Set in 1990s Dhaka against the backdrop of the military occupation, the novella follows the lives of a young university professor, his wife, and their house help, Phulbanu. The story is narrated entirely from Phulbanu’s perspective.
My teacher Professor Kashinath Roy (1947 2021) poet, short story writer, essayist died on January 17, at 74. Or did he die?
Professor Roy was my direct teacher in the Department of English, Dhaka University (DU), where I studied as an undergraduate. I recall the moment when I first saw him: he immediately stood out from the crowd because of his attire and appearance. Indeed, his immaculate white
pyjama and
panjaabi remained constant in his life attire that also seemed organic to his body and his being making the point that style itself is political.
Professor Roy taught us the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. He had a style of language and a cadence of his own, which stole into the heart with strange and remarkable power. He used to pace back and forth in our classroom, generating a spatial rhythm that we thought harmonised with the temporal movements of his beautifully textured sentences that also exemplified verbal economy. For him teaching was a work of art.