When a Rat, a Refugee, and a Locked-Down Paris Apartment Became a Battlefield for Memory

Exile is not movement. It is suspension. A state of being uprooted yet unplanted, displaced yet not allowed to settle. For Pinaki Bhattacharya, physician, blogger, and dissident, exile became both a punishment and an unexpected canvas. And in that suspended state—far from home, stripped of safety, watching his country from the silence of a Paris apartment—he wrote Fulkumari, a novel that is less a story and more an act of defiance stitched into prose.

The pandemic locked the world indoors, but for Bhattacharya, the lockdown carried a different weight. He was already living in political lockdown—unable to return to Bangladesh, marked as an enemy by a state allergic to dissent, punished for the crime of telling the truth loudly and too well. So he sat alone in his apartment, haunted by news from home: disappearances, censorship, intimidation, the slow suffocation of public debate.

And then a rat appeared.

In another writer’s hands, a rat would be a nuisance. In Bhattacharya’s hands, it became a companion, a witness, a metaphor, and eventually the title character—Fulkumari. She was scrappy, persistent, uninvited. More importantly, she was unkillable. Bhattacharya named her not out of affection, but out of solidarity. In his loneliness, she became proof that life, no matter how marginalised, insists on surviving.

Thus began one of the most quietly radical literary acts to come out of Bangladesh in years.

Fulkumari is not merely a novel. It is a chronicle of exile, state repression, and the unbearable weight of remembering. Like all great political fiction, its power lies not in anger but in clarity. Through the narrator’s conversations with the rat, we are taken into the memories the state wants erased: the betrayals of 1971, the distortions in textbooks, the lives shattered for inconvenient truths. The rat becomes a stand-in for the reader—listening, absorbing, refusing to look away.

This dynamic echoes a lineage of global literature born from displacement.
Solzhenitsyn wrote from the shadow of the Gulag.
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o wrote from imprisonment.
Roberto Bolaño wrote from exile that never ended.
Bhattacharya writes from the limbo of political banishment.

What connects them is not geography but defiance.
Their survival weapon is the same: narrative.

The genius of Fulkumari lies in its structure. The novel blends satire with sorrow, absurdity with accuracy, tenderness with accusation. Bhattacharya dissects the authoritarian playbook: the rewriting of history, the manufacturing of fear, the criminalisation of dissent. But he does so with a calmness that is more terrifying than rage. Rage is expected. Documentation is dangerous.

He lets the rat speak by listening to her, and in doing so, he lets truth speak by refusing to smother it. The rat and the refugee form an ecosystem of resistance—two creatures pushed to the margins, surviving through memory, refusing erasure.

There is also a deeper grief running through the narrative: the grief of distance. Exile magnifies the pain of witnessing injustice because you cannot reach it, cannot intervene, cannot even shout into the streets that once felt like home. Bhattacharya writes with the ache of someone trapped in safety while the people he loves remain in danger. It is the paradox of exile: you escape, but you never stop burning.

Yet the novel is not merely a personal lament. It is a global mirror.
Across the world, truth is under siege.
Journalists vanish in Mexico.
Activists are silenced in India.
Writers flee Pakistan, Myanmar, Russia, Egypt.

What Bhattacharya captures is a universal political tragedy: when states fear truth, they fear storytellers most.

This is why Fulkumari matters.

Not because it is about a rat.
But because it is about a citizen who refused to stop being one.

In a time when authoritarianism dresses itself in the language of patriotism, when memory is distorted into propaganda, when exile becomes a tool of punishment, Fulkumari stands as a reminder that stories are the last country tyrants cannot conquer.

Bhattacharya may be far from home.
But through this novel, he performs the bravest act a dissident can:
he remembers publicly.

And he teaches us that sometimes the most dangerous animal in the room is not the one gnawing at crumbs—but the one refusing to play dead.