Ultimately, even in the darkness of war there is light, as 'in the midst of all this madness,' Rehana realises, 'I found the world seemed right for the first time in a very long time'. We see power shift dramatically along geographic, political and familial lines we see love of all kinds turn unexpected corners we see impossible choices being made possible we see somebody's 'black' becoming somebody else's 'white'. Laced through A Golden Age is the idea of a 'cycle', a sense of going-around and coming-around. Her gradual acceptance of this reconciles the emotional tension of the novel.

Veering between indulgence and censure, 'there was a part of her that wanted to allow her children anything - any whimsy, any zeal, any excess', while 'another part of her wanted them to have nothing to do with it all, to keep them safe at home'. With the conflict taking its bloody course in the East, Rehana realises she cannot stop them from joining the Bangla effort as freedom fighters. you see how much I belong here and not to you.' As a mother, she is circumscribed by the 'yawning, cyclic, inexhaustible need' for the son and daughter who were taken from her. 'Dear Sisters,' she imagines writing to her family, suddenly the enemy.

When war comes in 1971, she discovers that, for all her inability to 'replace her mixed tongue with a pure Bengali one', it is the East that is now 'home' it is Bangladesh for which she will make the greatest sacrifices. It was to the West that her two small children had been sent in 1959 after she lost a court appeal to keep them. Some kind of fissure was almost inevitable.įor Rehana Haque, a young Urdu-speaking widow born in the western 'horn' but living in 1971 in the Bengali East, the chasm dividing Pakistan has long been metaphorical as well as geographic.

West enjoyed political and economic supremacy East was a poor relation, neglected even during the cyclones and floods that plagued its delta planes. 'What sense did it make,' its people wonder in this novel, 'to have a country in two halves, poised on either side of India like a pair of horns?' East and West spoke different languages, followed different religions, lived different lives. Bangladesh used to be East Pakistan and full of questions about its identity.

A golden age by tahmima anam