The World In My Hands
K. Anis Ahmed
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The World In My Hands, a novel by K Anis Ahmed, publisher of the Dhaka Tribune and the Bengal Lights literary journal, was published by Random House India. It is Ahmed’s second book and follows closely on the heels of his debut collection of short stories, Goodnight, Mr Kissinger.
The World In My Hands is a political satire chronicling the fate of two friends who find their bond bitterly tested when they are caught on opposite sides of a crisis that upends their country’s social order. The book has already garnered high praise. Fellow Bangladeshi writer Tahmima Anam, author of The Good Muslim, describes it as darkly funny, heralding Ahmed as a strong new voice in English writing from Bangladesh. Ahmed is not a writer of profound truths — perhaps, that is why his prose seems familiar — but is an effective satirist of the ordinary. His understanding of the micro is far more impressive than his conclusions about politics (which are commonsensical at best and naïve at worst). However, he constructs his characters’ obsessions and motivations with taste and humour. The way they reason with themselves and each other, the ways in which they invent their propaganda and justify their pursuit of power, are particularly relevant to the difficult choices they have to make. This is exemplified when Ahmed writes: “It was hard to know [whether] one should stay put on one’s presumed-to-be-safe perch, or take one’s chances and float like a dinghy on the swelling waters.” The novel revolves around the lives of a group of friends — Hissam and Kaiser, and Natasha — as they struggle to hold together their deeply polarised personal lives against the backdrop of a grand political divide. Where the novel does really well is in exploring the details of how everyone’s domestic lives carry on, while battles of good and bad, and right and wrong, are fought in the streets. How, when divided between political faultlines, the things that seem to matter the most to people seem so much more significant than the petty rearrangements of the regime for which blood is spilled and jails filled, and the world, torn apart.
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Paperback: 384 pages
K. Anis Ahmed