The author was born five years after the events she narrates, but has managed to recreate those turbulent times with an immediacy and intimacy which belies her relative youth. The book arrives in India already trailing clouds of glory, having won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ prize for best first book, and garlanded with rave reviews.
Anam in some ways fits all the tick-boxes for a successful South Asian writer: young, attractive female (see full-page author pic on the back cover), America-educated (Harvard, no less), Londoner (where she still lives), with the added fillip of a literary family (her father is the editor of the Daily Star, Bangladesh’s largest independent broadsheet, and her grandfather a well-known political satirist, Abdul Mansur Ahmed). But she—unlike the Monica Alis, Bharati Mukherjees and Jhumpa Lahiris of this world—has chosen not to write about immigrant life in the West, but instead set her story firmly in the subcontinent in a time of enormous strife, conflict and violence.
Her main protagonist, Rehana, is a mother and wife, and there are moments in the book where I feared that Anam might, like so many before her, be sucked into the quicksand of nostalgic domestic description—the textures and smells of mangoes, the tastes of home: ilish maachh and mango pickle. But Rehana is no mistress of spices and the pickle-making episode is actually part of a desperate subterfuge to mask her involvement with revolutionary activities.
Rehana is a reluctant revolutionary. Her daughter, Maya, and her son, Sohail, are both passionate nationalists, ready to risk everything in the struggle against Pakistani occupation. Rehana—an Urdu-speaking widow—is drawn into the maelstrom against her will. Her loyalties are tested again and again; and she emerges, scarred but strong, like tempered steel.
Joining her daughter in Calcutta, she becomes one of the millions of refugees (anywhere between 8 million and 10 million) who have fled the fighting. "They kept their hands in their pockets and a grateful smile stitched to their lips. They had unwashed hair and dirty shoes. Clothes that looked decent, but, looking closely she could see the ragged hems, the worn pleats.... Rehana found she could not bear to look at them; she was afraid she would see herself; she was afraid she wouldn’t see herself; she wanted to be different and the same as them all at once, neither option offering relief from the rasping feeling of loss, and the swallowing, hungry love."
The spareness of her writing, and the clear-eyed descriptions of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary times, result in a narrative that is harsh and tender simultaneously. The politics of nationalism, of religion, of language are all present—not as grand rhetoric, but in the intimate and small spaces of the heart. Rather like Rehana’s complex, conflicted and hard-won love for her children, it is this that forms the backbone of the book and leaves the reader enlightened, horrified, and hopeful.
