New Lonely Londoners

co-existence with history and circumstance.

A marriage contracted by elders takes young Nazneen from a village in Mymensingh district to London’s Tower Hamlets. Handicapped by language and roped in by Chanu, her self-absorbed, older husband, the window and the sometimes glowing television screen are her only access to the world beyond. Chanu is an overbearing bumbler. Blaming stagnation in his local council job on racism, on the resentment of “the white underclass”, he is a manic collector of degrees, wading through and reading aloud tracts on race, ethnicity and bookkeeping. Into their overstuffed flat he brings complaints of discrimination, of injustice, that his familiarity with Chaucer and Thackeray goes unrewarded by a people who have forgotten their classic writers. Every disappointment, however, spurs him to enroll for another course.

In contrast, Nazneen is stillness itself.

Homesickness and bafflement at the lonely hand dealt out to her, she learns to aid time to pass. She stills her mind, she hushes her heart. Restrained from venturing beyond the estate, stopped from signing up for a language class, she lives vicariously through rough Razia, battling a miserly husband but determined to take up small sewing jobs to buy her children the bare necessities of a London adolescence.

And through Hasina, her younger sister. Hasina had fled the village for Dhaka and love marriage. Now abandoned, she mails letters documenting her journey though the criminalised and impoverished underside of Dhaka. For Nazneen, these letters are a lifeline. Clumsily constructed, they are presumably Ali’s way of reflecting Hasina’s free and abandoned spirit. Instead, they irritate, they just don’t work.

Oddly enough, we gauge Nazneen’s mysterious bond with her sister somewhere else. When Hasina goes homeless for the first time, when her letter arrives without a return address, Nazneen hurtles out of the estate into the concrete and green maze of London. She doesn’t even know how to get lost in an alien city! She takes every second left and every second right at first, before succumbing to random turns. These are wonderfully written, heartbreaking passages, but they are the first, unerring intimations that Nazneen will endure, she will reach for much more than her husband or fellow Sylhetis have apportioned for her.

As the novel jumps from the mid-eighties to 2001, much is changed in the Ahmad household. Chanu is a thoroughly disenchanted man, he is struck by the Going Home Syndrome, working furiously to save for passage to Bangladesh and reciting Tagore to his two daughters. It is a worthy project, and Nazneen is finally allowed to pitch in financially, sewing bundles of clothes.

Soon enough the man arriving with the bundles becomes another aid to self-realisation. Young Karim adds to the happy hum of the sewing machine by reading out stirring articles about atrocities in Bosnia and Palestine, about repression in Egypt, by composing responses to anti-immigrant leaflets that have started carpeting the corridors. This battle of the leaflets, predictably, gathers fresh momentum after September 11.

Will Nazneen return to Bangladesh? Her older daughter is determined not to. Will she leave Chanu for Karim? Each makes a claim on her. In each she intuits gaping insecurities and deficiencies.

Run, Nazneen, run, we want to call out to her.

But Ali has other plans. Stillness has been the source of Nazneen’s courage and Ali’s prose remains sprawling but uncluttered, her pace even, as her heroine contemplates a leap.

Brick Lane manages a remarkable balance. It steers agonisingly close to an Oprah Book of the Month soppiness, it skirts the edges of a politically correct multicultural celebration. In the end, however, Ali — presented to us neatly packaged and labelled as one of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists of the decade — emerges untarnished. The biggest surprise in Brick Lane is that is works.