Blue Venom. Forbidden Incense

Two Novellas

Syed Shamsul Haq

Translated by Saugata Ghosh

 

5.5 x 8 inches, 128pp. May 2018

ISBN : 9780857425010

Rs  499.00 (PB)
$21.50 (PB)
£10.00 (PB)

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Bangladesh in 1971 showed vividly, and terribly, the deadly effects of war. Piles of corpses, torture cells, ash and destruction everywhere in the wake of the Pakistani army’s attacks on Bengali people. Blue Venom and Forbidden Incense, two novellas by Bangladeshi writer Syed Shamsul Haq, bear bleak witness to the mindless violence and death of that period.

 

Blue Venom tells of a middle-aged middle manager who is arrested and taken to a cell, where he is slowly tortured to death for being a namesake of a rebel poet Kazi Nazrul Islam.

 

Forbidden Incense, meanwhile, tells of a woman’s return to her paternal village after her husband was taken by the army. In the village, she meets a boy with a Muslim name whose entire family has been killed; as they attempt together to gather and bury scattered corpses, they, too, are caught by the killers.

Syed Shamsul Haq is an award-winning Bangladeshi poet and writer.

 

Saugata Ghosh works as an analytics professional and a writer/translator. His works have been featured in leading Indian dailies and in World Literature Today. His translations include The Deer Hunt (selected poems of Jibanananda Das), Kalkut's Shamba and Samaresh Basu's BT Road/The Hollow. He lives and works in Gurgaon, India.

Fiction