A twist of fate

Tahmima Anam was born in Bangladesh, raised in Paris, New York and Bangkok, eventually settling down in London to call it home. Having had this peripatetic childhood, she says, means that she’s interested in themes of identity, something that resonates strongly in her works. Her latest offering, The Bones of Grace, the third part in the Bengal Trilogy, is no exception.  

“I’m especially interested in characters who struggle to be pinned down as one thing or another,” she tells us. The critically acclaimed trilogy that chronicles three generations of a family from the Bangladesh war of independence to the present day stays true to what Tahmima holds close to her heart — themes of identity, belonging, history, paleontology, and love.

Her latest tale tells the story Zubaida Haque, who on the eve of her departure to find a missing link in our evolution, falls in love with Elijah Strong. Their connection is immediate and intense, despite their differences: His belonging to a prototypical American family and her, the adopted daughter of a wealthy Bangladeshi family in Dhaka. A twist of fate sends her back home where she is compelled to go down a very different path: Marry her childhood best friend and settle into a traditional Bangladeshi life. Her bid to escape familial constraints leads her to make a choice from which she can never turn back.

The bones of grace by Tahmima Anam Rs 1,347 approx, pp 432 (hardcover) HarperCollins

Having trained at Harvard as an anthropologist, you could say Tahmima’s novel is inspired. “Zubaida is an entirely fictional character. However, like me, she struggles with her identity, and must find a way to find her sense of self among the competing pulls of nationalism, history, and love,” she says.

Her characters too, are insightful and relatable. Why? Because the spirited novelist admits to taking composites of real people she knows and apparently mashing them together, making them stranger, more idiosyncratic and talkative.
Even as her tales, quite literally, grow more revolutionary through her Commonwealth Writers’ Prize-winning debut novel, A Golden Age followed by The Good Muslim, her writing ritual remains constant — to write in longhand while listening to music, and then type everything into the computer at the end of every week.

“I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” she says, now charting out her own path, while still upholding the legacy of her illustrious literary family — her father Mahfuz Anam, an editor and publisher and her grandfather, Abul Mansur Ahmed, a satirist and politician. “I wanted to be sure I had something important to say before I wrote anything,” she admits, penning down her first when she was in her early 30s.

Now 40, Tahmima is still hooked on to a habit that she picked up early in life — reading. “I am judging the Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded to the best work of fiction in translation published in the UK. We had to read 155 books, and have whittled it down to a shortlist of six. I’ve been immersed in this wonderful shortlist for the last few weeks — they are some of the most exhilarating books I’ve read in a long time,” she confesses. She also makes time for her other favourites — cooking and eating. “That’s why all my books are full of food,” she quips, letting us in on it.  

What’s next? Well, Tahmima is waiting to see too. “I haven’t settled on a next project yet. As I’ve been working on this Bangladesh trilogy for almost a decade, it feels like it’s time to take stock and consider what to do next,” she says. But if she’s sure of one thing, it’s this, “I would like to tell stories that move people to imagine worlds and lives that they might otherwise never encounter.”