The Book of Dhaka is a collection of short stories.
The first story, Raincoat, is about a professor who is taken by the military in a heavy downpour, as they are suspicious of his involvement in a bombing. The pain from punches makes us doubt the dubious nature of rain.
They took off the raincoat, who know where they put it. But its warmth is still stuck to his body.
The second, The Weapon, is a curious stream of self conscious thought. The narrator makes themselves present by saying 'A story is not life, whose natural end you have to wait for 67 or so years for. Don't you agree?' It is never revealed who the narrator is. In a turn of events, Ponir has to choose to throw a book or a gun. It is interesting that the character's dilemma is to throw rather than choose.
In The Decision, Anu and Adnan, an estranged couple meet at Book fair and discuss why returning would be a troublesome. Clouds gather in the story. They experience torrential rain over the next week. In Mother, a woman chooses to make a decision of leaving that we see coming. The Circle was the most scary story as disappearance is shown so resolutely in the story where the vehicle on which Alam is travelling keeps encountering same things. Alam keeps taking the same road - the bazaar, the ration shop, school office, workshop, Hannan's house. The story ends with "I can't get out, I can't get out." It is the woman in that story, who is sitting at the back of that scooter, getting angry, that really makes me uncomfortable.
There are 5 more stories - Home, The Princess and the Father, Helal was on his Way to Meet Reshma, The Path of Poribibi, The Widening Gyre.
Most of the stories are about helplessness in a way --- be it book fair or sheesham trees or long traffic snarls or roofs of slums. Reading this book is bound to make you sad with the plight of human condition. In the Introduction, K. Anis Ahmed calls Dhaka as a city of contrasts. Which city isn't?
The underlying message kept repeating throughout the book. To deboard this ruthless sadness setting page after page, I began asking - How else do you look at a city? What am I missing from this perspective of living in a city?
And there it was - The Sheesham.
How does ecology play a role in experiencing the city? Where does the ecology go? Does it only lie in the introduction of Dhaka the city, by plane, when about to land in an inundated rice field? Does it only remain as green colour of the book cover?
Why do people matter so much to writing a story about a place? What about the story of wildlife? Would the long shadows of sheesham show some kind of autumn for stories in this kind of city life?