A note from the translators:
The following is excerpted from the second chapter of Mahmudul Haque’s Jibon Amar Bon (My Sister, Life) – a tribute to the Russian writer Boris Pasternak’s poem with the same title. Jibon Amar Bon is one of the most significant works of fiction from Bangladesh. Haque wrote it in 1972, right after Bangladesh became independent in December the previous year, and it was first published in the Eid supplement of the magazine Bichitra in 1973. It came out in book form in May 1976 and has remained in print ever since. In 2023, the Bangla Academy in Dhaka included the book in the first volume of a four-volume publication of the complete works of the author, Mahmudul Haque Rochonaboli.
Written just after the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, the novel’s unsentimental approach to the liberation movement is striking. Jibon Amar Bon alternates between conversational banter and stream-of-consciousness introspection, between indoor and outdoor scenes. This excerpt begins with the protagonist, Khoka, outside his house, observing and reflecting on the political turmoil around him as conditions in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) become insurrectionary.
In the rest of the novel, the turmoil outside grows more and more intense, and we see the evolution of Khoka’s disdain for the movement as well as his conflicted emotions towards his sister Ranju; his love interest, the married woman Nila Bhabi; and his friends, many of whom grow more and more engaged with the movement outside. The novel hurtles towards a climax with the Pakistani army’s crackdown on the liberation movement on the night of 25 March 1971 – a time of fire and bloodshed signalling the full-scale onset of a war that would continue until Bangladesh won its independence.