Word: bengalis
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...passage in Above Average, the character Arindam experiences an epiphany while playing in a band: "That first roll to the end of the song was the one time in my life when anything seemed possible ... the one time in my life when I was not a bespectacled Bengali computer scientist sitting in a small room in Mayur Vihar, but Mitch Mitchell himself, the master of the drum...
...while Deeti drives a story of considerable scope, she's not alone. Ghosh has a talent - revealed not only in this novel but previous ones - for bringing to life through his characters worlds that have been long forgotten. We meet, among others, a freed American slave, an impeccably-mannered Bengali nobleman turned convict and a cross-dressing businessman who scans the stools of strangers for spiritual omens...
...sleepy neighborhood on the outskirts of Dhaka stands an empty lot called the Jalladkhana - Bengali for "Butcher's Den." A courtyard, flanked by a red brick wall and lined with potted plants and marble plaques, leads to a small two-room building. Inside, it is quiet and tranquil; a few candles flicker. Kept there are tiny traces of an untold horror that took place nearly 40 years ago: a pair of broken spectacles, a sandal with its straps torn, human skulls and bones. "They speak," says Mofidul Hoque, a trustee of the museum that preserves the site, "of an immeasurable...
...West Pakistan, a thousand miles away on the other side of India. At the close of the Liberation War, as it's called by Bangladeshis, TIME reporters suggested the death toll was above a million. Ask people in Dhaka today and they'll tell you the true figure of Bengali civilians murdered by West Pakistani troops and death squads guided by collaborators was three times that. Bangladesh sits atop an alluvial plain, so those bent on genocide needed only to dump bodies in rivers or, as at the Jalladkhana, down the wells and conduits of local water-pumping stations, where...
...grow fat." (He would famously win a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting five years later on Cambodia's killing fields.) Passing through the charred husks of villages razed by West Pakistani troops, he heard whispered story after story of mass executions of Hindus, college students and anybody suspected of Bengali nationalism. Neighborhoods were gutted as Bangladesh's main cities fell to a fifth of their existing population; 10 million refugees fled west to India. Almost every Bangladeshi household has a tale of loss and suffering. Around 400,000 women, by some estimates, were raped...