‘There is a whale, a woman who gave up her child, a piano, and a man who searched so hard for his beloved that he found me.” In the third novel by Tahmima Anam, the concluding volume in a loose trilogy that began with 2007’s A Golden Age and continued with The Good Muslim in 2011, that “me” is Bangladeshi-born US-educated palaeontologist Zubaida. She recounts these and other intertwined stories of contested loves and multiple leave-takings in a long letter to Elijah, the lover she meets in the States and loses several times.
In contrast to Elijah’s affluent American background, Zubaida is an adopted child. And though her background in Bangladesh is equally privileged, it comes with a tortured legacy: “I knew my parents questioned whether I cared about the country as much as they did, and I never really felt the need, or had the courage, to confess that I did not. I was proud that they had been in the war, proud to call my parents freedom fighters, but in reality I resented the space that it took up … so that all it took was a brush against history to reveal the shiny betterness of the past.”
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