A country coming to life

Edited by Rifat Munim, the leafy, magical cover of Bangladesh: A Literary Journey Through 50 Short Stories reminds one of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967). Like the founding of Macondo in an uninhabited swampland, the boatman floating up a lake between two villages on A Literary Journey's cover instils a sense of entering and exploring a new territory. This effect is not limited to the cover; the stories in the volume will also consume the readers into a hypnotic consciousness as they discover a country teetering from one crisis (the Partition of 1947) to another (the West Pakistani dominance until 1971).

The opening story of the collection, "The Tale of a Tulsi Plant", even without a cast of fully-fleshed characters, is an excellent allegory about inheritance, memory, and communalism. In "Hands", a visceral story about loss, we follow a man with a supernatural pair of hands who can repair irreparable things; "The Musings of A Gravedigger" is a Dickensian insight into human beings' multifaceted relationships with mortality and religion. Salimuddi's son strikes an unlikely–and a stomach churning–bond with a dog in "Milk", triggering an irreversible consequence for the entire village. 

Weaving the grand themes of politics and history, the book is a revelation into how the ordinary lives within a country are buffeted by constant changes. It is as much local as it is universal; sorrow, happiness, and everything in between and beyond define the characters' circumstances. Even someone with absolutely no prior knowledge about Bangladesh can find the collection worth their time as it's not filled with cultural jargons and references that only Bangladeshis can comprehend or contextualise. The translated prose, often lush, atmospheric, fast, and ornamental, was a bonus for someone like me who prefers the similar styles found in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (1981), Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2005), and VS Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). Although I haven't read the stories in the original Bangla, I could tell from the translators' authorial voice that the process of translation did not dilute the compelling effect of the original stories.

Shah Tazrian Ashrafi is the author of The Hippo Girl & Other Stories (Hachette India, 2024).