Book Review: Incandescence by Mehreen Ahmed

Chitra Gopalakrishnan reviews Mehreen Ahmed’s Incandescence (Published by Impspired, 2022) observing how the story morphs from a candle to a flame to a wildfire of hope.

• ISBN: 978-1915819048
• Publisher: Impspired 
• Date of Publication: 2022

Mehreen Ahmed’s ‘Incandescence’ folds into its pages the intriguing story of the making of Bangladesh as a nation in 1971. A mere gleam of an idea in the eyes of visionaries in the earlier years, this yearning emerged as a revolution and then a nation with a suddenness, with seemingly nothing preordained about the upsurge other than a swelling of protests and rallies.

But the bridled energies and emotions of people suppressed over centuries, gathered high amounts of precipitation in a short period of time like the monsoons in this region, exploding hard and fast into unrelenting violence, one that cleaved this region from its earlier geographical loyalties and devastated lives, lifestyles, and destinies. Restoration has been slow in the making and is, as yet, an enterprise in progress. After all, social engineering takes time to come to fruition and comes at a price.