Brick Lane

A boy is stabbed as a result of gang fighting, lighting the fuse for protest. Following the funeral procession on Commercial Street, Nazneen suspects that the other women know of her affair and are snubbing her. She reaches out to Razia, who is despondent over her son. Nazneen still can’t open up to tell her about Karim. Each parking ticket in Chanu’s mounting pile has his writing as an acknowledgement of time catching up with him, as he’s “gone away to an address unknown”. Nazneen tells her daughters stories about the village, finally telling them the secret of her mother being possessed by an evil jinni.

Karim visits less but brings up wedding plans and says he is finding out about divorce. Nazneen feels caught, believing if she remains, she will have to marry him. She has physical pain and a head full of unanswerable questions. Yet, Karim’s memory in her body is searing.

October 27 is set for the march against the mullahs and Lion Hearts leaflets began fluttering through the courtyards.

Hasina’s letter reveals her personal evolution through her act of charity, giving away the money her sister sent to cure a deformed child whose mother, Monju, has now died. Monju’s last act was unburdening a secret that she never told anyone--that she abused her child. Hasina writes “those secret things will kills us” and pointedly asks her sister if she has a secret.

One day and a week before October 27, Chanu announces they will go to the Bengal Tigers’ meeting. Nazneen is so surprised that she drops her scissors. She is filled with dread that he knows about her affair and intends to do something embarrassing about it in public. Chanu makes a ritual of preparation complete with his double-breasted suit, extracting an A4 Premier Collection refill pad from a folder marked “Speech”, then making a sweeping gesture and clearing his throat before the announcement: “I think we are ready.”

On the threshold, they pass the secretary hanging around the doors as a boy in a dark purple tracksuit calls to him: “Hey, get on the train of repentance, brother.” The secretary grins and replies: “It’s already passed your station, brother.” The boys on the right side of the room are gathered in a circle listening to someone at the center but Nazneen can’t determine if it is Karim. Nazneen and Chanu sit on the left-handed side. He shows her the front page of his pad and says he will give her a taste and then reads the title: “Race and Class in the UK: A Short Thesis on the White Working Class, Race Hate, and Ways to Tackle the Issue”. Nazneen then understands that he “would challenge Karim with words…And prove himself his equal”.

Karim bounds on the stage, with the secretary carrying a packing crate to be, used as a pulpit on stage. The leader calls the meeting to order but plans for the march are interrupted by the Questioner who extracts a scroll of papers from his jacket relates the injustice of the World Trade Center dead mourned, but not Muslim brothers being killed in revenge for the act. The meeting is disrupted by grievances, with Nazneen having thoughts that she doesn’t dare make public before her husband until Karim takes charge by assigning people to the estates and issuing instructions and organization for the march itself. Nazneen wonders when her husband will make his move. Turning her attention to her lover, she observes how he is possessed with the power. And as far as her husband’s lofty intellectual ambitions, “And she felt misery rise like steam from Chanu at her side, and knew that he was lost in his own private torment; Race, Class, and Short Theses did not touch him there.” The meeting ends in a split between the opposites: the Questioner, who has now proclaimed himself a leader speaking on the global level, as opposed to Karim’s focus on the local.

A collision with Mrs. Islam at the threshold of the butchers is how Nazneen learns that Dr. Azad gave her husband money for their “escape.” At home, she confronts her husband about the debt. This prompts his about truth, concluding in a curious statement about the heart: “When you find something so strongly that it can’t be questioned, you have to ask yourself—is this true?” Instead of confronting her directly about her affair, he shows her the plane tickets. There is an indication of fate on the date: October 27, five days hence. Nazneen is struck by the inevitably of their departure and asks how they will live in Dhaka. He replies that he is going into the soap business.

Nazneen sits in a state of panic in Razia’s empty apartment where her friend has locked her drug-addicted son in his room by his own request. In the midst of the door pounding and pleas emitting from this tough love scenario, Nazneen thinks about Karim with a new woman. This confrontation with his reality forces her to confront her own: Dhaka will be a disaster. Finally, she confides in her friend: “He lifts me up inside. It's the difference between… I don’t know. It’s like you’re watching television in black and white and someone comes along and switches on the colors.” Razia sums up her feeling as being “in love” in the English style.

Dr. Azad arrives with the boy’s medication and a gift of a snow globe that was given to him by his wife. He shares his hard-won wisdom about his love marriage: “What I did not know, I was a young man, is that there are two kinds of love: the kind that starts off big and slowly wears away, that seems you can never use it up and then one day is finished, and the kind that you don’t notice at first, but which adds a little birth to itself every day, like an oyster makes a pearl, grain by grain, a jewel from the sand”.

Nazneen dreams that her mother tells her that she robbed her son of any chance for life by standing between him and his fate. In the dream, Nazneen reacts hysterically when Amma demands she admit to killing her son.