V V: Bangladesh - in search of an identity

Tahmima Anam, London-based Bangladeshi social anthropologist and writer, is the best chronicler of the post-war Bangladesh scene. In The Golden Age (2007), her debut novel which was set against the backdrop of the Bangladesh War of Independence (1970-72) and the hopes and aspirations that evaporated in the chaos of the era, she had described how the revolution devoured its own children — from student protesters to the country’s leaders, from rickshaw pullers to the army’s soldiers. In the sequel, The Good Muslim (Penguin, Special Indian Price: Rs 499), she continues her examination of the consequences of the war and “the disappointing ordinariness” of the freedom for which the younger generation had fought. Anam, in many ways, paraphrases Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s famous poem “Freedom’s Dream” in this novel:

 

This leprous daybreak, dawn night’s fangs have mangled —
This is not that long-looked-for-break of day,
Not that clear dawn in quest of which our comrades
Set out, believing that in heaven’s wide void
Somewhere must be the stars’ last halting-place,
Somewhere the verge of night’s slow-washing tide,
Somewhere the anchorage of the ship of sorrow.

A good novelist, it is said, is also a social historian: the operative word is also. This is a portrait of post-war Bangladesh a decade after independence when a brother-sister duo symbolise the clash between secularism and fundamentalism, which lies just below the surface of everyday lives in the social fabric of a middle-class Bangladeshi.

The year is 1984 and Maya returns to her family home. She had been away for more than a decade in the north of Bangladesh where, giving up hope to become a specialised doctor, she had become “a simple country doctor”. She tells her companion Joy that she had heard “a woman screaming, sitting at the back of a tailoring shop, in labour. I helped her and I felt like I hadn’t felt for a long time. Like I was finally good for something.” For all the travails of a nation in the making, life was still worth living, if only to do some good for all in distress around her.

But it isn’t the outside world that torments her as much as the change that had taken place in the lives of the people she had known before she escaped to the north. Her mother was seriously ill with terminal cancer and needed to be nursed, which sapped her time and energy. But apart from the wear and tear of ordinary mortals, what distressed her the most was her brother Sohail’s transformation into a holy man with a following. He had become the head of a puritanical and proselytising branch of a reformist Islam, following the death of his beloved wife, Sylvi. She had left behind a little son, six-year-old Zaid, almost illiterate and wild. The father refuses to give him a modern education or even a normal life, so Maya takes over the responsibility of educating and bringing him up.

One of the most distinctive patterns of the Indian novel, ever since Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, has been how the family chronicle or crisis mirrors the state of the nation: so it is here as politics takes command. A dictator has taken over; war crimes are unaccounted for or glossed over. The stories of women raped during the war for independent Bangladesh have been deliberately forgotten or marginalised. Instead, a picture of a glorious country is presented to hide the harsh realities of daily living. But distress was everywhere and frantic forms of religiosity proliferated. The past, violent and unpredictable, was never quite past.

Maya escapes the mourning all around her to accept the affirmative celebrations of a golden past. Joy, recently returned from the US, reintroduces her to a life that might have been if the revolution and the domestic crises had not intervened. But politics was never far away in Bangladesh that had been politicised by the power struggles that inevitably follow revolutions.

In many ways, the book is about the fluid nature of memory, or as Marquez says in Living to Tell the Tale, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” So, Maya starts writing columns herself on life around her on a battered typewriter, and involves herself in rescuing Zaid from a monstrous father who finds refuge in a fanatical version of Islam. It is all loss, both personal and political, that links the past to the present.

This is a reflective novel in which Maya is forced to rethink what it means to be a good daughter, son, friend and citizen — or simply a good Muslim. Anam’s fluent prose and sharp insights into the nature of good and evil and the crooked timber of humanity make this an important novel.