Book Review: Besati O Bosoti [The Dealing and The Dwelling], a novel, by Imran Khan, Dhaka, Chandrabindo Prokashon, 2024, 310 pages, ISBN 978-984-98208-6-4 (hardcover)
Bangladeshi writer Imran Khan’s second novel, Besati O Bosoti [The Dealing and The Dwelling] (2024), is an exemplary literary endeavour to address the intrinsic connections between humans and nonhumans, demonstrating how the anti-environmental activities by humans rupture that connections and threaten the survival of all species. The novel, written in the writer’s native tongue Bangla, encapsulates the transformation of Bangladesh’s natural environments through the process of anthropogenic intervention. This intervention contributes to the global climate crisis and renders the country vulnerable to the crisis. While the novel’s engagement with the ramifications of environmental destruction, against the backdrop of the planetary crisis caused by climate change, may prompt one to categorize it as “climate fiction” or “cli-fi,” a very prominent genre of fiction of the present time, I would rather describe it as an Anthropocene novel, for the novel’s focus is more on the role of humans in climate change than a speculative imagining of the consequences of climate change on humans and other species.
In Besati O Bosoti, Khan allures his readers to an enthralling exploration of the enmeshed existence of sentient and non-sentient beings, particularly highlighting the profound connection between nature and humans from multiple standpoints of its ensembled characters comprising both humans and non-humans. He underlines the role of nature in shaping human psyche by divulging how the protagonists consciously or subconsciously encounter the natural environments at different stages of their lives, and how those interactions shape their perceptions of life and the world. The imagery of mongooses in the earlier part of the novel is a case in point. Swarupa, one of the female protagonists, frequently witnesses the mating of a pair of mongooses during her first menstruation days, and this experience profoundly influences her future sexual behaviour, as her animalistic self becomes more active during sexual intercourse. Conversely, Leo, her husband, encounters a frightened mongoose on a dark stairwell in his childhood, which makes him inexplicably phobic of all sorts of sexual vulgarity.
While Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh, is the main setting of the novel, the narrative often traverses other parts of the country and beyond. Khan adopts some factual incidents of ecocides in Bangladesh and endows them with fictional characteristics. For example, he draws on the Shitalakshya River’s contamination by severe chemical pollution in 2004, 2017, 2021, and 2023, which resulted in the killing of many aquatic animals on each occasion. Khan’s graphic description of thousands of dead fishes floating on the contaminated river water is an instance of apocalyptic imagination, which may invoke myriad ecological emotions like despair, anger, anxiety, and empathy in the reader:
The river was riddled with carcasses of aquatic animals in the chemical attack, and the famished birds swarmed in the sky. Swarupa might have forgotten this underwater massacre if the kites, hawks, and kingfishers did not start diving down to feast on the dead. Their shrilling voices were full of pure joy. They were swooping like fighter jets, plummeting on the dead water-dwellers. They were hovering with their sharp claws and were going to sit somewhere and tear the victims apart. (p. 145)
Khan also addresses other forms of environmental pollution in the novel, such as sound, visual, and light pollution. He links the light pollution through an exquisite description of van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” emphasizing how unscrupulous human actions in the name of development and consumption are behind the catastrophic environmental violence.
Akhil, a surrealist protagonist, leads a preternatural life and plays an active role in his own birth. From his mother’s womb, he comes into the world much like a free man. He steps out of the womb with his feet first, rather than the head, ignoring the knife of a C-section. Later it is seen that any distortion in nature affects him, as the “construction of a suffocating building on a suffocated grassland” (p. 160) also suffocates him. He encounters various crises in his life, and finally, being apathetic to the world, he enters a thinning forest like a sage. After spending one night there, he experiences a trance-like state and realizes the ruptured relationship between humans and nature. Because of the rupture caused by the so-called civilized way of living, humans are not much welcomed in nature, and they too cannot sustain themselves in “nature” without intervening in it. Therefore, humans are essentially and even unconsciously harmful to nature. An electrocuted monkey in the forest shows Akhil the way out to civilization. After returning to the human habitat following his sanctification, he transforms into a “natural” human being, starting to preach that the religion of humans should be to keep the religion of nature intact.
The novel also reflects on how Dhaka city, built on the famous Buriganga River, has lost most of its greenery over the years as it has grown into a megacity. All its rivers, including the former beauty Buriganga, are now baneful due to industrial and human waste. Hundreds of navigable and fish-breeding canals have been filled up, unlawfully grabbed, or converted into rubbish dumping sites or sewage transporters. Furthermore, over the years, filling up the swamp areas, both multistoried buildings for the rich and slums for the poor have been constructed. Ironically, as the novel represents, marginalized people from the southern part of the country, being displaced by climate change, take refuge in those slums, causing the displacement of nonhuman animals because of the destruction of their natural habitats. This kind of profound description of the precarious existence of both humans and nonhumans resulting from the environmental violence by humans makes Besati O Bosoti an important Anthropocene novel of our time.
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Rakibul Hasan Khan is a Bangladeshi poet and academic based in New Zealand. He has earned a PhD in English at the University of Otago, where he works as a tutor. He can be reached at [email protected].
