Woven through the novel, Hasina's letters from Dhaka recount a world of overwhelming adversity. While Nazneen journeys along her path of self-realization, a way haunted by her mother's ghost, her sister Hasina, back in Bangladesh, rushes headlong at her life, first making a 'love marriage', then fleeing her violent husband. He sets questions before her, of longing and belonging he sparks in her a turmoil that reflects the community's own he opens her eyes and directs her gaze - but what she sees, in the end, comes as a surprise to them both. 'I didn't ask to be born here, ' says Shahana, with regular finality. Chanu calls his elder daughter the little memsahib. Yet Nazneen walks a tightrope stretched between her daughters' embarrassment and her husband's resentments. For years, keeping house and rearing children, she does what is expected of her. Her life in London's Tower Hamlets is, on the surface, calm. Nazneen's inauspicious entry to the world, an apparent stillbirth on the hard mud floor of a Bangladeshi village hut, imbues in her a sense of fatalism that she carries across continents when she is married off to Chanu.
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