'Sometimes I make him lose patience without I mean to.' Both women accept Hasina's subsequent beatings as normal, and neither questions the circumstances surrounding the death of their mother when they were younger.Īuthor Ali shows Nazneen's world in all its earthy details. ' is a good man and very patient,' Hasina writes. Hasina's life in Dhaka, on the other hand, is far more dramatic. Sometimes she managed it.' As the author focuses on the minute details in Nazneen's everyday life, the reader observes equally minute changes taking place in the relationship of Nazneen and Chanu as it waxes and wanes in response to life's daily challenges. She told her heart, Do not beat with fear, do not beat with desire. ' To remain calm, even passive, 'She told her mind to be still. 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. Now Nazneen's only contact with home is through letters she exchanges with Hasina, whose own fate back home in Dhaka changes throughout the fifteen years that this novel takes place.

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. She asked it to leave her alone but it would not.It listened quietly, and then burrowed deeper into her internal organs.' And there was this shapeless, nameless thing that crawled across her shoulders and nested in her hair and poisoned her lungs, that made her both restless and listless. Nothing else that God wanted her to do.There was Chanu, who was kind and never beat her. For her, there was nothing else to be done. Even if the tornado was heading directly toward her. Down overto read a review of In the Kitchen)

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