For iftar during that month we were served milk with rosewater which I found quite delicious, and gulab jamun served as dessert. When some girls didn’t want or didn’t finish their portions they would give it to me and I would accept happily.

It's time to take care of ourselves, both mind and soul, To live a life that is complete and whole.

The pleasing melancholia of Friday morning hovers through the window as a heavy gloom and sways within the fake plastic daisies lying on Marium’s table while the smell of burning spices filled her entire house. Marium’s mother couldn’t care less about the condition of the kitchen now. Her husband has just collapsed to the floor.  

A dream of me in a sea of green.

It began with a faint sound of walls being scratched. Initially, the man believed it to be the normal sounds of an old home settling during the middle of the night.

I spent the whole day running on the roads near Ramna park. Riding a bicycle alone through the narrow alleys of Mohammadpur without the fear of anyone jumping out at me from the corners.

'In Extreme Need of Guidance', the book being serialised here, captures the first sixteen years of Sultana Nahar's life. "Mercolized Wax" is the second chapter in the book.

Come, if you may, with swords or guns. Remember, I won’t cry and run; I will rise from the depths of the land.

She wakes up suddenly from her unnatural beeline posture, slowly and ever so gently, like a chained demon would after just hours of calculated slumber. I never look.

I was nine years of age the first time I set eyes on a Dhaka street. I received my first welcome from a group of beggars tapping on my car window.

When I think of the thick limestone walls of the house now I think of the essence of the generations of our family that it has absorbed.

Are ghosts real? This was the question Mollie, a little 8-year-old girl who lives at the end of our street asked me in a–real–letter she wrote me recently. I had apparently included a book of ghost stories in a bag of books I had given her.

Break me into numbers and spirals, and blood and flesh make me all that I don't wish to be.

Someday, I will write about those places, the cities, monuments, and faces.

But I understand. I am part of a historic pattern. So not everything is personal. I can't help but fall into some of the traps and become prey to some of the vultures.

Showers and storms give way To a surge of sunlight A fragrance of hope floats in On morning breeze

Delicate like butterfly wings, And yet as strong as boulders Her mind is a divine place, Eternal peace on her shoulders. 

Rahman emerged from his grave in the middle of the night. His return from the dead took place in no more than 10 days after his passing away.

Seek if you must If you believe the truth shall set you free And then? We heal.

I don’t remember when they took it down. We asked the building supervisor, the cleaners, anyone who would listen, but nobody had a clue.