56 pages • 1 hour read
Monica AliBrick Lane
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
A letter from Hasina indicates troubles brewing in her marriage. Nazneen is alarmed when she receives no responses to her three subsequent letters. She finds joy, however, in her new friend, Razia. Nazneen indulges her friend in Hasina’s romantic image of her love marriage, causing Razia to vow that her daughter will only have one “over my dead body”.
Nazneen’s life settles into a regular pattern where she calms her frantically beating heart by shutting herself off from the erotic desire possessing her only sister. As she stoically sinks into her new life, she becomes pregnant. Her reaction is to bust out of confinement. She leaves the carefully drawn boundaries of her daily existence and walks to the end of a deserted brick lane, surpassing another boundary in venturing beyond the narrow confines of her immigrant neighborhood. Then, she enters the larger city on her own for first time, with its gleaming glass buildings and the world of the business of men in suits and women with strange hair. She walks until she is lost. Seated alone on a bench, she recalls the letter from her sister revealing why she hadn’t responded to her three letters: she ran away from her husband, who was beating her. Hasina describes a beggar woman, a metaphor revealing the place to which she has fallen, begging to be lifted out of her state of homelessness.
Nazneen`s unconscious desire to become lost is a means of identifying with her sister’s experience of being lost in the indifference of the big city. Now, she can grieve for her sister`s lost innocence and the courage she will need to endure the societal branding as a “fallen woman.” Yet, in attempting to mirror her sister`s fate, she is forced to realize how very opposite their conditions have become. Her own struggle to create an identity isn’t helped by relating to her sister’s suffering. Instead, the running away serves as a type of initiation rite and in finding her way back home, she uses one of the few words she knows in English and is acknowledged in return. Nazneen arrives home in time to make a hurried dinner for her husband, feeling triumphant after having had her first exchange in English with a stranger.
Nazneen begins the long journey of separation from her past by working out her feelings of anxiety about her sister with her husband. Chanu uses every trick to convince her that there is nothing she can do to help Hasina. This fatalistic similarity to her mother causes Nazneen to distance herself from her husband’s aspirations, a crucial initial step in her development as an autonomous being.
Mrs. Islam takes her to Dr. Azad, who tells her to expect a healthy baby. Nazneen learns from her new friends that she is relatively in a good position, because she doesn’t have to share her husband with a co-wife. From Razia, she learns more about how England can aid a woman’s independence through education and public welfare. Wealth can even be acquired from the cast-off objects of the rich. Meanwhile, Chanu begins a petition on a quest for establishing a mobile library for “their humble estate.”
Nazneen wants to build on her first step towards independence and take lessons in English. Yet, fate intervenes again when her husband reminds her of impending motherhood. This biological obstacle is reinforced by the memory of her mother telling her “if God wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men.”
Chapter 5 Summary
Nazneen and Chanu’s baby boy changes the lives of the couple, and suddenly, there is a vessel for Chanu’s hopes and dreams. Through the child, Chanu is learning the joy of the rituals of daily life.
In their first outing with their son, the couple pay an impromptu visit to Dr. Azad. They don’t even have to cross the threshold to discover why the doctor is startled by their visit. His is ashamed of his wife, whom he has been hiding from his friends.
Returning home from the visit, Nazneen realizes the child has a raging fever.
Chapter 6 Summary
The sense of a cohesive reality between inner and outer snaps on the way to the hospital. The baby is very sick and rushed into the intensive ward. Nazneen and her husband maintain a vigil as they rely on Western medicine to save their child.
Chanu rises to the challenge as protector and provider, even going home to cook and bring food. The parents discuss how fate can suddenly shift the course of events in people’s lives forever. As a case in point, he has a “begging letter” from a man who lost his wealth and is down to one servant.
During the crisis, Nazneen realizes she is fortunate in her father’s position as the second wealthiest man in her village and in his solid choice for her husband. She has matured to the point of being grateful of what she has been given. Moreover, in the course of the death vigil, she realizes that she has begun to love her husband. Razia visits but fails to cheer her up. Her friend is depressed and reveals her marriage is in trouble because her husband doesn’t provide enough funds for food.
Razia comes to the hospital to relate the news of her husband’s sudden death and informs Nazneen that Mrs. Islam is a usurer, warning that her sons will break bones of those who fail to make their payments. She also informs her of the departure of the Tattoo Lady to an institution. At this point, Nazneen realizes she has been praying poorly and vows to change her habits.
Under the pressure of his son’s impending death, Chanu makes a key revelation. He confesses that he has misled his relatives to think he is rich; this explains the persistence of the “begging letters” which impede his own dreams of social mobility.
Nazneen learns that her child would have certainly died if she hadn’t brought him to the hospital. Now, she wonders if she has violated her moral code in attempting to save the child’s life. She endures this event by internally journeying back to her participation in the washing of her mother’s corpse.
Nazneen returns home feeling like a stranger entering a lunatic’s room. There is a great deal to do to put her home in order. On a whim, she puts on a pair of her husband’s trousers, lies back and lets her mind float, then starts composing letters to her sister. Nothing is resolved and yet everything has changed; her son is still in the hospital and her husband has abandoned his job.
She plays games with her mind, thinking the death meant for the son took Razia’s husband. When she returns to the hospital, Chanu tells her that their son is dead and he has quit his job.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
This section opens with the strong character of Mrs. Islam stepping in to care for the expectant mother. The interaction begun with the tale of the fallen woman now extends to Mrs. Islam’s allegory of how the women in her village withheld sex from their men until they dug a new well: “If you think you are powerless, then you are. Everything will within you, where God put it. If your husband does not do what is required, think what you yourself have left undone.”
This approach is contrasted with Hasina, whose beauty never fails to attract a man to save her from ruin. Hasina writes of her landlord, who will get her a job at the garment factory. As the name Mr. Chowdhury suggests, her protector represents the wolf in sheep’s clothing, gaining her trust through a show of rescue and pouncing once her resistance is lowered. Chanu’s attitude serves to further the emotional distance to his wife that will evolve her character through a sharpened vision: “He cannot accept one single thing in his life but this: that my sister should be left to her fate. Everything else may be altered, but that.”
The symbol of the three, which will enter the narrative several more times, enters with the three letters that Hasina does not return. The three represents the creative way out of the opposites, and this path appears with a new friendship with Razia, whose humor is sourced in an unsparing realism.
Nazneen sees her future of raising a boy through her friend Razia`s demanding son, Tariq, whose cynicism about her marriage is revealed in the junk piling up in the family apartment. Razia reveals that Muslim women who try to work end up shaming their husband’s name. Nursing her son, Nazneen recalls how she was torn between intervening with the fate of the man punished for kidnapping and killing a village girl; he was tied to a tree and left to die and begged for water, but on her way to fulfill his dying plea, she questioned whether it was possible to intervene in a village execution. In this key passage, the number three enters the narrative again. From the distance, Nazneen sees three men circling around him with sticks.
In learning about the opportunities for women in the Western culture, Nazneen`s inner reflection associating the three executioners with sportsmen doing a dance around the victim is an unconscious means of merging the opposites into a creative third possibility. This key passage is therefore a foreshadowing of the end of the book, where Nazneen`s choice is to take a middle passage between obedience and rebellion against a husband succumbing to the “Going Home Syndrome.”
An unannounced visit to the house of Dr. Azad contains a symbol at the entrance of a garden paved with multicolored flagstones “in random shapes and sizes, as if a huge vase had been dropped from a great height and the shattered fragments had landed directly in front of the house.” This represents the chaos of shattered relationships exploded by passion. To the side of the door is a “three-foot high policeman bowed his jolly legs and faked a smile.” Inside, a “pair of snarling tigers guarded a glass fire” is a symbol of the Azads’ contentious relationship. This insight into the fated downward spiral of a love marriage will factor into Nazneen’s decision at a crucial turning point.
The joyous birth of a child that becomes suddenly deathly ill is an outer reflection of the mechanism of fate cycling in families. Nazneen’s guiding mythology is that she was left to her fate; no energy was expended on keeping her alive, only the offering of the breast, which she accepted after five days of being left alone. The opposite occurs when Nazneen’s child is gravely ill. The parents rush the child to the hospital where they maintain a vigil while placing their expectations in Western medicine.
There is a double foreshadowing of death. The first is Razia relating a death that would seem to be that of the child; in fact, she is referring to her husband, killed by frozen cows falling out of his truck. The cow is a sacred symbol of life in India. This death of “frozen life” foreshadows the descent and transformation that will come to Razia and her family, which will impact Nazneen’s future. The second foreshadowing is the arrival of the cleaner with a mop whose bucket is knocked over. The flood represents the overwhelming of consciousness from the archetypal experience of the death of the child.
Razia also brings news of the dispensing of the Tattoo Lady into an institution. This means the symbolic figure marking the boundary between fate and free will has disappeared from Nazneen’s daily reality. Tattoos are messages written on the body indicating the altering of a predetermined condition through proactive measures.
This, along with the warning about Mrs. Islam, is a foreshadowing of the forces set in motion by desire that can only be met with a consciously imposed counterforce. Nazneen’s memory of washing her mother’s corpse reinforces the body as a site of ritualistic passage into her becoming a woman. The Tattoo Lady’s ominous presence at the window also serves as a signal of a new rite of passage. Nazneen is challenged to read her body’s messages so she might gain personal autonomy, unlike the Tattoo Lady, who is now confined in an institution.
