‘Strange Meeting’

The final chapter juxtaposes fiction from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India. The war crimes tribunal and the post-war histories of Pakistan and Bangladesh raise questions of justice and impunity. The attempt here is to listen to the stories and what they tell us about the possibility of recognizing of each other’s wounds and suffering. While only one work by an Indian author is discussed, it points to the transnational stake in the memories of 1971. While one of the objectives of this work was to take stock of the war literature of Bangladesh, it is clear that any politics that addresses open injuries of history cannot be constructed without recognizing the entangled nature of our pasts—1947 and 1971 to name only two—and the future. This chapter also tries to make a division of chapters on the basis of genre arguing that the method was defined by the material and not the other way round. Works by Tahmima Anam, O.V. Vijayan, Intizar Husain, Yasmin Saikia and others are analysed.