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Synopsis:
A law student at Dhaka University, Afsana’s future is bright. Her greatest concern is whether or not her parents will approve of her marriage. When they do, the young bride knows she can face anything the future holds.
Then war breaks out.
Six years later, she encounters a ghost from her past-her first husband, presumed dead in the fighting.
My War, My Child vividly and compassionately tells the story of Bengali birangona, the war heroines, whose lives were brutally torn apart by the 1971 War for Independence. Though the fight resulted in the freedom and independent nation so craved by the Bengali people, hundreds of thousands of women’s lives were devastated, leaving them to scrape together the pieces and carry on as best they could-often with children and orphans forced upon them.
This is a piece of history you’ve never heard before, an inside look at the resilience and strength of women around the world.
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Author Bio:
Bharati Sen was born in Rangoon, Myanmar and spent much of her childhood growing up in Southeast Asia and West Bengal. She completed a Masters in International Relations, and discovered a passion for writing about disparities and cultural differences, particularly in women. Her debut award-winning book titled, On the Banks of River Sarayu, is a compilation of nineteen stories reflecting the lives of ordinary South Asian women within bittersweet tales. The book was awarded finalist in the 2020 International Book Awards as well as the 2020 finalist for the MiPA Midwest Book Award in the category of Short Stories. Her first novel, My War My Child, narrates the intertwined story of two war heroines during the Bangladesh War of Independence, and will be coming out in Spring of 2024.
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EXCERPTS:
First Excerpt:
Farzad startled when she touched his arm. Her voice had changed indeed, weaker, but still the voice that in old days—not so very old either—-was the one voice that meant the whole world to him.
For a single instant, his thoughts strayed away into the past, and the marvel of his first love came back to him.
He looked down upon the soft hand that held his arm. He stared at the fingers, held in desperation.
His heart awoke under that touch, like a sudden flash of light, bringing back happy moments. And sad.
He recalled the last look that he had seen on her face at the door when they parted, her face conveying the anxiety of uncertainty about seeing him again.
He remembered that he had turned away abruptly, that in his preoccupied state of mind, he had not spoken one soothing word to her.
Her voice now sounded like a mournful echo of his dead love.
The days when he adored her, thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, the days when he lived on in the bitterness of missing her gentle love for him, could not be revived again.
And it occurred to him that he still had a moment to decide, only a brief moment now, whether to take her back or abandon her.
Second Excerpt:
The truck bumped along, continuing the trek toward whatever fate held in store for her. She lost track of time completely before it groaned to a halt.
The doors of the convoy were opened.
“You can all come out,” the officer announced.
Nafisa followed the line of women and soon they were in a courtyard of sorts, surrounded by a wall.
One of the two adjacent buildings, one had the appearance of a barrack and the other, with bars at all the windows, looked more like a prison.
The sun had already set by the time Nafisa arrived at the barracks. She stretched her legs and craned her neck as the soldiers demanded the women follow them.
All was tranquil and reposed, save the mournful cry of birds of prey in the far distance.
She looked up at the sky to discover that it was not a moonless night. And the rising moon, like a timid, blushing nymph, rose from the silvery clouds to take on an eerie silver glow, when its rays broke through the darkness.
With its thickly studded stars, the sky looked on calmly, as if nothing unusual was going on beneath them.
A man dressed in a faded uniform was seated at a table. pen in hand, writing down the names of the prisoners as they disembarked from the truck.
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