Fragments of Riversong/book review

Book author: Farah Ghuznavi

In one of the excursions of my college life, we girls were heading towards Kushtia, to visit kuthibari, then the country house of Rabindranath Tagore, now the tourist attraction of the city. Our bus paused near the Hardinge bridge and we let ourselves out to stretch our body and mind amidst the cozying half awake winter breeze. There, beneath the bridge, I have tasted the best baro vaja, twelve mixed, a street food of Bangladesh prepared by mixing twelve spicy and crunchy ingredients, in my life. A sugar cane field on one side of us, the great Padma on the other side, the mighty Hardinge over our heads and this perfection in my mouth– left a dear memory in my  mind. Which I relived again after reading Fragments a Riversong, a collection of 12 short stories, each cooked with premium, original Bangladeshi spices.

Bangladesh is about– uprising high class citizens who speak Americanized Bangla, farmers who produce the most and receive the least, price hikings just when Ramadan is on its way, crazy  cricket lovers, public examinations’ tension, Facebook hashtags to support a religion that you hardly follow and so on. Farah Ghuznavi picked some of these deshi ingredients, sprinkled indigenous spices on top and made very readable short stories out of them. Her stories cover both the lives of the passengers of six-wheeled cars and the hawkers and beggars who keep knocking the glasses of those air-conditioned cars to convince the people inside to spend on their product or begging. From the lives of female garment workers to immigrant Bangladeshis who speak no Bangla, how she mastered building the stories on such a wide spectrum, I don’t know! And she was at ease playing Bangla terms and our very own cultural instruments like shap ludu, fuchka throughout the book.

I could relate to most of the stories, some with “tell me about it!”, some with “LOL”, some with “ow yeah”, and some with sad nods.

The most unexpected people became ostentatiously pious during this month.

You know which month it is.

It’s such a circus, with everyone trying to outdo everyone else, showing off their expensive saris and gold jewellery. Young girls are expected to dress up, and be on display like cattle at the eid markets.

Boy, weddings in Bangladesh. LOL.

The story about Rana plaza tragedy moved me so much. "We have several urgent orders to ship to Europe, so they won’t shut the factory–they would lose too much money." This gave me goosebumps. I was reminded of my sociology teacher’s lecture where he said “when the poor of a third world country die, it’s the number of deaths, not their names that come into the headlines.”

My personal favorite is Escaping the Mirror. You know the story very well if you are a female (or male with low chance) Bangladeshi. Into whichever class, status of family you were born, you were never protected from perverts in the form of distant or close relatives/acquaintances. You thought, what is this weird thing going on? Nothing similar ever happened to someone else. And it takes you until your 20s or so to understand what happened to you (and to all your girl friends at least!) was sexual abuse, a crime with huge number of victims, yet so under-reported status as you were only seven years old.

I was always proud of the rich Bangla literary works of East and West Bengal, my most read are from the 20th century. We had some excellent short story writers back then like Bonoful, Abu Ishaque. But I have always felt the void of true Bengali, precisely contemporary Bangladeshi stories written in English, that I wanna boast about to the international readers. When I read and recommended Arundhati Roy, Kader Abdolah, Khaled Hosseini, I used to sigh for an English book on contemporary Bangladesh. Now I have a strong recommendation ready in my stock!

I want to thank Aadrita for not only posting her review on this book in Goodreads, that took my attention, but also for answering my desperate query on where I can find this potential gonna-hit-me-strong book. Thank you, girl!