In this warm and complex study of friendship, love, and roots, Kamila Shamsie focuses on the interrelationships of a group of vividly realized, upper-class residents of Karachi, particularly Raheen and Karim and their friends, only thirteen years old as the novel opens. Raheen has always regarded Karim, her one-time crib-companion and blood-brother, as her best friend, someone who knows her so well he can complete her sentences. Their parents, too, are close friends, and as the story evolves, we learn that Raheen’s father was once engaged to marry Karim’s mother, and that Raheen’s mother once pledged to marry Karim’s father. The story behind the exchange of fiancées, though revealed as an intimate personal story, has wider implications, since it is tied, obliquely, to the ethnic unrest of 1971, when civil war broke out between East and West Pakistan, and Bangladesh came into being.
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Nazneen, a young bride married at sixteen to a 40-year-old man, is wrenched from the only life she has ever known in the countryside of Bangladesh and conveyed to England, where her new husband, Chanu, has a job. Taught from the day of her birth that “fighting against one’s Fate can weaken the blood,” or even be fatal, she accepts the miserably lonely existence fate has bestowed on her in a London council flat. Though there are others from Bangladesh living there, Chanu believes the other immigrants to be uneducated, illiterate, and uncultured, and he discourages any reaching out Nazneen might do to these people who are “below” them. Speaking directly to the reader in unpretentious but vividly descriptive prose, Ali recreates Nazneen’s life in all its mundane details, showing her acceptance of a new culture (which some would call “growth”) through tiny, seemingly insignificant decisions. The gradual evolution of a new Nazneen is neither simple nor without conflict, and no member of the family escapes her transformation.
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In this sensitively imagined and astutely observed novel, Babu, son of veterinarian Dr. Dam, reminisces about his father’s life, trying to understand him–at least to the extent that sons can ever understand their fathers. Acutely aware that men of every generation are molded by the events and experiences which occur during their own lifetimes, Babu recognizes that though he and his father have shared many events, their views of these events are vastly different, in each case conditioned by their separate, though sometimes intersecting, pasts.
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