IN Rizia Rahman’s story, ‘The Realist’, an ex-employee writes to Madam, the eponymous “icon of Bangla literature” to remind her of the time he spent in her service. A budding poet, he found himself hired as her copier and became a witness to her privileged life — her Westernised daughters, the opportunistic literary men who surround and flatter her, and above all her reluctant patronage of the “bold, sensual, frank” writings of the spoilt daughter of a rich friend.

Rahman may well be making a sly dig at her own world — she’s a celebrated Bangla­deshi writer who has, in the 40-odd years of her career, won much acclaim and many prizes. Her sly technique, though, becomes evident as the story progresses: she’s aiming at something beyond literary satire. The narrator loses his job because he fails to show up at work the day after one of Madam’s parties; he tries to make a living as a writer of pulp fiction, only to have his manuscript disposed off and recycled as wrapping paper for puffed rice. At the conclusion of his letter, he tells her how the hand that once held a pen now holds a gun, as he’s now the armed member of a political party, his “mornings, afternoons and evenings are spent duelling with death”. “Do you,” he asks, “find any realism in my understanding of life?”

Like the narrator of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, our reluctant poet-turned-gunman may be embellishing the circumstances of his life to score a point to his tormentor; but dark and sometimes overblown endings are a common feature in Rahman’s work. A young pregnant woman appears at the home of a scientist she once called uncle, to “spread misery … like dark ink”; she begs for help for an ailing brother beaten up for a petty crime; dismissed with a 10-takka note, she hangs herself. Another woman who escaped from army rapists during the ’71 war gains the reputation of a fallen woman; eventually, another attack on her honour compels her to seek shelter in prostitution. A fiery professor and rebel poet goes into decline when his mother dies, obsessed with the picture of a Polish girl “blocking the path of tanks as huge as monsters” during World War II with a bunch of roses in her hand.

Bangladesh has recently laid claim to a place on the Anglophone literary map with names like Zia Haider Rahman and Tahmima Anam gaining accolades and prizes. With less fanfare but no less talent, Maria Chaudhuri and K. Anis Ahmed have published notable works over the last few years. There’s also a flourishing local market for Anglophone writers, and we’ve recently seen Neeman A. Sobhan, Sharbari Z. Ahmed and Abeer Y. Hoque publish collections of short stories on home ground. But translations from Bangla are rare to find outside their native country, though UPL Dhaka have bravely continued to produce anthologies as well as handsome editions of selected Bengali modern classics in translation. I came across one of their books, Rahman’s volume of stories, Caged in Paradise and Other Stories, at my hotel in Dhaka last year when I was attending the Hay Festival Dhaka. I was immediately drawn to the vivid imagery in the fine, seamless translations done by a number of hands; I read several stories in a row, but typically came back from Dhaka with far too many books to read and a crowded teaching schedule, and put the book away neatly under my coffee table.

At Karachi airport last week, I picked up a volume of stories by Shamsur Rahman Faruqi to read on the long journey home. They were fascinating but after reading two I put them down, as their length was far more than I expect of a short story — the shortest was about 75 pages long. That’s all very well, I love novellas: but once you’ve read two of them you need a rest — your brain is taking in the time span of a novel without the singular compression shorter fiction demands. I turned to another volume of short stories by a renowned Indian writer I won’t name; they read like magazine stories, flatly written and competently plotted, but dependent on recent political events for their impact: often the characters sounded like spokesmen for current ideologies.

It was when I came home that I remembered Rahman’s collection: some of the stories, which were political in hue but not overly connected to newspaper reports, had continued to haunt me. Many are written without any apparent concern for the mechanics of conventional plotting, but are nevertheless beautifully shaped, with a poet’s concern for the telling image. And best of all, the stories achieve their effects within 5-15 pages, which is the ideal span of a short story.

I retrieved the book from its place in my pile, reread what I’d remembered, and read on. Rahman moves easily from the literary salons of Dhaka to lower middle-class apartments and onwards into the rural hinterlands of Bangladesh. In a delicate piece, a handicapped girl rings up a romantic writer, pleading with him to make her the heroine of one of his stories: she convinces him, but later he realises he has no record of who she is or where she called from. Two other stories I hadn’t read before are narrated, as it were, by a crowd. In one, the poor of the streets complain about a hartal that affects their petty occupations — selling matchboxes, petty thievery, casual prostitution — more than it does the more privileged; eventually, they join the affray. Another story recounts a night-long journey when the ancient train (nicknamed ‘The Beggar Woman’) lurches to a halt and causes panic among the travellers. Its realism, as it comes to an end, delicately moves towards an almost surreal finale.

Some of Rahman’s finest stories use religious imagery, stitching it into a realist texture like bright embroidery on a plain white quilt. In a story of revenge-rape and violence against women, the characters’ names acquire enormous significance: here the conflict about the status of women is located, not between the religious and the secular, but between a vicious charlatan who exploits the simple faith of the villagers to justify his lust, and his enemy, the village imam, who regularly quotes examples of great heroines from Muslim history to justify his liberal stance on gender equality. Though the central character, Hajera, dies tragically, the imam conducts an absentee funeral for this victim of violence; the tears of her blind, weeping mother echo the tears shed over the fate of all women and man’s injustice to man by the Holy Prophet’s (PBUH) daughter, “the most holy lady Bibi Fatema”, whose namesake she is.

In another story a young man, tellingly called Adam, dies in a flood: there’s no place to bury him, so he is set afloat on the tide on a raft. In a telling metaphor of dispossession, Adam is denied the earth of which he is made and to which he was destined to return.

Symbolism becomes more overt in the final story of the book. Another of Rahman’s writing males, enraged by the attention given to (yet another) pushy women poet, engages in a dialogue with a crow about the lost grave of Chengiz Khan and the legend of his immortal horse who is now “running amok throughout the world, inscribing Chengiz Khan’s name over and over in the list of the world’s most notorious and infamous murderers.” In a characteristic move, the crow then begs for bread, but the narrator has forgotten “the poet I had once been … a freezing chill was descending from the final glacier of a lost world”. Rahman’s surrealism returns, ultimately, to the realism that is her hallmark.

These stories are rooted in local realities, but would be familiar to most subcontinental readers. As I closed the book, I was reminded of a story I was told on a plane, in Pakistan a week ago, by a man who’d been in hospital in Rawalpindi. While there, he had been particularly impressed by the diligent conduct of a young nurse who attended to him. Then, one evening, out in a wheelchair in the local park, he’d been shocked to see the same young woman, heavily made up and dressed, hanging onto the arm of an elderly man. Later that night she’d come to his hospital bed and begged him not to repeat her story. She sent half her salary home to her family; another part went to support a brother at school; the rest, on her rent. She barely had enough left for food. It’s a story that Rahman, who knows that real life is where the melodramas are, and maps the streets on which the horse of strife runs amok, would certainly recognise and recount with compassion and skill. 