In The Book of Dhaka, a collection of Bengali stories translated into English and edited by Arunava Sinha and Pushpita Alam, Bangladeshi writers have chosen the megapolis as a setting, a subject, a plot device, a character-as an enigma that they are continuing to decode. Dhaka in short story collections is taking shape, with certain attributes and traditions beginning to form.
As more writers enter the fray, the infant Bangladeshi writing in English is beginning to show the first signs of learning how to crawl. It is better served to satiate a different temptation.
Zaman’s turn as an able conduit for Choudhury renders the need to discuss each story in the collection moot.
An anomaly itself, in that someone other than the author introduced the stories in a comprehensive essay running the length of a story, it is part incisive literary analysis and part heartfelt homage to a friend from another Bangladeshi writer who has recently emerged: the DSC longlisted Nadeem Zaman, himself an accomplished short story writer. There is no better guide to the stories in Choudhury’s slim collection than the introduction. Numair Atif Choudhury, like Toole, did not live to see his published words and left them for the passage of time to decide their place in Bangladeshi and world literatures. A Confederacy of Dunces drove John Kennedy Toole to an early grave, putting an end to an emerging voice before it had left the cocoon. Knowing that these are the last printed words of a voice that had only a year ago been added, albeit posthumously, to the cathedral of published works, makes it difficult to judge it purely on its merits. While it is not for the author to defend their work, the industry demands that the author speak to and of it, to boost sales and their profile. The author’s untimely demise has made the standard fare of commenting on his works as they are sent out into the world impossible. The need to search for every piece of information to decode them is more urgent, since this book, like the critically acclaimed novel, Babu Bangladesh! by the same author, is an orphan. To judge a book by its cover, Taxi Wallah and Other Stories is composed of slices of the rainbow splashed on a backdrop of brooding, even melancholy.
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