Deyal

Deyal was Humayun Ahmed’s last novel, completed in the months before his death in 2012. It is a historical work, set in the years immediately following the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in August 1975, and it caused considerable controversy on its publication for the way it dramatised real, recent political events.

The novel weaves together the lives of fictional characters with the historical figures who shaped Bangladesh in those turbulent months — the coup, the counter-coup, the tense uncertainty of a young country looking at itself in the mirror. Humayun Ahmed had been writing about ordinary Bangladeshi life for decades, and Deyal applies that same intimate eye to the lives caught up in big events.

The book is also unusual in Humayun’s body of work for being so directly political. Most of his novels work in domestic register — families, marriages, small sorrows. Deyal is bigger, and it has the sense of a writer settling accounts. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand both Humayun Ahmed as a writer and the early history of Bangladesh through fiction.