‘The Meat Market’: These stories take an ice-cold plunge into clammy depths of human behaviour

There is an obvious dissonance in prefacing a review of Mashiul Alam’s The Meat Market – translated from the original Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya – with a line from Shakespeare’s works. And yet. “Wilt thou be gone?” cried the bard’s lovelorn (if underage) Juliet, lamenting the departure of her new husband. “It is not yet near day / It was the nightingale, and not the lark, / That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear,” she tells him, exhorting him to stay back just a little bit longer, assuring him the lark had not yet announced daybreak.

An ice-cold plunge

Some four hundred years later, in a subtle nod to, and signalling a violent departure, from the settledness and certainties of Shakespeare, Alam’s Modina, a young bride in the village of Modhupur in Bangladesh, begs her husband, Modhu, to stay home for just one more day, as the cuckoo trills from the branches of the korai tree on a spring dawn. Modhu is a rickshaw driver in Dhaka. Exiled from home by the threat of starvation – no water in the fields he worked in as agricultural labour, no clouds in the sky to shelter him from a hostile summer, no wages to be brought back...

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