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As soon as Riziya removed the niqab from her face, there was a hue and cry from a section of the audience. Maulana Tahirul was at his wits’ end, and as he stood on one side, he remembered that, in exactly the same way, he had suddenly gone up on stage during the function organized by Rafiq Ali. He kept gazing in Riziya’s direction. Thousands of verbal arrows were flung at Riziya. If she hadn’t been a woman, she would have been dragged and hauled off the stage. But quite a few people had also responded with applause. They wanted land for a school. Meanwhile the Panchayat Pradhan, Rafiq Ali Sheikh, had grabbed the mic. He roared out, ‘Wow! What a fantastic drama we are seeing here! And all of you are watching that! Rizi becomes a Muslim again as soon as Suman dies! It’s all a conspiracy against me! Wasn’t part of the land purchased by me? All of you know that Kalu Miya sold his share of the land to me. Let me see how a school comes up with her sole donation. Many of you saw who brought her by taxi from the morgue in Howrah. All this is his conspiracy. Does that land belong to Riziya alone?’ And as he said that, he pointed to Abid Sheikh. Abid Sheikh’s supporters raised an uproar in protest.

Maruf was stunned. He stood silently on one side of the stage. What he was hearing was no melodious azan like that of Bilal of yore. He could only hear the growls of dogs fighting. He looked despondently and speechlessly at Riziya. And then he turned his eyes towards Rafiq Ali and Abid Sheikh, towards the elderly people seated on the stage, and Abinash Babu. He then walked past Tahirul, and slowly climbed down the stage.

And just then, someone whispered something into Tahirul’s ear. He turned the mic on again, and announced:

‘I request everyone to remain silent. I have a sad announcement to make. We have to pause the programme. We have just received news that Kalu Miya’s son, Raqib, has passed away. Inna Lillahi…’

about the book

Set in Sadnahati, a Muslim-majority village in West Bengal, Talashnama is the story of Riziya, an educated and headstrong woman with an anguished past.

Hounded by a devastating secret, Riziya elopes with her tutor, Suman Nath, a Hindu, although it is Tahirul – the local Imam torn between duty and desire – who is her true love. On the day she leaves, she allegedly writes anti-Islamic graffiti on the wall of the village mosque – an incident that both baffles and enrages the villagers. Ten years later, Suman Nath takes his own life, and Riziya must return to a Sadnahati fraught with disapproval and condemnation...

Ismail Darbesh’s debut novel, Talashnama, is a thrilling literary tour de force, where love, religion, modernity and politics collide. A bestseller in the original Bangla and translated brilliantly by V. Ramaswamy, it is also an evocative inquiry into the uncertainties and challenges of being Muslim in today’s India.

about the author and the translator

ismail darbesh was born in an ‘ostagar’ or traditional garment-maker family, and completed his schooling at Tentulkuli High School and Makardaha Bamasundari Institution, after which he attended Narsingha Dutta College in Howrah and graduated with Honours in Bengali. He began writing stories, essays, features and sketches for little magazines from the time he was in college, but discontinued thereafter. From 2016, after getting a smartphone, he began writing again, this time on Facebook. His collection of short stories, Kangshobodher Nepothye (Behind the Scenes of Kamsa’s Vanquishment) was published in 2020 by Abhijan, Kolkata. Talashnama, his first novel – which also began as a series of posts on Facebook – was published by Abhijan in 2021. His second novel, Raanridighir Brittanto (Tales from Raanridighi), will be published later this year.

v. ramaswamy has translated Subimal Misra’s The Earth Quakes: Late Anti-Stories, This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale: Two Anti-Novels, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories, Anti-Stories and The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories; Shahidul Zahir’s Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas (with Shahroza Nahrin), Why There Are No Noyontara Flowers in Agargaon Colony: Stories, and I See the Face: A Novel; and works by Manoranjan Byapari, Adhir Biswas, Mashiul Alam, Shahaduz Zaman and Swati Guha. He was a recipient of the Literature Across Frontiers–Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in creative writing and translation at Aberystwyth University in 2016, the New India Foundation translation fellowship in 2022, the PEN Presents award in 2022, and the Bangla Translation Foundation (Dhaka) prize for the best translated book of 2022. He lives in Kolkata.

Praise for Talashnama

‘What makes Talashnama fascinating is not just its nuanced portrait of conflicts in a sited rural Muslim community, but the way these conflicts are used to adumbrate the larger tensions, problems and possibilities of our times and country. Engrossing and illuminating.’

– tabish khair, author of The Body by the Shore

‘A sensitively observed tale of immense contemporary significance.’

– kunal basu, author of Filmi Stories

‘Talashnama is a provocative and insightful portrayal of the reality of the Muslim community, far removed from the picture one often gets from those in a position of power. It is an exemplary exposition of religion and spirituality, of belief and faith, of puritanism and pluralism, of fundamentalism and liberalism, of rights and deprivations. And underlying the many voices that one hears in the story, be it within the family or outside of it, within religion or politics, is an empathy and understanding that are as profound as they are palpable. A brilliantly crafted novel, soulfully translated.’

– k.r. meera, author of Assassin