Nazneen tells herself that she is relatively lucky. Chowdhury charges her discounted rent, saying she is like a daughter to him.
Since Hasina is often short of money, Mr. Hasina intimates in her letters that Malek wishes she were a better wife, but it’s not until Hasina leaves him for Dhaka and a job as a sewing woman in a garment factory that Nazneen finds out the truth: Malek had taken to beating her, so Hasina fled her marriage and threw herself under the protection of Mr. Hasina writes to Nazneen often to tell her about her life with her young husband, Malek, who works on the railway and is, in Hasina’s opinion, exceptionally smart and talented. Islam, an older widow who claims to be an authority on everyone living in Tower Hamlets, and Razia Iqbal, an irreverent yet kind woman with two young children and an angry husband who grows furious whenever she defies his wishes or the conventional expectations of the local Bengali community. Homesick and isolated, Nazneen spends much of her day cooking, tidying up her apartment, and watching her neighbor, a much-tattooed white woman, drink and throw her beer cans out the window.
She does not return, however, and Hamid, a widower following Rupban’s apparently accidental fall onto a sharp spear, arranges for Nazneen to marry Chanu, a forty-something man living in London.Ĭhanu and Nazneen marry and move to Tower Hamlets, a low-income housing estate in a Bangladeshi immigrant neighborhood in London. Nazneen’s sister Hasina, on the other hand, is born beautiful and rebellious, and at sixteen elopes in a love marriage with a local boy, much to the fury of Hamid, who keeps vigil at the edge of the village for sixteen days, prepared to chop his daughter’s head off should she return. To the great surprise of friends and family, including her father, Hamid, Nazneen survives and grows up into a plain, thoughtful child who, like her mother, decides that most everything in life should be left to God. Instead of taking Nazneen to a hospital, Rupban decides to leave her daughter to her fate. Everyone on hand at the birth, including Rupban’s sister-in-law, Mumtaz, and the village midwife, Banesa, thinks Nazneen dead until she begins kicking and screaming, albeit in a weak and listless way that suggests she could probably use immediate medical attention. Brick Lane by Monica Ali begins in the village of Gouripur in rural Bangladesh, where Rupban is going into labor two months early with the birth of her eldest daughter, Nazneen.
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