conclusion. These three phases are vividly brought to life in Qayyum’s book, through the beginning confusion, terror and flight from Dhaka, when he crossed over into Tripura. The first Muktis, he notes sorrowfully, “…just sacrificed themselves …We know very little about these early fighters.” In India he joined a camp at Motinagar, met up with old friends and acquaintances from Dhaka, including Sheikh Kamal. Eventually he ended up in Balurghat in West Bengal, where he, along with others, was selected for officer training at Murtee camp – “in

the Himalayan foothills with the high mountain ranges in the north.” After fifteen weeks of training, he saw combat in Sector 7. Though he writes about grim times, there is also the occasional laughter in the dark, interspersed amid the blood and gore.

This section, dramatic and lively, with its detailed descriptions of camp life and training by Indians, of the combat itself, including cases of friendly fire, surely is a first among our wartime memoirs. It is Qayyum’s real and lasting contribution to the literature on the Liberation War.

n

Guerrilla by Shahzaman Mozumder (Daily Star Books, 2014) was launched at the Hay. If Qayyum’s account is that of an officer, Mozumder’s is, as he puts it, that of the “regular sepoy.” As such, his is a closely-maintained focus on almost eight months of unrelenting combat, months of it barefoot. He was just over fifteen years old when he joined the Mukti Bahini in the Teliapara area of Sylhet. Unlike Qayyum’s book, here nothing else intrudes, no other books and authors, no long quotations or references – just camp, training, patrols, ambushes, firefights, Pakistan army, guerrillas, close calls, Joy Bangla battle cry, AK-47s and rocket launchers, Star cigarettes and the ecstasy of eating shorshay ilish after getting his monthly pay of Rs 30 in July. All this is related in a fairly matter-of-fact tone that is the great strength of his book – in fact, the absence of melodrama or special effects makes the combat

scenes come alive in a very real way. Mozumder’s book is remarkable not only for its specifics about Mukti Bahini tactics and armaments, but also for its acute rendition of the general atmosphere in which the battles were fought. Both books frankly discuss desertions, friendly fire, the fog of war, and wrong tactics, such as frontal assaults in which lots of lives were needlessly lost. Mozumder’s is also possibly the first detailed account from a Mukti Bahini guerrilla – Indian army accounts aside – of the battles of Akhaura and Ashuganj. Akhaura was a major test for the Indians entering the fray, and Ashugang compelled them to a far higher sense of discipline and resolve.

n

Sound editing is missing in both books. Regrettably, one of the jokes of the Hay festival was the subtitle of Mozumder’s book – the word “memorandum” instead of “memoir.” In Qayyum’s book there are Banglish sentences such as “His advise (sic) sounded sound,” and careless statements – a footnote informs us that Enayetullah Khan, editor of Holiday, was arrested before August 20, 1972, when in fact he was arrested on May 14, 1975. Shahzaman’s book suffers from wildly uneven language, which can suddenly, and jarringly, veer from Queen’s English to street slang – “scared shitless” or “chickenshit.” The author’s voice needs to be consistent. Towards the end of Guerrilla, some of the writing appears rushed. For example, Mozumder writes that, “For unknown reasons the Pakistanis did not defend Brahmanbaria and it fell to the joint forces without a fight,” when the reason is actually well-known. The Indians, after suffering heavy casualties in the pitched battle for Akhaura, decided from then on to go around built-up defensive bunkers instead of conducting head-on charges. The Pakistanis, sensing the encircling

Liberation War at the Hay Khademul Islam

Quayyum Khan has achieved a marvelous fusion of reminiscence and research in his memoir of the independence war. On the one hand, we have a gripping account of the ardors of training and the nervous excitement of combat; on the other, a conspectus of the complexities that inevitably surround such a momentous event in history.

Shahzaman Mozumder’s story is among the most exciting and touching of war narratives. Throughout the book there is a chilling realism, leavened with occasional touches of humour. There is admirable balance in the overall picture. The contribution of our Indian allies is generously acknowledged. And in indicting the Pakistanis there is no histrionics. I want to address three words to my old comrade-in-arms: I salute you.

– Kaiser Haq Company Commander

Alpha Company Hamzapur sub-sector

Sector 7 Mukti Bahini

S M Islam, A Qayyum Khan Kaiser Haq, Shahzaman Mozumder


Extracts

(At camp) the NCO instructors conducted the weapons training but they were not comfortable dealing with university students… In the Pakistan army, soldiers of the East Bengal regiment were taught their craft in Roman Urdu. The NCOs tried to teach us just as they were taught. They began with khlona-jorna (stripping and assembling). Our NCO instructor started the class by saying “Iss purza ko kehta hae…” (this part is known as…) in Urdu.“Why are you speaking in Urdu?” we protested immediately.“Urdu is the army’s language!”“The Pakistan Army’s language! This is the Bangladesh army! No Urdu here! And if you don’t speak in Bangla we won’t listen to you!” we told him.The complaint reached the Subedar Major. (He tried to calm us and go on with training, but we refused)… The matter went up to Khaled Mosharraf who was greatly amused. “Shalara, they are such fools! It has not dawned on them that they no longer have to speak in Urdu!” he said laughing. He immediately issued an order: henceforth there would be no more communication in Urdu.

- A Qayyum Khan

I reached the last hut and using it as cover, began peering at the bunker thought the sight of my rifle. My position was perfect. I could see the barrel of the (Pakistani) LMG belching fire but the gunner was not visible. I could discern movement inside the bunker which meant that there was more than one person in there. As our other group on the right began firing, the LMG swung towards them and the gunner’s face came into my rifle’s sight. I controlled the temptation to squeeze off a hasty shot and took deliberate aim at the face, held my breath, and slowly pressed the trigger. A single shot rang out. I must have blinked because the next thing I glimpsed was the face turning red and then disappearing from view. I was certain my shot struck him in the face. The LMG had fallen silent but soon resumed firing. By now, other freedom fighters had joined our group and we poured an avalanche of lead into the bunker. Finally, all firing from it ceased. When we captured it we found lots of blood and one corpse – shot just below the temple. This was my first confirmed kill.

- Shahzaman Mozumder

When I came back from Hay Festival Dhaka I have to admit friends and family in Kolkata were not that interested in what writers I met. Did you eat ilish, they asked. What about Dhakai biryani? Is it better than Kolkata’s? Actually they were not far off the

mark. Writers might pretend to be about intellectual pursuits but in reality we want to drink, smoke, eat and flirt. A literature festival is a forum that allows us to legitimately do all that and still feel like we are involved in some kind of loftier pursuit.

A few years ago the fabled Jaipur Literature Festival almost came to a grinding standstill not because of any threat to freedom of expression but because the delegates discovered two dry days in the middle of the festival. Writers and publishers, faced with the prospect of socializing with each other without the lubricating help of alcohol, simply panicked. “You mean we have to be nice to each other without booze?” said an incredulous friend. A publisher’s party at a fancy hotel was postponed. A famous commentator invited the privileged few to his hotel suite for private parties because, as he said airily, dry days are for the plebes. When the bar re-opened at midnight, the beers cost twice as much but people just queued up anyway. The relief was palpable.

At Hay Dhaka there is always a nervous delegate who wants to know if Bangladesh is “dry”. But firewater is part of the fabled hospitality and the only business card I came away with from Hay Dhaka was from the barman of a party I attended. We also concocted a drink once there. We called it Daabka – a bit of vodka inside a green coconut. It felt very ethnically correct and locally appropriate. One could sip it with a tinge of moral cultural superiority.

But somewhere in between the traffic jams and the social jamborees, the literature also happens. Jung Chang talks about Chinese dowager empresses. Salil Tripathi launches a book about a colonel who would not repent. Lucy Hawking packs the theater asking if science matters.

Bengali poets elocute with tremulous passion. And the president of PEN International listens to Nazrul poems done in a riveting capella. And eager young people actually buy books.

Between gossip about who said what last night, snide barbs about the latest literary wunderkind and the astonishment of wandering into an absorbing discussion one did not expect, one also discovers that sahitya-charcha does not just follow the program laid out in the catalogue. It exists in the gaps in between the scheduled programming, in chance conversation on the dusty lawns, in serendipitous discoveries at the bookstore, and yes, in selfies at the party on a rooftop under the stars.

Will you come back again someone asked me. Of course, as long as there is smoked ilish and blended whisky alongside the sahitya-charcha. And some kalo jaam juice from Thanda Garam to help digest it all. That alone is worth crossing the border for. n

n Sandip Roy is a Senior Editor with Firstpost.com. His forthcoming novel is Don’t Let Him Know (Bloomsbury).

Literature Also Happens Sandip Roy

Sandip (L) moderating DuiBhasha session

move, retreated to Ashuganj, where Indian soldiers of 18th Rajput Rifles and 10th Bihar Regiment, fooled into thinking it was a cakewalk, walked straight into a lethal ambush – an ambush that Mozumder does describe in riveting terms. In books such as these, it is absolutely necessary to also provide an adequate number of maps – there is no other way to negotiate sensibly though the maze of battlefields, camps, operational areas or movements of the protagonists.

In conclusion, war memoirs such as Qayyum’s and Mozumder’s are invaluable on general principles. In 2010, the Indian Army

accidentally found out all its records pertaining to the Mukti Bahihi had been deliberately destroyed (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Truth-lost-Most-military-records-of-Bangladesh-war-missing/articleshow/5907855.cms). The only reliable history – comparatively speaking – we have of our side of the war, of the Mukti Bahini, now are these books by ex-freedom fighters. One hopes, therefore, that more of them join Mozumder and Qayyum in writing about the Liberation War. n


Q: Spoken word is a coming together of poetry, theatre, music – what do you view spoken word as? Is there a difference between spoken word and performance poetry?

A: The term ‘spoken word’ has been both a friend and a potential problem. I’ve encountered many publishers, once recommended someone’s work to publish, shy away at the last minute with “Oh we don’t do that sort of thing” when they hear a poet does performance poetry. As though immediately, by naming something as ‘performance poetry’ or ‘spoken word’, you bring into question the degree of craftsmanship and work that goes into it.

It’s also problematic because it’s not an intuitive term native to Botswana. And by this I mean that we only have one word for poet. It is gender-neutral, and it has no qualifier such as ‘spoken word’ poet,

‘performance’ poet. The assumption is that every single poet has to be able to read their work out loud, even if they write it, or to compose work on the spot and share it out loud; anyone can walk up to you when you say you are a poet, and want to hear your poem, not so much to read it, which they can do later.

This is the trap with such terms that I don’t want to fall into. But having made that position clear, I think even within what’s referred to as ‘spoken word’ and ‘performance poetry’, there are so many variations. I am quite physically inanimate on stage. I don’t move around, I don’t dance, I don’t dress in a particular way, I very rarely work with

music - anything from a 17-piece band of professional musicians to the 6-piece concept band that I belong to, to just one person on guitar. But this for me is not the instinctive place I go to.

Q: What I understand from how you describe the culture in Botswana is that spoken word, performance poetry is not really anything new; it’s traditional and these are just new terms for things that already existed. In Bangladesh we don’t have a “scene” as such for this kind of poetry and we’ve been trying to build one from the ground up, with the assistance of institutions such as the British Council and workshops organised by them. Would you say you had to distinguish yourself separately from the culture that already existed and build a scene, or

was the audience already there?A: Both. The audience was there because like you say, it’s part of the

(Botswana) culture. So people were used to hearing a poet. But not on a stage with other poets; rather at social events such as a wedding. I’ve even heard one or two at funerals; I’m not sure if that is a national thing but sometimes people ask poets to come to a funeral and read poetry. It is not surprising or shocking given how often poems deal with death and loss. So the audience were there in that sense, they weren’t hearing poetry for the first time. They had come across it in different social elements. But not on a fixed stage with 10-15 poets, or a festival such as this. So we created something, such as the festival that is happening now, only much, much smaller. We got together sometime between 2000 and 2003. It grew and it gained a name. It was mostly 18-19-20-year olds who just got together in different ways, knew each other, and some people just joined us because they heard we were maybe meeting at a cafe.

Q: Let’s talk about language. You mentioned during your session with Sabrina Mahfouz at the Cosmic Tent that your native languages were ruled out of the classroom and you had to speak in English or you would be punished.

A: Let me not speak with a national voice, but I have definitely come across instances where I have realised that the English language has now been tied to years of class-ism. There is an assumption that if you speak English, you must be intelligent. There are people who are amazingly articulate in Kalanga, Setswana, and of course they are, they have spoken it all their lives but in the city English is seen as a mark of sophistication. But I think it is changing and people are seeing that this is no measure of intelligence or kindness or goodness. It’s just a reflection of their background and where they grew up. As you and I say, I couldn’t learn Kalanga in any institution growing up. It is the national language, but it is not my first language, and in school we only did this in language class. But English not only had a language class, we studied everything in English. It was the medium of instruction, of communication. These associations and hangovers are things we need to get over. We need to find conscious ways to making our own languages “cool” again, of recognising the cool in them because they are. n

TJ Dema on the ‘Spoken Word’ and English Ahsan Sajid talks to a poet from Botswana

If you were at the second day of Hay around evening time and noticed a throng of people at the lawn, gaping and awe-struck, it was because of the performances by Lakshmi Pamuntjak, Kosal Khiev, Sabrina Mahfouz and TJ Dema. Festival regulars said they had never seen such a crowd gather for any session on any previous year. If you were baffled by a similar gathering the next day at noon, it was because of fanboys and fangirls flocking to take “selfies” with these cool poets. These selfies may have been the highlight of many a festival-goer’s experience. Yours truly was also part of this crowd, waiting to grab a little conversation with TJ Dema, who wowed the audience a day earlier by declaring “All poetry is bullshit” – thus immediately piquing my intrigue. TJ finally managed to get away and we got that talk over a very late lunch – butter chicken, naan and dal.

Photo: Nashirul Islam


Wi t h i n m i n u t e s o f m e e t i n g G i d e o n

Haigh he gets one through my bat and pad – a top spinner, Magnus effect and all that jazz. We are sitting in the lobby of Sonargaon hotel. In order to make it there on time I had ditched the car stalled in traffic and hoofed it here in double time. Phew, Dhaka pavements! I tell him, that

bloody road crossing in Kawran Bazar, buses like bullets micro-inches from my toes… Yeah, he says. Then a little while later he lets slip that he walked from Bangla Academy to the hotel that day. Walked? I ask. Yes, he says. How was it? Great! Good walk, he says. I feel skittled. Here I am, a Dhaka resident, bitching and moaning about its pavements and traffic. And Gideon, his first visit to Dhaka, unfazed, merrily skipping his way through it all. Ricky Ponting hit by a 90 mph zinger on his elbow, doesn’t even look at it, no whining, no moaning. Damn Aussies – that tough rawhide shit of theirs!

It’s the same with Gideon. When later we discuss Australian writing and authors, he says it’s heavily subsidized by the government. “Not me,” he says, with a sudden flinty grin that Aussies otherwise bare only to the Poms during the Ashes, “never took a dime. Earned it with the sweat of my brow, every last penny.”

Gideon does do a good Sardarji voice. He was in Delhi, he says, and dropping his voice an octave, does the question Bedi had asked him, “So, Gideon, are you on Twitter?”

I laugh. Are you, I ask. In reply Gideon gives a palpable shudder. Though he must have heard a zillion cricket stories by now, he can

still crack up at one more. When he says his favorite Pakistani cricketers were Wasim Hasan Raja and Majid Khan, I tell him that back in Karachi in the 1960s I had gone to see the MCC Under 25s led by Brearley play the Pakistanis. In those days they didn’t wear helmets, and after Geoff Brown let three bouncers fly at Majid, there had been a confrontation between the two in the middle of the pitch. The plucky but undersized umpire raced between them, reached heavenwards to place his hands on their chests – the two cricketers were both tall burly men – braced his legs and pushed, pushed till they were apart. The crowd had roared and thumped their feet in approval. Kirket, yaar, what to do, nah!

But that was only later. Gideon is sharp and watchful, drops his guard slowly. I was eager to meet him. Of all the writers – sorry, guys, but the truth is the truth – at Hay Dhaka this was the one guy I wanted to have a chat with. It was not that I had read his cricket books and liked them – I did, but I had not read that many of them since I couldn’t get my hands on them easily – or the fact that he was a prolific (actually giving new meaning to the word!), or that his Ashes blogs in the Guardian were s-o-o-o good, but that, one, he brought a different sensibility to cricket writing. There’s lots of good writing on cricket these days – some from South Asia – but who else would bring in Robert Musil on a piece on Warne, or Hillaire Belloc on an article on Adam Gilchrist: ‘Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not.’ The second thing was that over the last year I had begun to be aware that Gideon had written on a variety of subjects, from the legalization of abortion to digital media.

A cricket writer on legalization of abortions? How did that come about? Well, he got interested in the subject after an ex-girlfriend mentioned the word ‘Mehennitt’. What was that, he had asked. And the answer, that it was the name of the Australian judge who gave the landmark ruling on abortion, got him curiouser and curiouser, so he went researching and wrote a book. “One book propagates another. Things lead on,” he says.

There is something of the omnivorous, self-taught intellectual about him, restless, brainy, bushy-tailed, and bookish. Very bookish. He was born in Geelong (pronounced Jeelong he corrected me), was a voracious reader, but after finishing school decided not to go to college. Instead he joined the business desk of a newspaper, and till today remains interested in business and industry issues, writing books on CEOs, asbestos, the Australian car industry. On BHP, the Australian mining behemoth. While at the paper, he shut himself up in a room and wrote The Cricket War: The Inside Story of Kerry Packer’s World Series Cricket, the book that made him. He has not looked back since. And has kept on reading and started on his library – there are photos on the Net on his sizable collection of books. As I said, an omnivorous, restless intellect, backed by a very independent Aussie spine.

I didn’t talk too much about state of cricket today with him. Gideon’s views on money and corruption in cricket, the Big Three, the Position Paper, etc., are well-known and easily available on the Web. We did talk about the hiding administered to Michael Clarke’s Australia by Pakistan in Dubai – “What a series, eh!” we both kept marveling. So is the Test thing going to die out? “I don’t know,” he sighs at this point, “the more money the boards get from their T20s, the more they should funnel it to the Test system to enable it to survive and thrive. Instead… I don’t know…” he trails off.

So we talked about Aussie politics, right wingers, racism, writers, Mohinder Amarnath, his article on book reviewing in a lit mag that drew so much flak, and his book Many A Slip, about his cricket club the Yarras. I tell him it was fun reading, in the same vein as A Hard Yakka and Rain Men. “Uh huh, maybe,” he said. “A lot of people didn’t believe some of the things in there, but it’s all true. It was first written as columns for the Guardian. I thought nobody would read it, so I wrote about things just as they were. If I had written it as a book from the start maybe it would have been different.”

Book or columns, however things start with Gideon, however one thing propagates another, one can’t see him dissembling, even artfully. He is incapable of it.

I tell him that at the last Hay Kamila and I and Shehan (of Chinaman fame) had talked about cricket. “Yes, they should always get cricket into the mix,” he said. Well, I think, they got a good one this time, thanks to the quick thinking by the Australian High Commission.

Too soon the talk is over. It’s time to go. I shake hands, get my copy of On Warne signed, and walk out of the hotel. Outside Dhaka traffic sneezes, coughs, clears the phlegm in its throat, roars, bellows, but I am indifferent to it all, an Aussie for the time being. n

Gideon Haigh: “One book propagates another!” Khademul Islam

Salil Tripathy

“Took my seat for Dhaka next to Salil Tripathi, the epically well-travelled Indian journalist, who in addition to having just written a fine new book about the Bangladesh war of liberation turned out to be a serious cricket fan. A serious cricket discussion ensued. ‘What’s the number of this flight, Salil?’ I asked finally as we filled out the customs forms before landing. ‘Zaheer Abbas at the Oval, 1971,’ said Salil: that is, 274. “

- Gideon Haigh, ‘Dhaka Caravan’ – December 1, 2014 (from his Cuts and Glances A Sideways Look at Cricket blog in The Australian newspaper)

n

Khademul Islam is a Bangladeshi writer and translator.

Gideon Haigh with Zafar Sobhan

24 pbARTS & LETTERS DHAKA TRIBUNE SUNDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2014

for the handful of publishers of English-language books in Bangladesh, Hay Dhaka provides a crucial (perhaps ONLY) entry point into a nascent market of both emerging writers and a budding English readership. So it becomes all about the books that you publish, the panels that launch them, and

the stalls that sell them. But if you’re part of a publishing team, forget about enjoying any of the

attractions the festival has to offer. You have work to do. Boy, do you, and some!

First, of course, come the books – selection, editing, editing, editing, design, and printing. That particular period of insanity is material for a whole separate article – or articles, truth be told – in itself, so let’s fast forward to the point where your books are at the press and you’re basically spending any and all free time on your knees praying that the chhapakhanar bhoot afflicts the Other Guy. In between the prayers – forget meals unless you can call the half-eaten shingara and a cuppa of tepid something a “meal” – you’re on the phone threatening your press guy great bodily harm if the books are not delivered on time! He’s not really worried, since this is a call he’s received from you EVERY MORNING for the last two weeks. But this is Dhaka! So his Zen-like calm will last till it’s some 30-odd hours before deadline and his press has suddenly received “urgent orders” to print the police department’s annual report.

Tell the police to wait their turn? I think not. So mere hours before Zero Hour, you shut up and get in line.

This is also when you start becoming the sudden best friend (read stalker) of your friendly, neighbourhood Hay Dhaka representative. You need to make sure your authors have been properly represented. Are they on the right panels? And the times? If they are on First Thing Thursday Morning or Right After Lunch On Friday – you are dead in the

water! So you need to look at the schedule. So, is the schedule ready? When can I get my hands on it? Great, so this is the FINAL version? No? Ok, so when do you think that will be available?

Now that you’ve promised me the BEST PANEL TIMINGS, DUDE, WHERE’S MY STALL?

Keep in mind you’re one of about ten thousand people the Hay team is juggling with right around this time of the year, all making equally crazy demands. There’s bound to be some confusion:

“Yes, hi! Ummm, so, there is a bamboo pole running through the middle of my stall. It’s, like, really cramping our style.”

“Yes, that would be the stall divider. Two stalls, you said.”

“I know, but I meant one big one that’s the size of two.”“Well, that’s not what you said.”“Yes, I may have used the word ‘contiguous.’”“Well, if you want one big stall, we can build you one there” [pointing

to a remote back corner of the grounds which you distinctly remember from last year was the very spot for the unofficial public toilet.]

Cut to the night before D-Day. The festival ground is abuzz with sounds of sawing and hammering as the last few stalls come together and decorations are set up. The work goes on into the early hours of the morning, punctuated by tea or khichuri breaks. It is impossible to leave the work to the carpenters or the bannerwallahs – you run the distinct risk of coming back in the morning to a stall not quite like the one originally designed. You may even find the work unfinished; your hired hands nowhere to be seen. So instead, you brave the dank cold of a Dhaka November and dig in for the long haul.

Needless to say, by now you should have all your stall materials in hand. But you haven’t accounted for the r i c k s h a w a l l a h driving off with your bag of nails and hinges. And these have now become THE LAST NAILS AND HINGES available in Dhaka.

8:15 pm – Nails and hinges bought, heading to venue. Lovely night for

a rickshaw ride along the wide DU Campus avenues. You’ve finally let your mind drift from the task at hand. Now you’ve really lost yourself in a Hay-inspired dream of returning kings enjoying black-hole spaghetti. You waft back into Bangla Academy. Under the halogen spotlights, the roughly illuminated outline of your still-not-finished Hay stall resembles a lonely shipwreck.

9:28 pm – The panicked jabbering of the kaath-mistri wrenches you back to reality. You realise you’ve left everything on your rickshaw. It’s past closing time for most shops now. It’s a mad dash around town to try and salvage what you can. As you promise your first-born in exchange for a pair of hinges in Changkharpul, you feel not unlike your friends in the drug business.

11:52 pm – Back on the grounds, got everything – AGAIN! The banners look skewed, but the banner guy is telling you it will “fix itself” by morning. The carpenters are throwing a tantrum so you send them off on a twenty-minute tea break.

12:37 am – Carpenters not back yet. You’re starting to question your generosity re their tea break.

1:24 am - Still no carpenters. You’re debating the feasibility of a YouTube crash course in table-making.

2:19 am – Carpenters back. They seem in good cheer so you decide to postpone your lecture on professionalism and work ethics.

4:10 am – Back home. Stall complete. More prayers – you are in actual danger of becoming a good Muslim. Alarm set for 7 am. Emergency run to the press to pick up your books before a mad dash to get in to the Hay venue in time for the opening ceremony crowd.

It’s going to be a very l-o-o-o-n-g weekend. Oh Allah, give me strength, give me powah! n

Chapakhanar Bhoot and all that! Q P Alam

This is also when you start becoming the sudden best friend (read stalker) of your friendly, neighbourhood Hay Dhaka representative. You need to make sure your authors have been properly represented.

n

Q P Alam is managing editor,

Bengal Lights Books.

Before After

Dec hay 14

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Transcript of Dec hay 14