“Dui Teer o Onyanyo Golpo”
Book by Syed Waliullah
(Short story collection , Dhaka: 1964)
Literally “Two Shores and other Stories”. This short story collection contains the famous story “Ekti Tulsi Gachher Kahini” (The Tale of a Tulsi Plant).
The partition of British India in 1947 saw massive migration of Bengali Hindus from what was then East Pakistan to India, and a flow of Muslims in the opposite direction. Many of these migrants found refuge in the homes abandoned by those who had left – places that still retained vestiges of the lives of the original inhabitants. Syed Waliullah’s Ekti Tulsi Gachher Kahini (A Tulsi Plant’s Tale) is a story of one such house in a corner of what is now Bangladesh, and one in which the absence of what once was is equally powerful as what is now.
