A Nomad’s Home was my first published story and one of my favourites overall. Nomad’s concerns two brothers – Abu and Tanim, orphans who have to rely on their wits to survive the cities of Bangladesh. They steal, they forage and they do their best to make sure they never get caught. This story is a story about family, of brotherhood, of knowing that home is not a place, it is people.
Anatomy is a short story written for a friend and describes one of my favourite characters – the girl with no name. I won’t spoil the story here – it is short enough that it can be read in a few minutes. The story is a young girl’s conquest of an inhuman monster, a young bespectacled Beowulf slaying her own Grendel.
A book review for the book The Herd - published in the Daily Star
Dry Spell is explicitly set in Canada – the story acting as a spoof of modern romance and one of my forays into a more comedic style of writing. Essentially the story of Dry Spell is very simple – it is the story of a young woman who is about to be picked up in a coffee shop by a rather clichéd gentleman. However, the story is also an exploration into sexuality in the 21st century, the challenges of young adulthood and of being a stranger in a strange land.
I remember I started writing this story almost five years ago, my first week at my first proper job. Naturally I was underutilized because I was new and they couldn't find anything for me to do. So I started writing this story. Due to it's length, I am breaking down this story into several parts. This is part one.
A Winter’s Tale tells the story of the last moments in a couple’s relationship – the couple, Naima and Nuhash, two students who had come to Canada for higher education and tried to make a life happen. While desperately trying to navigate the storms of young adulthood, Naima realizes that she cannot come to build a life in Canada when her heart lay in her homeland. The story describes two flawed people, trying their best to avoid mutually assured destruction and the heartbreak that comes when goals become irreconcilable. The key themes in this story are about loneliness, the fragility and irrationality that come from being in love and the sad truth that, sometimes, love is not enough, that the world will not make things easy.
The hunt is a short and simple horror story – it is about a man who finds someone at a club and proceeds to seduce her. It’s told from the perspective of an unnamed main character, who meets a girl named Sarika – this man is a philanderer, a man who styles himself as the king. The themes explored in it are mainly how men pursue women as objects to be won over, to be hunted, to be conquered and it is a reversal of those dynamics which I found particularly interesting in this piece. Another key theme that I tried to explore is lust. The result is before you.
Darker Possibilities is a horror story – pure and simple but it makes use of a number of literary techniques which I have shamelessly stolen from much better writers than myself. The story concerns an educated protagonist named Nikhesh, who is living a life of exile in Dublin. Over a beer or several, he speaks to the reader and tells them of his life and how he came to be so far from home. The key themes of this story are guilt and regret, of the inconsolable knowledge that one gets after transcribing one’s life and knowing exactly where mistakes were made.
Love can be dangerous - read to find out. This story takes heavy influence from the writer Mohsin Hamid and Junot Diaz in terms of tone.
Dead Silence is the story of two people – a father and a son. It was originally intended to be a play written for a talented group of stage wizards and it was a story that I needed to write. In essence, Dead Silence is the story of miscommunication – the gap that comes between parent and child, the gap that comes when one tries their best to be the person you parents wanted and in the process, losing who one was meant to be. . As mentioned before, there are two characters, a father and a son – the father wants his son to follow in his footsteps, to show the world and bring honour to the family name by becoming a great doctor and the son wants nothing more than to carve his own path and create a future out of his own talents – namely, photography. The story is told through dialogue and soliloquy.
I remember I started writing this story almost five years ago, my first week at my first proper job. Naturally I was underutilized because I was new and they couldn't find anything for me to do. So I started writing this story. Due to it's length, I am breaking down this story into several parts. This is part one.
The scariest thing a writer can experience is the inability to write – it is the anxiety that, almost anyone can relate to, that suddenly you find yourself waking up one morning unable to do the thing that you love the most, that forms the core of your identity. This is what had happened to Farhan Ahmed, renowned Bangladeshi novelist, who has been unable to write anything good for the past several years. Without his words, he is a man without a purpose and so he takes to drinking and to women to drown out his sorrows. One day, after coming back from another night of inebriation, he finds a gift on his front step – a typewriter, one that promises to help him write. For a price.