It feels good, really good, when your first book comes to live for sale. There are millions of writers and millions of books, but this one is really yours. It’s the result of your hard work, an outcome of your patience and perseverance. Why don’t you feel good?
It took only two months for me to write the novel. It was just a simple story then; there were neither any ‘black ants’ nor any ‘white pigeons’ in that story. Then I rewrote and edited the work over and over again until I was satisfied after two and a half years since I’d finished writing the story for the first time. Throughout this course of rewriting and editing, many friends extended their helping hands by reading, editing, and with their helpful advice. I’m grateful to all of them.
Black Ants and White Pigeons is a story of a family or a few families: their struggle for happiness in the wake of the rise of Islamic radicalism in the country and their pain and sufferings brought upon by the untoward changes. It tries to portray the life of a husband whose wife turns radical and then becomes apathetic to everything but religion, a father whose son joins ISIS and becomes traceless, and who himself abandons his daughter for marrying a Jew.
Black Ants and White Pigeons is also the story of a country, Bangladesh. It is essentially the changes in the policy of the country that drove people in the wrong direction and made their life miserable. The novel also tells how Bangladesh, a secular country during its birth, has turned gradually into a country with persistent minority oppressions and eventually a death-valley to the secular people.
Those who are curious about the recent killings of the authors and the bloggers in Bangladesh, this novel might give them a simple overview of the facts. It also provides an inside story of the procedures the jihadist organizations apply to brainwash both the young and the adults.
I hope you will enjoy Black Ants and White Pigeons as much as I enjoyed writing it.
The novel is available only on Amazon. There are both Paperback and Kindle versions of it.
