'A Golden Age' tells of a mother's love tangled by war

A Bangladeshi widow will do anything for her rebel children.

from the January 8, 2008 edition

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But, just as a decade earlier, they leave her behind. Maya becomes a press writer for the nationalists in Calcutta, while Sohail joins a rebel cell near home. Only this time, over the course of the novel, Rehana learns how to let them go.

As her friends hide in their homes and pretend the war doesn't exist, Rehana finds herself becoming an involuntary revolutionary. She starts by sewing blankets made from her silk saris.

Then she lets Sohail's rebel friends set up a base in her rental property – vacant since her Hindu tenants fled the persecution by the Pakistani army – and bury guns under her rosebushes.

At first, Rehana is motivated less by nationalist fervor and more by a desire to make her son happy. As his requests become more and more dangerous, Rehana is oddly delighted: "It was the most distasteful, gruesome task," she thinks when Sohail begs for another favor. "But it was also an opportunity. Her son was giving her another chance to atone. The years of slavish devotion, the mothering ... she had always known they would not be enough. She could not help welcoming the prospect of some new sacrifice."

Many comparisons have been made between Anam and Monica Ali, another highly talented Bangladeshi writer who lives in Britain. But where Ali's "Brick Lane," followed the immigrant experiences of a woman living in London, Anam focuses wholly on her native country.

"A Golden Age" is the first of a planned trilogy covering the birth of Bangladesh. Since the novel just keeps getting stronger as it progresses – building to a doozy of an ending – one can only imagine great things from the sequel.

• Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.

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