This is a book about Babu Abdul Majumdar, a man popularly known to many of us as Babu Bangladesh or simply Babu. Chances are that media hounds the world over remember encountering his name a decade ago. Babu was in the international spotlight from 2008 until he went missing in 2021. In his prime, Babu had gained repute as a spirited environmentalist who advocated for development in poverty-stricken regions. While he is now overlooked by mainstream and gulfstream eyes, his initiatives are applauded by collegiate programmes, leftist organizations and ecological societies scattered over the continents. Concert-goers might have caught a glimpse of Babu's face flashing across massive LED screens at U2 and Asian Dub Foundation shows. Thich Nhat Hanh, Arundhati Roy and Cornel West have publicly quoted him. The Peruvian-born rapper Immortal Technique dedicated his song 'Where they went' to Babu. Rock-queen Annie Clark is said to boast a tattoo on her left buttock that closely resembles him. However, due to her weight gain post-2026 it is difficult to confirm the resemblance. Civil sleuths posit that when US president Tulsi Harris visited Bangladesh in 2022, she went off the record to voice distress over Babu's peculiar disappearance.

In Bangladesh, Babu is remembered as a writer, a politician, and as something of a mystic. Depending on the nature of their interactions with Babu, some salute him as a saviour while others are less generous in their reckoning of our bifacial snapper.

Post-2021, after Babu had departed for unknown skies, much of this adulation ebbed in his homeland. Although there are still a few institutes named after him, along with the odd bridge, museum and scholarship that sport his name, Babu's bureaucratic legacy in Bangladesh has effectively vaporized. As far as state apparatuses are concerned, cogs have fallen into old grooves and reverted to prior revolutions.

All the same, thousands in Bangladesh are still intrigued by him. There remains unrestricted access to his poetry. Several zettabytes of grainy amateur videos and hacked Vype chats still exist. If one digs around online, one will come across blogs, newsletters and threads that contemplate him at length. Those who delve beyond likes, favourites, bookmarks and predictive-search algorithms will encounter conspiracy theories involving Babu. These range from trade imbroglios that connect Rwanda, Ecuador and Peru to the pension of CIA heads in Malaysia, and the successes of Chinese bases in Sri Lanka and Tunisia to barrel policies in the Belarus. Then there was the scandal where Cyber-71, a league of black hats linked to Babu, hacked offshore-investment intel for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. These breaches resulted in the pivotal Shangri- La Papers of 2021, where nineteen million confidential documents exposed thousands, including 167 Bangladeshis, who had stashed billions far afield. As chatter has it, this affair was inseparably knotted to the 42.4 million dollars that were misappropriated from the Bangladeshi ministry of culture merely days before Babu's unanticipated departure. These spectacles, varied and wild, indicate that a great deal had been hushed up and swept under totalitarian Safavid rugs.

My work for the past nine years has been to powder through rubble to retrieve fragments of what is Babu Bangladesh...

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