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Literary Review
FICTION
Love and longing in the time of war
R. KRITHIKA
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By weaving the war into a family’s life, Anam brings home the price that people pay in a time of fighting.
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A Golden Age; Tahmima Anam, John Murray, £10.99
This is the story of the birth of a nation. It is also the story of one family. Tahmima’s Anam’s A Golden Age is set in Dhaka OF 1971. The fortunes of the Haques are interwoven with the fortunes of East Pakistan as it f
ights to become independent of the West. Rehana Haque, originally from Karachi, loses her children to her brother-in-law after her husband’s death. By the time war breaks out in 1971 her children, now teenagers, are back with her. Despite her fear and need to keep them safe, Sohail and Maya are drawn into the freedom struggle. Rehana does her bit; her house is a transit point for the guerrillas. The story follows the family as Bangladesh finally becomes independent.
There is a sense of the nation as mother concept that we Indians are so familiar with. The nation is split into two; Rehana’s family is split by a court decision. But this is not your stereotypical projection.
Poignant moments
War, torture and brutality mingle with love and loss. One poignant moment comes when Rehana talks to Maya about the time they were away from her. Maya tells her it was all right. Rehana’s reaction is immediate: “How could it be all right?” And the worst part of that enforced separation for Maya is forgetting … “I couldn’t remember your face. I kept asking Sohail, and he would say, Ammoo has the prettiest eyes, and I would nod but I’d forgotten.”
More importantly, this is a story of war told from a mother’s point of view. The reader sees the war from Rehana’s perspective: that of a mother worried sick about her kids. Her action in helping the guerrillas is fired by the need to keep her son safe but others regard it as a nationalistic act, more so since she comes from the West.
Role of women
Apart from Rehana, the reader follows the dreamer-turned-soldier Sohail. Is he fighting for the love of a country or the love of an already-married woman? And Maya, more mature politically … what is the role of women in a man’s war?
Rehana’s love for her dead husband is skilfully drawn as is her affection for the injured Major in her house. “In the midst of all the madness I found the world seemed right for the first time … And yes I loved him…. As it was with you so it was also with him…”
Political tensions co-exist with the domestic. Visits to the butcher are dangerous since as a Urdu-speaker he is suspected of collaborating with West Pakistan. “… And Rehana realised how strange the language suddenly sounded: Aggressive, insinuating. She saw that it was now the language of her enemy; hers and Sohail’s and the Major’s. She tried to feel something else, some tenderness for her poets …”
Anam’s writing falters a little in her use of the English-Bangla mix but overall she manages to hold the reader’s attention. One instance that lingers is Rehana’s feelings as she tells the Major how she stole to get her children back: “It could have been a smile, or it could have been a grimace,’ she thinks. And the tickle in her throat could have been a chuckle or it could have been tears. It was mixed up: sad; funny; unfunny.”
Born in 1975, Anam credits her parents with telling her “so many stories that I couldn’t help become a writer”. By weaving the war into a family’s life, Anam brings home the price that ordinary people pay in a time of fighting. And in this time of fighting and bloodshed, you wonder how many mothers can say with Rehana: “This war that has taken so many sons has not taken mine. This age that has burned so many daughters has not burned mine. I have not let it.”
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