It was a leap year, the final day of the book fair. I was wandering through the dusty dusk with empty pockets, chatting with a friend on Messenger. Pausing at stall after stall, I picked up books, turned their pages over and over, and gently set them back with a sigh of financial helplessness. Drifting along this way, I found myself standing in front of Songbed Prokashoni. My gaze first fell on Nribiggan Path-porichoy [An Introduction to Anthropology]. Reading the preface, it seemed fascinating. Then, true to habit, I set it down and picked up another book resting right beside it.
Its title was Kromagoto Hotyar Serenade [A Serenade of Unending Murders]. The author: Aditi Falgunee. A serenade is an evening song—so the author was evoking an evening song of slaughter. It was unmistakably symbolic. Leafing through its pages and noting the thickness, I realized it was a novel. Turning the cover, I read the flap introduction penned by Professor Ajoy Roy. The essence of the preface read: “With rare patience and relentless dedication, the author has documented almost all the free-thinkers and rationalists murdered in this country in recent times. Visiting their homes, sitting with their grief-stricken families, and gathering extensive testimony through intimate dialogues, she has faithfully ‘fictionalized’ those harrowing truths.”
Without a second thought after reading that preface, I snapped a picture of the cover and the flap, sent it to the friend I had been chatting with, and texted: “Buy this for me. Right now.” I was desperate, to say the least. Without asking a single question, my friend transferred the money via bKash, and I bought the book on the spot. That was how Kromagoto Hotyar Serenade came into my hands—a work that, while structured as a fictional novel, spans a massive canvas anchored in uncompromising history.
The opening of the novel is intensely arresting: the departure of Socrates. The meticulous preparation moments before death and the harrowing, granular sequence of his final breath. Did Socrates’ hands truly not tremble as he held the cup of hemlock? His companions-in-arms stood right beside him, watching him slowly fade away before their very eyes; one must applaud the author’s imaginative power in rendering such an agonizing tableau.
The timeline of the novel weaves past and present seamlessly together. Yet the ‘present’ is not entirely of this very hour; it belongs to an era fifteen or twenty years behind us. The historical epochs drawn in as foundations are laid bare without reservation, while for the contemporary figures she chose to fictionalize, only the names have been altered. Everything else is rendered with raw, unflinching truth. Throughout the entire novel, there is no hedging, no fear, no softening of blows.
It is an undeniably fearless piece of fiction. In these suffocating times, the author wields metaphor with exquisite precision, conjuring historical figures that many would dare not even utter a word about. She narrates events over a millennium old from distant desert lands with dispassionate clarity—events that communities shackled by blind faith would vehemently refuse to accept.
Rooted firmly in truth, the entire novel requires the reader to brace for death at every turn. Figures across history, past and present, have died or are dying one by one. And why? Merely for daring to speak for humanity. Their sole transgression was advocating the liberation of human society from the monstrous clutches of blind fanaticism and dogma.
The scope of the novel spans disparate, fractured epochs of history. It begins in the Greece of Socrates. Drawn by the tides of time, it journeys to the turbulent origins of a faith born in the Arabian desert. It circles back to the disappearance of Sri Chaitanya and the subsequent ripples of treachery within the monarchy of Bengal. It lays bare the plight of Dalits crushed under the caste system across British India, and the fierce clash between Mirabai and contemporary orthodoxy. It chronicles the savagery of post-Partition communal riots, the brutal pogroms unleashed against Hindus following the 2001 elections, and the blood-slicked trails of human carnage.
The novel also touches with poignant sorrow upon Professor Ajoy Roy’s days during the Liberation War of 1971. And woven into an impeccably crafted timeline are the modern tragedies: Professor Humayun Azad surviving a brutal extremist machete attack; the assault on Asif Mohiuddin in 2013; the slaying of Rajib Haider under cover of night during the roaring Shahbagh protests of February that same year; and the systematic slaughter of 2015 when extremists struck again and again, taking Avijit Roy, Ananta Bijoy Dash, Washiqur Babu, Niladri Nil, and publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan. Even the horror of the Holey Artisan bakery attack is not omitted. Alongside the bloodshed, the novel tenderly reconstructs the quiet, agonizing struggle of bereaved families trying to survive the wreckage of loss. From the outside, we mourn the national void; yet we can barely begin to grasp the intimate wound when a living soul is violently torn from a family’s embrace.
I—and indeed all of us—owe a profound debt of gratitude to author Aditi Falgunee for completing such an arduous, monumental undertaking. Had she not stepped forward, such an exhaustive chronicle of the slain bloggers might never have been written. Far more than mere fiction, this book stands as an indispensable historical testament to the free-thinkers of this region. It is a blood-stained diary of those condemned to die simply for singing the songs of humanity. Its name is Kromagoto Hotyar Serenade—A Serenade of Unending Murders.
