A Golden Age

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By the end of 1971, Yahya’s forces were defeated; Mujib was released, and soon after this East Pakistan divorced itself from West Pakistan and the republic of Bangladesh was born. In East Pakistan/Bangladesh, Muslims and Hindus live comfortably in mixed neighbourhoods and in friendship (Rehana's friendly relationship with her Hindu tenants is significantly on display even in their absence). Rehana felt like a fully fleshed-out, flawed and multi-faceted character, as she trod her precarious path though life, but Rehana’s friends could seem more emblematic, while the guerrilla soldier who becomes important to Rehana felt positively wraithlike. That didn’t have a lot about the exact historical events of the Rhodesian War, but I still loved it, so something else must be wrong. Her life centres around her household, and that remains true even when revolution breaks out and she finds herself sheltering freedom fighters.

a b c d "Discourse of Discontent: A Study of Select Works of Tahmina Anam, Taslima Nasrin and Manjushree Thapa" (PDF). has very critical name because I could not understand when a country is under military reign and the most fierce suppression, from which angle the time seems to be ‘golden’? Rehana's sisters in Karachi and sister-in-law in Lahore are, in contrast (although they all grew up in Calcutta), contemptuous and racist towards Hindus. e. the split between East and West Pakistan in 1971, the central theme is a mother’s efforts to save her children. She had married a man she had not expected to love; loved a man she had not expected to lose; lived a life of moderation, a life of few surprises.Growing up with two parents that had been involved with the Bangladesh Liberation War, patriotism was important to Anam's family. Razboiul de independenta ii gaseste pe acestia doi studenti, cu viziuni comuniste, dornici sa se implice in razboiul de independenta. Rehana grew up in calucutta and then left to west Pakistan after her marriage and her native tongue became Urdu, Rehana does not feel the same sense of nationalism as her children.

As with other novels I've read where conflict turns a family life upside down, there's an underlying story that would have been worth telling by itself: Rehana's struggle to get her children back from her brother after losing custody, and their life as a single-parent family struggling to come to terms with their feelings about the separation, to say nothing of the adolescent and adult lives and loves of the kids. Every year,' Rehana observes, 'the land will turn to sea as it disappears under the spell of water, and then prevail again, as if by magic, and this refrain, this looping repetition, is the archive of its long, flood-turned history. Rehana finds her nationalism within her own experiences and those she loves that have brought the idea of the nation of Bangladesh to hold significance for her. While this is a beautiful setup, and there are some very striking scenes, it is sadly not because of the book that they are striking, it is simply history.The story falters when it isn't tagging along with the fantastical events of what actually happened. On the other hand, I just finished another book concerning how war wreaks havoc in people’s lives, Scribbling The Cat, and that I loved. While Reena herself is lukewarm on the question of independence, at least at first, her children are supportive, and Reena lives for her children. When the book opens Reena has just lost her children to her in-laws, and then the book jumps a few years into the future where Reena and her children struggle though Bangladesh birth pains as the country gains its independence from Pakistan.

The novel is well written and easy to read; the main strength is the family drama and there is a good bit of tension as well. It revolved around one family; a single mother, her son and daughter, and how their life is affected by the war. In her fierce love and desperate need to keep them safe, she is willing to consider some unholy alliances and has to make difficult choices.

It will be interesting too, to see if and how Anam's writing style has changed for this book that has come out 3 years after the first one. My Bangladeshi friend in our book group was bothered by what she saw as a lot of inaccuracies about the history and culture. The Dhaka university students had been involved in the protests from the very beginning, so it was no surprise Sohail had got caught up, Maya too.

Anam is great on description of food, Rehana is an excellent cook and the feast is described in loving detail.

For Rehana Haque, a young Urdu-speaking widow born in the western 'horn' but living in 1971 in the Bengali East, the chasm dividing Pakistan has long been metaphorical as well as geographic. It provides an account of the heart-breaking decisions that families may be forced to make in wartime, about sacrifice and the toll of conflict and the particular cruelties of civil war. I'm going to start right into the next book of this trilogy, The Good Muslim, while the characters are still fresh in my mind.