Stories of a Bangladesh in crisis | Review of Mashiul Alam’s ‘The Meat Market’, translated by Shabnam Nadiya

Mashiul Alam's vivid stories in The Meat Market, translated by Shabnam Nadiya, reflect Bangladesh's social realities, with surreal elements and a focus on poverty and powerlessness.

He builds his stories on vivid images. The characters often escape the grind through dreams and imagination, and amid the crushing poverty arise howling winds, rain, and swelling rivers. Along with other Bangladeshi writers, Mashiul Alam has often held a mirror to his country’s social, political, cultural and economic realities.

At least one of the stories in The Meat Market, translated by Shabnam Nadiya, is a surreal foretelling of the blackout that has engulfed Bangladesh in the grip of student protests and a severe pushback from the government.

With the onslaught of platforms such as Google and YouTube, media houses have begun to sack employees, and Shagar Sengupta has just been told that he needn’t report for duty at the newspaper he works for anymore. This is how ‘Field Report from Roop Nagar’ begins. But there’s a crisis brewing which needs urgent journalistic attention — the whole town of Roop Nagar is cut off, no one can be reached by telephone, and those deciding to make a trip there also go silent after reaching the place.

Rumours swirl, about killings and tensions, but nothing can be verified. In panic mode, every news outlet, and even the government, despatches reporters, photographers and officials, but the minute they reach Roop Nagar, there is not a squeak from them. There are no easy answers; Alam will not settle things either, and the story takes a turn, verging on horror.

The collection begins with his famous story, ‘Milk’, which also appeared in Bangladesh: A Literary Journey Through 50 Short Stories. The latter is edited by Rifat Munim, who writes in the Foreword that Bangladeshi writers initially built on “the foundation laid by Tagore and the three Bandopadhyays”, Bibhutibhushan, Manik and Tarashankar, of West Bengal, but at the end of the 1970s and post-liberation, its fiction was on the cusp of a breakthrough.

Gradually, the writers have “tilted towards indigenous storytelling traditions and magic realism”. In ‘Milk’, a mother’s milk dries up, and her child seeks out a bereaved dog to fulfil his needs. A terrible tragedy follows, and soon the village is inundated by a river of milk. It ends with the boy and his favourite dog-mother swimming in that “moonlit milk-sea”. The plight of the poor and powerless is brought out in several stories, including ‘Underpass’ and ‘The Hands of the Man of Light’.

‘The Meat Market’ of the title revolves around the life and death of Aminul Islam who goes out to buy meat for Eid and never returns as he dared to protest against adulteration. “At the moment I was being slaughtered, I’d wondered in astonishment: had this country become an anarchy?.... Slaughtering a human being just because you’re angry — does that really happen?” A lot worse is happening in reality for future writers to confront and make sense of.