Mojaffor Hossain
Translated from the Bengali by Rituparna Mukherjee
I often feel the character that I play has not been written for me. That I have been cast in the wrong part. Perhaps that is why I find my own life a stranger. I lie in wait, weighed down by something, for someone to take this weight off me. Saying so, Himadri throws away his unlit cigarette.
Nila sits quietly. She is sobbing. She doesn’t know why. Himadri keeps looking at her.
Whatever we see comes to us in the shadow of an absence. And we live our lives mistaking the shadow for the original, don’t we, Heem? Nila says.
Without uttering a word, Himadri takes out another cigarette. He will keep it in his hands for some time and then throw that away as well. Nila stands up. She has asked Himadri to kill her one night in her sleep. Himadri has agreed. Yesterday was that night. The police would arrive at their house a little later. Himadri had himself dialled 111. He had long wanted to test if this number, provided by the nation for emergencies, worked.
After a few attempts, he finally got through.
“Hello, this is Himadri. My house is at 3/3 Blind Lane, I have a corpse in my house, will you please send someone to dispose it, take me away as well.” Himadri spoke very lifelessly.
“Nonsense! Don’t joke this early in the morning. Someone called a while back asking us to resolve his quarrel with his wife. Don’t we have anything else to do? What do you people take us for?”
“We haven’t fought. Besides, Nila wasn’t my wife. My house is at 3/3 Blind Lane.” Saying this, Himadri puts the mobile phone away.
“Won’t you flee?” Nila says.
“Where?”
“Wherever you can. You will be jailed. You might even be hung.”
“So be it. I don’t care for a life that is not mine own.”
The original Bengali was first published in Aadipaap er Porer Paap, by Pathok Somabesh, Dhaka, 2024.
Mojaffor Hossain is an acclaimed and well-awarded author from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has authored thirty books till date. His works have been translated into several languages including English, Spanish, Italian, Hindi, Gujarati and Nepali. His distinctive approach involves utilizing local realities as backdrops, infusing them with magic realism or surrealism. Seven of his stories have been adapted for stage performances in Dhaka, Kolkata and New York. He has received eight prestigious awards in Bangladesh for fiction.
Rituparna Mukherjee teaches English and Communication Studies at Jogamaya Devi College, Kolkata. She enjoys writing short fiction and flashes. A multilingual translator of Bengali and Hindi fiction into English, her original work and translations have been published in many international journals. Her debut translation, The One-Legged, translated from Sakyajit Bhattacharya’s Ekanore, has been shortlisted for JCB Prize in Literature 2024 and won the KALA Literature Awards 2025. She is currently translating a political thriller set in West Bengal and is the fiction reader at Usawa Literary Review.
Featured photo by Maria Luiza Melo (Pexels)
