With warmth and sensitivity, author Ali draws us into Nazneen’s world, a world of “Regular prayer, regular housework, regular visits with Razia. Through Hasina’s letters, author Ali shows the similarities and contrasts in the lives of Nazneen and Hasina, both second class citizens, and, like other Bengali wives, powerless to control their own fate in the culture in which they live. Whose own fate back home in Dhaka changes throughout the fifteen years that this novel takes place. Now Nazneen’s only contact with home is through letters she exchanges with Hasina, Her younger sister Hasina, who eloped in a “love marriage,” has been disowned. Nazneen has been the “good daughter” in her family, the daughter who accepted the marriage her father arranged for her after the death of her mother. 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. 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. 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. For her, there was nothing else to be done. Even if the tornado was heading directly toward her.
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