Portrait of a ‘fallen’ woman coming of age
The other night I had this dream that I was married. That in itself wasn’t so bad, what was bad was the person I was married to. He was fat, opinionated and worst of all, cut his toenails on the dining table. I woke up relieved that that was not my life.
Until I figured out who my “dream” husband was. Turns out, he was a character in a book. More specifically, he was the nightmare husband in Brick Lane, Monica Ali’s Booker prize shortlisted novel.
Well. After a dream like that, I couldn’t not re-read the book. I hunted my bookshelf until I found it, hidden behind a bunch of others and dust covered and began to read it again, slowly. As always, the story of Nazneen, the young Bangladeshi girl married off to a much older man and transported to London, was poignant and moving. But this time, I began to read something into the book that I hadn’t seen before. The last time I had read it, I had nothing but loathing for Chanu, the husband, with his pompous, overbearing ways, his ways of undermining his wife and daughters, his way of lecturing people, even the way he made Nazneen clip his corns at any given opportunity. But then, this time, I began to see deeper.
Arranged marriages are a tricky thing, Nazneen begins her marriage hating her husband, even doing some domestic guerrilla warfare, by mismatching his socks, and leaving things a mess. But as the book goes on, you see the affection that sort of grows within Nazneen, the way she empathises and feels for this man, the way she wants to protect him from the world outside their flat. Even when she has an affair with a much younger man, she doesn’t think of Chanu with contempt, only sadness, that it has come to this.
Brick Lane is ultimately, a story about families and finding yourself, even in the midst of them. Hasina, Nazneen’s beautiful wayward sister, longs for a family of her own, even though she is a “fallen woman”, Nazneen learns that sometimes you have to stand up to fate and make your own path, and it is a happy-sad ending, but will keep you gripped through the whole thing.
The columnist is an author
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