[Reader-list] NYT Review of Tahmima Anam's GOLDEN AGE

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

NYT. January 27, 2008. Birth of a Nation. by Michael Gorra.
A GOLDEN AGE. by Tahmima Anam. 276 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95.

About halfway through Tahmima Anam's first novel, the story slows for
a weather report, an evocation of August in the author's native
Bangladesh. The mornings seem "unbearably liquid" with humidity, and
tempers worsen as "the air stopped around people's throats, not a
stir, everything still as buildings." Then come the daily
"exclamations of lightning," and always there is "one small boy, or a
very old man, or even a dog" waiting with his tongue out for the first
drop of rain to fall. The description allows for a few seconds of calm
in an increasingly tense plot, but it's also a bravura set piece. It's
almost as if Anam were giving herself a test - if she were writing
about Los Angeles, she'd do the Santa Ana winds - a test she passes,
not least because she never uses the word "monsoon." And from that
moment on, almost everything goes right with this historical novel
about the birth of a new nation. I say "from that moment on" because
this book, the first in a projected trilogy, gets off to a muddy
start. Born in 1975, educated in France, Thailand, England and America
and now resident in London, Anam is too young to have witnessed her
country's drive for independence; instead, she's telling the story of
her parents' generation. When the British quit India in 1947, they cut
the subcontinent in two and left a Pakistan that was itself divided.
The country that now bears this name was the politically and
militarily dominant west; the more densely populated east was a very
different place. There, a shared Bengali culture linked Hindus and
Muslims, with close ties between the Indian city of Calcutta and East
Pakistan's capital of Dhaka. In 1971, an eastern party won a
parliamentary majority, but leaders in the west kept it from taking
office, and the army invaded what had been its own country. That army
quickly earned a reputation for atrocity - and found itself facing
both a declaration of independence and an unexpectedly active
resistance. After millions of refugees crossed its border, India
joined the war on behalf of the new nation of Bangladesh and within
weeks compelled a Pakistani surrender. But the dead were already past
counting.

"A Golden Age" opens in 1959 with the words of a widow to her dead
husband: "I lost our children today." Rehana Haque, a young woman from
an aristocratic but impoverished Calcutta family, has entered into an
arranged marriage with a kindly businessman in Dhaka, only to see him
die of a heart attack. With no money to fight her husband's rich
brother, she temporarily loses custody of her two children, who are
taken far away to Lahore, in the west. After a mysterious bit of luck
with an investment in real estate, Rehana is able to bring them back,
but the loss has marked her. Although she builds an ordered life, she
has no dreams or hopes of her own. When the civil war begins, it takes
weeks for her to realize the scale of the history taking place all
around her.

Her children, now in their late teens, react more decisively. Rehana's
daughter, Maya, moves to Calcutta to write about the freedom fighters
for a newspaper, and Rehana's son, Sohail, gets himself to a training
camp for guerillas, eventually returning to bury a cache of arms in
his mother's garden. At the same time, Rehana's hated brother-in-law
comes to Dhaka as a member of the occupation.
Historical novels must get the history right. They must be scrupulous
about details in order to make us swallow the liberties they
inevitably take in representing actual people, or in putting their own
invented characters close to the center of the action. In some novels,
these liberties may be writ large, made mythic or fantastical, as in
Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children," which attempts to get at a
truth that lies beyond the documents. But Tahmima Anam works in a
traditionally realistic style, and because of that she came near to
losing me in her opening pages. When her children are sent to West
Pakistan in 1959, Rehana is deemed an unfit mother, too young and
feckless to teach them proper behavior. One item of evidence cited in
court against her is the allegation that she has taken the children to
see Elizabeth Taylor  in "Cleopatra" - which wasn't released until
1963.

This silly mistake put me in a deeply skeptical mood. It made me ask
whether "Cleopatra" would have been shown in Pakistan at all, and if
so, in how censored a form? Still doubting, I later asked myself
whether 17-year-old Maya would really have told her mother that all
the girls at her university were having sex. Would it have been true,
even in her Marxist circles? Anam deftly captures the brutality of the
Pakistani Army, but could its soldiers have also been so unobservant?
Would none of them have detected the digging in Rehana's garden,
especially after it became public knowledge that her son had joined
the freedom fighters? Would such fighters have been able to stay in
touch with one another by telegram, as Anam suggests? If a writer
can't be trusted about small things, can we trust her about large
ones?

At the outset, Anam's prose doesn't help; in fact, some of her
descriptive passages are so overwrought as to be unclear. In one
scene, Rehana sees a little girl next to a blood-filled gutter, her
mouth a "pale pink smudge, like the introduction of a bruise," but
Anam so tangles Rehana's perceptions and her own omniscient narrative
voice that it's impossible to tell if the child is alive or dead.
Yet the monsoon brings relief. Once the war takes hold, Anam finds her
subject in Rehana's fierce love for her children, in the story of what
she is willing to do to keep them alive. The novel's language grows
more confident, and history itself becomes an animating force. Rehana
travels to Calcutta and works at a refugee camp, then returns to Dhaka
at the height of the crisis. The second half of the novel acquires a
taut, electric air, and I turned its pages as greedily as if it were a
thriller. The start of "A Golden Age" may not be promising, but by its
end this first novel has itself become a promising start.

Michael Gorra teaches English at Smith College. His books include
"After Empire" and, as editor, "The Portable Conrad."
January 27, 2008
First Chapter

'A Golden Age'

By TAHMIMA ANAM
March 1971 Shona with her back to the sun
Every year, Rehana held a party at Road 5 to mark the day she had
returned to Dhaka with the children. She saved her meat rations and
made biryani. She rented chairs and called the jilapi-wallah to fry
the hot, looping sweets in the garden. There was a red-and-yellow tent
in case of rain, lemonade in case of heat, cucumber salad, spicy
yoghurt. The guests were always the same: her neighbour Mrs Chowdhury
and her daughter Silvi; her tenants, the Senguptas, and their son,
Mithun; and Mrs Rahman and Mrs Akram, better known as the gin-rummy
ladies.
So, on the first morning of March, as on the first morning of every
March for a decade, Rehana rose before dawn and slipped into the
garden. She shivered a little and rubbed her elbows as she made her
way across the lawn. Winter still lingered on the leaves and in the
wisps of fog that rolled over the delta and hung low over the
bungalow.
She dipped her fingers into the rosebush, heavy with dew, and plucked
a flower. She held it in her hand as she wandered through the rest of
the garden, ducking between the wall - hugging jasmine and the
hibiscus, crossing the tiny vegetable patch that was giving them the
last of the season's cauliflower, zigzagging past the mango tree, the
lemon tree, the shouting-green banana tree.
She looked up at the building that would slowly, over the course of
the day, cast a long shadow over her little bungalow. Shona. She could
still hear Mrs Chowdhury telling her to build the new house at the
back of her property. 'Such a big plot,' she'd said, peering out of
the window; 'you can't even see the boundary it's so far away. You
don't need all that space.'
'Should I sell it?'
Mrs Chowdhury snapped her tongue. 'Na, don't sell it.'
'Then what?'
'Build another house.'
'What would I do with another house?'
'Rent, my dear. Rent it out.'
Now there were two gates, two driveways, two houses. The new driveway
was a narrow passage that opened into the back of Rehana's plot. On
the plot stood the house she had built to save her children. It
towered above the bungalow, its two whitewashed storeys overlooking
the smaller house. Like the bungalow, it had been built with its back
to the sun. The house was nearly ten years old now, and a little
faded. Ten monsoons had softened its edges and drawn meandering,
old-age seams into the walls. But every day, as Rehana woke for the
dawn Azaan, or when she went to put the washing in the garden, or
when, after bathing, she fanned out her long hair on the back of a
veranda chair, Rehana looked at the house with pride and a little
ache. It was there to remind her of what she had lost, and what she
had won. And how much the victory had cost. That is why she had named
it Shona, gold. It wasn't just because of what it had taken to build
the house, but for all the precious things she wanted never to lose
again.
Rehana turned back to the bungalow and entered the drawing room. She
ran her palm across the flat fur of the velvet sofa, the dimpled wood
of the dining table. The scratched, loved, faded whitewash of the
veranda wall.
She unfurled her prayer mat, pointed it westwards and sank to her knees.
This was the start of the ritual: wake before sunrise, feel her way
around the house; pray; wake the children.
They were not children any more. She had to keep reminding herself of
this fact. At nineteen and seventeen, they were almost grown up. She
clung greedily to the almost, but she knew it would not last long,
this hovering, flirting with adulthood. Already they were beings
apart, fast on their way to shedding the fierce, hungry mother-need.
Rehana lifted the mosquito net and nudged Maya's shoulder. 'Wake up,
jaan,' she said. 'It's our anniversary!'
She went to Sohail's room and knocked, but he was already awake. 'For
you,' she said, holding out the rose.
While the children took turns in the bath, Rehana ironed their new
clothes. This year she had chosen an egg-blue sari for herself and a
blue georgette with yellow polka dots for Maya. For Sohail there was a
brown kurta-pyjama. She had embroidered the purple flowers on the
collar herself.
'Ammoo,' Maya said, 'I have to go to campus after the party - I can't
wear this.'
'I'm sure your activist friends won't mind if you don't wear white for one day.'
'You wouldn't understand,' she retorted, tucking the sari under her
elbow anyway.
After they had all bathed and put on their new clothes, the children
took turns touching Rehana's feet. 'God bless you,' she said, hugging
them tightly, their strong, tanned arms around her neck almost beyond
her imagination.
They were both taller than her. Maya had passed Rehana by a few
inches, and Sohail was a full head and shoulders above them both;
Rehana was often reminded of the moment she'd met Iqbal, hunched over
the wedding dais, how he had towered over her like a thunder cloud.
But in fact Sohail had grown to resemble Rehana. He was pale and had
her small nose and her slightly crooked teeth; his hair was fashioned
into a wave at the top of his head, the crest threatening to tip over
his eyelids. Sometimes, like today, he wore kurta-pyjamas, but usually
he was seen in more fashionable attire: tight, long-collared shirts
and even tighter trousers that hung over his shoes and drew tracks in
the dust.
It was Maya who looked more like her father. She had his chestnut skin
and deep-set eyes that made her look serious even when she was trying
to say something funny or make a joke - which rarely happened - but
Rehana had often seen her friends pause and look at each other,
wondering whether to laugh.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam Copyright (c) 2008 by
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