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he first passage of the book gripped me.
The words were deep, picturesque; flow was smooth and yet they conveyed the
anguish without any undue force – “The
petals of mustard flowers, dried to dust, tickle his nose and remind him of the
scent of meat, which he has not tasted in several months. Underfoot the grasses
spit and cry; overhead the heavy-lidded eye of a midwinter sun.”Tahmima Anam’s
“The Good Muslim” is more than a good read, it’s a journey through the pathways
of a country that waged a war to set itself free and became prisoner to its own
people, blinded by a faith. The book is not a denouncement of any religion or
of Islam in particular. Far from it. It talks of faith and its price, it talks
of what you gain in surrender and what others loose!
This may be only the second novel by
Tahmima but her voice is confident, thoughts mature and narrative strong. Her
pen has a strange but intoxicating mix of torment and calm. There is freshness
in the prose as well a subtle lyricism. However there are incidents in the plot
that portray confusion. The characters are sometimes made to behave in a
certain manner to fit a thought process, not their own. This is a jarring note,
but then this can also be a perspective of the reader. Maya, the protagonist,
grows on the reader as a character and one starts moving with her along the
prose. At a point, you get so engrossed in this fearless yet vulnerable woman,
that you start looking at her predicaments as yours. And, of course this is
because Tahmima has etched Maya so strongly in the readers mind.
Bangladesh as a new nation, struggling to
wipe off the signs of a bloody war and trying to move on, is a character in
itself in the book. The country caught between the “revolutionaries” and
“reactionaries” is struggling to keep aloft the ideals it fought for, and
failing miserably, for the people who fought the gruesome war for nine long
nine months, scarred with a genocide and thousands of rapes, wanted to move on
too quickly. “At first she thought of
sitting there…. For someone to come and explain to her why Paltan Maidan had
been turned into an amusement park”- speaks of an entitlement of the people
who bore the birthing pain for the new-born nation. And then this entitlement
turns to anguish – “it was where, for a
moment, they had won. Now their histories will be papered over with peanuts and
the smell of candyfloss.”
Another more powerful portrayal in the
novel is of “beerangona”, (the war
heroines), as Sk. Mujib called them. The ladies who fought a different war,
fought on their flesh by hungry soldiers. These ladies were part of the collateral
damage who could not wipe off “the shame” of rape and lust they were victim of.
Ironically, while the father of the nation had opened his heart for them,
asking people to welcome them back to their homes as decorated soldiers of war,
he decreed, but not the seeds that they carried. The abortions and the desperate
attempt of the much maligned women to build their homes, finds a touching
portrayal by Tahmima.
There are some twists and turns that sound
stretched at times, but then these are minor glitches. Tahmima succeeds in
building a narrative that grips you and makes you chew on some thoughts long
after you have closed the book. Like, “why
child, why you have to be so intolerant? ... Don’t be so frightened of it…. It
is only religion.” But you ask, is it simply that, a religion?
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