Writing amidst calamities…

My very first book Footprints in Obscurity was born out of an unforeseen adventures in over twenty counties  where I have travelled in Africa, and the second book was an adventure beyond imagination; I was writing a book on a child solider in Sierra Leon, and the book was named Behind the Eclipse as I wanted to show some light in the life of the Mutilated Young Life once called a fearless Westside Boy. Then I was caught in the middle of Ebola Crisis and retained in West Africa throughout the crisis. That was it; I rewrote the story but did not change the name, that was a top-match though. The shortly after the onset of Donbas crisis in Ukraine, I happened to go to the eastern part of Ukraine where the flames of separatism remained fleshly lit, it was in 2015, Bayan remained a cloudy story limited to a corner of my mind, and, in 2016 it became the story of Ivan Nikolaevich. It was completely an unexpected pice of writing and I did not have a sketch of it till it finish it. I just allowed myself to vent. There was a story in it. Even today, among all by books I have an inexplicably profound attachment with Bayan, probably I see my seventies through it. 

And Barsha, the Bengali girl I met in Termites was hundred percent unlooked-for,  and Termites was first a short story that was never published. One day, while sipping a glass of Scotch on a rooftop of an apartment complex in Cox Bazar, Bangladesh, I had an urge to go to my room and pull out the short story called Termites. I leafed though the 40 pages exercise book, and then, that evening, I scribbled over another 40 pages adding 80 pages to the story. The it was 2 am in the morning I went to bed, still crowded streets in Cox were live with noises, mourns, shouts and laughs of constant human struggle. 

The following day I began the writing the novel  Termites. The rain of fire…, Yes, calamities are mirrors of human resiliency, they do project the enormous willpower and endurance encapsulated within us in a fracture of a second. I have witnessed it first-handedly in all major calamities around the world, in the past one and half decades, but there is a strain of human resiliency that grows with the human with his growth and remain unfractured with each fracture of bones. I kept looking at them in Maungdaw, Buthidaung, Rathedaung, Sittwe, Cox Bazar, Jalan Bukit Petaling, wordlessly but tearfully, and decided to tell the world a story of a Rohingya. 

In brief, all of my books so far were just surprises, and stories scattered in different parts of the word, and writing during times of calamities, while working for vulnerable and affected population around the world.