I unknowingly fell in love with Milan Kundera’s work during my childhood. The renowned Bangladeshi physicist and science writer Ali Asgar used to live on the fourth floor of our building, and his younger son Vaskar was my classmate, probably the first friend I’d ever made. Almost every time I went to his house, he secretly brought out a particular book from his father’s library (a huge one, which probably had over 10,000 books), and both of us read portions of intensely.

Now, I feel no shame to admit that it was a guilty pleasure. The book was a Bengali translation of one of Kundera’s finest work, The Joke. And the part we used to read was the one where there was a vivid description of how Helena – one of the protagonists – inadvertently stripped in front of Ludvik, another of the main characters. I can’t remember right now how long we continued to do this, but it was after my secondary school certification exams that I actually thought of reading the entire book instead of that particular section.

And so I read The Joke in an English translation – it turned out to be a mixed journey back then. It was hard for me to understand the complex nature of Ludvik – a witty and popular student who was an enthusiastic supporter of the still-fresh Communist regime in post-World War II Czechoslovakia. I was, frankly, too naïve to comprehend the jokes of his life. But the book did one good thing for me – it upgraded my reading habits from Jeffery Archer to a whole new level.

Four years later, when I was a second-year university student, I read The Joke again. But things had changed a bit by then. I was kind of influenced by Samajtantric Chhatra Front (Socialist Student Union), and I used to read a lot about communism. The journey was amazing then. “Optimism is the opium of mankind!...A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity!...Long live Trotsky!” I was actually able to grasp the humour now.

My affection for Kundera started then. PG Wodehouse is the writer whom I would assert as my favourite of all time, but Kundera was something else to me. I began a hunt for his book in the shops selling old books at Nilkhet in Dhaka. The first one I found was Slowness. The impact? I enrolled for the French language course at Alliance Francaise, and when the instructor asked the customary question, “Why do you want to learn French?” I replied, “I want to read Slowness in French.” Slowness was one of the books Kundera wrote in French and not in Czech.

Within a year, I had found five of the ten novels Kundera had written till then. I could have easily gone to the large bookshops or asked my brother living abroad to send me his books, but I just didn’t want to miss the sheer joy of hunting them one by one in the vast jungle of old books at Nilkhet.

My – and probably many others’ – favorite Kundera novel to date is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The novel explores artistic and intellectual life in Czech society during the Communist period, from the Prague Spring to the Soviet Union’s August 1968 invasion and its aftermath. I really can’t explain why, but I think Sabina, whom Kundera sketched in this novel as the epitome of the “lightness” of being, is a haunting character. Through her, Kundera portrayed love as fleeting, haphazard, and an endless string of insignificant coincidences. It was frightening.

Later, I watch the film adaptation, where the character was portrayed by Lena Olin. Her performance strengthened my perception of Sabina as a haunting character who repeatedly comes into someone’s dream to whisper, “Life is insignificant, and decisions do not matter.”

I haven’t read any of Kundera’s works in the past ten years. Somehow, my literary appetite has reached a place where I now prefer reading Reader’s Digest (no offence, it’s a great magazine) to high literature. But every year in the past two decades, I have been eagerly waiting for the announcement: “The Nobel Prize for Literature goes to Milan Kundera.” Unfortunately, I have been reminded every single time that Santa isn’t real.

Faisal Mahmud is a Dhaka based journalist