BLiterature-Apratim

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was shy of publicity and relatively unknown in his life-time, he will surely achieve a
high position in the realm of fictional literature.
His first novel was Anur Pathshala (Anu’s School) in which his deep insight
into the psyche of childhood, his extra-ordinary poetic presentation and above all, his
comprehension of the deep crises of human soul and civilization in the modern era,
astonish us. These issues are presented through poetic symbols and ornamentation.
Jiban Amar Bone (Life is My Sister) is a valuable document of man’s
confusion and helplessness at times of national crises. Khoka, a sexual pervert, tries
to neutralize himself when the war of liberation has begun in this country; but his
escapist endeavor fails and his love (?) turns from his sister-in-law to his own sister.
His all aim centers on his attempt to save his sister’s life. And it ends in futility and
tragedy; and Khoka now realizes that all are integrated into mass and national halo.
Now the country seems to him a pond in which his beloved sister (as his other two
sisters did in a real one) has been drowned.
Nirapad Tandra (Safe Sleepiness) was his third publication. In it Haq depicts
the tragic life of a low-class minority girl who elopes with her Muslim lover and is put
by fate into severe sorrows and torments through horrendous experiences. She
starves in slums day after day, is violated again and again and at last is compelled to
engage herself into white slavery. And the narrator, who does not attach himself to
any compulsion of the harsh world, is at last met with her last painful existence with a
body reduced to a thin skeleton.
Matir Jahaz (A Ship of Clay) is a novel presenting the humble lives of the
proletariat. Haq is a bit Marxist here.
Kalo Baraf (Black Ice) is his autobiographical novel which exposes the
author’s own deep anguish for the partition of Bengal in 1947. The memory of this
tragic historic incident, which is derived from the writer’s own dreamlike childhood
experience, haunts him throughout his life. Tinged with extra-ordinary poetic and
exuberant vision, this novel is his masterpiece.
Khelaghar (The Play-Room) is a novel set in the background of our Liberation
War of 1971. A young girl, being violated by the Pakistani army, loses all her moral
conscience. Rescued and sheltered in an old house in a village, she builds up a
love-affair with the narrator Yakub and later forsakes him. The tortured girl no more
holds the noble essence of loyalty of love; does no more believe in its greatness.
Through this novel, the writer shows what worthy assets we have sacrificed for our
political liberty.
Ashariri (The Phantom) is another fictional work on 1971. Here Haq depicts
the unbearable pain of persecution of a war-victim.
And Patalpuri (The Underground World) narrates the story of an unemployed
youth who even surrenders himself to prostitutes out of tension and frustration
despite having love for a girl.
Haq’s short stories too, which concentrate on the depiction of human
character, sorrows and sufferings, are of great appeal.
Haq is undoubtedly a great fiction-writer. His deep perception of human mind,
his poetic unfolding, his humanitarian consciousness and above all, his artistic
integrity – will be a matter of great surprise till man’s taste of art and good will
survives; the poet of a dirty and deserted world will remain alive till that time.