![]() Mourning and reparation, exile and return, losses both personal and political link the novel's past and present. She involves herself in the rescue of Zaid from a father who seems monstrous, but is actually too involved in his own mourning and reparation to concern himself with his child. ![]() Maya has started writing columns herself, on an old typewriter, addressing such issues. At a political meeting, she hears the author of a modern Bengali classic about the loss of her son in the war speak of a country "that allows the men who betrayed it, the men who committed murder, to run free, to live as the neighbours of the women they have widowed, the young girls they have raped". ![]() Joy, recently returned from a long stint driving taxis in the US, reintroduces her to a life of which she might have been a part. Maya escapes from shadowy rituals of mourning to more affirmative celebrations of past ideals and victories. Frantic forms of religiosity proliferate. The stories of women raped and abused during the war for an independent Bangladesh have been erased or marginalised in the search for a clean, linear history. A dictator is in power war crimes are still unaccounted for, and criminals are on the loose. ![]() The family crises mirror the state of the nation. ![]()
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