Abu’s Comments (group member since Aug 03, 2011)

Abu’s comments from the Q&A with Abu Zubair group.

From the author notes, "Afterwords," at the end of the novel:

"As I tried to write this book, as discarded pages piled by my feet, I grappled with a way to tell the story of a people, a country, a pivotal time. ...I tried, using every literary technique I had at my fingertips-poems, letters, vignettes, multiple points of view-to write a series of stories, composites, with a common thread, constantly striving to drive the story further, the emotions deeper into the nine months of ‘71 and its far reaching implications decades later.

Sometimes it takes a lifetime to appreciate a moment. And 1971 is full of such moments. Forty years after the birth of Bangladesh, as I pen my last words of this novel, the fearful costs of ‘71 have taken on meanings I never envisioned back then."

My novel can also be enjoyed as a series of short stories, driving the theme forward, braiding the lives of the characters together. It can be daunting in our rushed lives today to read several hundred pages, but you can read fourteen pages of "Mukti Bahini," or "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" and be immersed in a guerrilla movement in Bangladesh in 1971 or enjoy being at The Concert for Bangla Desh. Linear in time, but non-linear in space, I braided East then West into a woven, driven story of characters who I hope you will remember long after the book is closed.