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 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Nazneen chooses a celebratory red-and-gold sari to wear for what will become a momentous day in her life. Inexplicably, she sits down to sew in this regal costume, and as decorative gold chains interfere with her sewing, she fantasizes that changing her clothing will liberate her from the chains of her heritage. When she ventures out to purchase thread, she passes the meeting hall and encounters the secretary, who repeats the mantra: “Get on the train of repentance, sister, before it leaves your station.” Inside, she comes face to face with the Questioner, who is preoccupied with a pile of papers that he repeatedly “shuffles and straightens.”
Judgment Day has arrived and the ceremony is marked by a musician with “two black tents,” actually a pair of women who formerly wore hijabs and have now upgraded to burkas. In addition, there is a black man in the center of the group representing the sexual priest in a gray felt cap and baggy white robe and naming all the religions he has sampled and then repeating the phrase “loose and lax.” As the hall fills, Nazneen is “dizzy with relief” that she wore her red-and-gold sari while anticipating that her lover will be speaking to the crowd saying words meant just for her ears. There is a commotion as the room grows lighter and Karim enters like a lion, commanding the stage. There, he confronts the Questioner, who has proclaimed jihad, and brings the local debate into a global arena by showing photos of children dying under the sanctions in Iraq.
Nazneen loses track of the debate and focuses on Karim. She has a revelation that the energy he built up over time in her flat could now be “pulled down here, in the hall.” This makes her pay rapt attention to gender as the source of their dispute; the Questioner addresses only the brothers, not the sisters, and Karim insists on including the sisters. Demonstrating his leadership abilities by commanding that individual voices in the crowd to be heard, Karim succeeds in diminishing the Questioner’s focus on local radicalism through a parting slogan: think global but act local. The meeting is dismissed.
Nazneen stands up and walks down the aisle “looking neither left nor right” and “all the way home she fought the desire to run.” When she arrives home, she waits inside beside the door, opening it before Karim knocks. He commands that she enter the bedroom and get undressed. She has a fever and feels sick and only wants to sleep. Yet, she moans when she feels him kissing the back of her neck.
Chapter 14 Summary
Chanu takes his family on a holiday to see the sights of London. He admits that all he saw was the Houses of Parliament in 1979, but now he is the tour guide for his family, even purchasing them tourist supplies such as a compass, guidebook, bottled water, binoculars, maps and disposable cameras. He provides an immigrant perspective on London through the remnants of the British Empire. His talk is one of division, externalized in the two pillars before Buckingham Palace, which Nazneen views with disdain. The contrast between the huge palace and the confined living quarters of the Bengali family brings up logical questions about space which Chanu is happy to answer with statistics, mixing the information from the guidebook with personal conjecture.
As Karim and Nazneen become more intimate, the war between Karim’s Bengal Tigers and the Lion Hearts subsides. Yet, Karim suspects the latter have only gone underground to gather forces while his numbers have visibly diminished. Karim grows a beard and receives religious instruction. In making a payment she expected would be her last and Mrs. Islam weaseling more from the “home fund,” Nazneen realizes the danger she is in.
Nazneen goes shopping with Razia, who is dressed in masculine clothes and complaining about her son Tariq’s lengthy disappearances. Nazneen doesn’t share her suspicions gleaned from Karim’s knowledge of the drug addiction epidemic sweeping the estate. Rather, she stretches a “cherry roll” of fabric and admits to the debt from Mrs. Islam, revealing that she hasn’t been keeping track of the numbers. Her friend warns her not to let the old woman get her twisted fingers on their home funds. On the way home, Razia denies that it could be her errant son responsible for the missing funds from her purse.
At home, Nazneen is still thinking about her friend’s empty purse while Chanu pontificates on how the government is flooding the poor neighborhoods with drugs and how the English destroyed the Bangladesh textile industry through tariffs. In a father-daughter bedtime talk with his daughters, Chanu resigns himself the loss of his dream. His daughters try to tell him that a neighbor sold his flat for considerable profit, but he doesn’t seem to hear and declares that their mother and he have decided to go home.
The tension in the family causes Nazneen to be jolted from her suspended state. She crashes and the horror of her actions cause her to vomit. She crashes with a horror and has a visitation from her mother’s ghost declaring that life is a test that has to be endured.
Chapter 15 Summary
Nazneen’s capacity for endurance has stretched to the limit like the cherry red cloth. Her delirium lasts for several days. Chanu finds her on the kitchen floor and carries her to the bedroom. She gains consciousness in her bedroom before Dr. Azad appears, telling her that her husband is a very good cook and has made her splendid meals. On his way out, the doctor asks Chanu about his petition and Chanu declares that he is “too busy with my family” and sighs with satisfaction after declaring “Let them go to hell too—ignorant types, readers and illiterates, council as well. Let them go together.”
Nazneen recovers to a changed reality in which she is ambivalent about seeing Karim again. Yet, she has difficulty orientating herself to the disorder in the apartment and tries to center herself by arranging and rearranging the objects in the room as paranoia invades her thoughts, convinced her family knew of her infidelity. She hears a chant saying, “You are nothing.” Turning to the Koran, she panics to find no words of comfort and turns instead to her sister’s letter, relaying that she gave her Nazneen’s money to Monju, a thirteen-year-old bride who refused to let her husband sell her son and needed the money for dressings after he threw acid on the child.
Nazneen struggles with depression as she considers the consequences of her actions. Karim returns with a new batch of clothing and they end up in bed together. Yet, their love affair has become strained; they don’t know what to say to one another and she realizes she is ambivalent about his presence in her bed. He has plans for a march of his Bengal Tigers against the Lion Hearts. She asks why there always has to be an opposition for a march and suggests a third option. He understands she means a mela and warms up to the idea of doing something positive for the entire community. She is “vaguely shocked and nearly thrilled” with her indifference at the thought of their being caught in “compromising domesticity” as she sews while he plays with the computer. He accesses an Islamic education website on the computer and reads out loud the condemnation of adultery in English. She orders him to leave.
The posters about the mela begin to appear around the estate and the girls get excited about participating. Chanu decides they will all go to the meeting together. Nazneen opens up to her husband about her sister’s tragic life of being raped and having to sell her body.
The meeting for the mela is festive, like a mela itself. The Questioner inevitably asks what the mela is supposed to be celebrating when their community is being persecuted around the world. Chanu offers his view that “Bangladeshis are the most deprived ethnic group in the world.” Tuning out his words, Nazneen finds immense satisfaction in that she has finally learned acceptance.
When Nazneen arrives home, she finds Razia waiting for her in a disheveled state. She proclaims that her son sold the furniture.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
Nazneen’s sexual awakening is reflected in the regal choice of the sari she chooses to wear at home, the site of lovemaking between her and her younger lover. Red and gold are the royal colors. The decorative chains interfering with her stitching is a metaphor for the crossing of boundaries between her family, her lover, and her work. All of these female roles –as mother, wife and goddess—now merge in her love affair with Karim. This young man has the energy and imagination to take on simultaneous roles as lover, boss, instructor, and friend. His talk of the feud between his Bengal Tigers and the Lion Hearts is an externalization of the dynamic of the masculine and feminine energies in the erotic dance.
Chanu has placed Nazneen beyond suspicion, much like her father referring to her mother as a saint. Yet, his strong reaction to the “Multicultural Murder” pamphlet reveals an unconscious knowledge of the “multicultural murder” of his dutiful wife, whom he uprooted from her native land into an environment where women have more rights.
Nazneen passing the meeting hall on her way to purchase thread is a symbol of the connection between her and her beloved. The meeting room lies in between her home and her eventual destination of freedom of movement in the larger world. The thread is the link connecting the three steps of evolution—from home to community meeting place to the outer marketplace. The repetition of the mantra “get on the train of repentance” is a warning of fate, instilled in the narrative as rhythmic repetition imitating the specter of time itself. Furthermore, the shuffling and reshuffling of papers by the Questioner, a symbol of Judgment, is an outer symbolic ritualized enactment of the inner dynamism representing the gender polarity of opposites as the source of erotic tension.
Karim has transformed into the Lion King, revealed by the manner that he dramatically appears. He circles the room like a lion, then jumping on stage, lunges for the kill.
Nazneen’s acute observations cause her to pay rapt attention, her body being totally present in the moment, which means the integration of her masculine logic and feminine intuition. In fact, Karim’s dispute with the Questioner is about gender. Karim is aiming to evolve the gender divide into an oneness while the Questioner is intent on the division. Here we have a plot development that demonstrates the difference between “falling into” one’s fate through the rote repetition of the decree of authority versus the “rising into” one’s destiny through the confrontation with the figure whose title represents the very act of questioning itself. By twisting the Questioner’s focus on the local body into a global movement, Karim succeeds into transforming the passions of the body into a vehicle for communal action.
Nazneen’s departure from the meeting hall during which she looks neither “right nor left” symbolizes the passage into the third realm between the opposites, where her stoicism has resulted in the self-mastery commanding her body to meet its fate. This takes the form of the physical love affair with Karim, which will then create the conditions in which she can become an autonomous being. The fever that raged in her body is the passion that transforms her into a new being.
During the family excursion into the sights of London, Nazneen is disdainful of the two pillars before Buckingham Palace, thinking they should be torn down for “something elegant and spirited …like the Taj Mahal.” Additional significance to the observation is the fact that Princess Dianna posed alone before the Taj Mahal to demonstrate her sadness over her split from Prince Charles. The connection made between the physical body and the eastern versus western royal architecture is made clearer through Nazneen’s appraisal of her daughter. Shahana is demanding her body rights through a lip piercing, while her intention to get a tattoo is a haunted reminder of the Tattoo Lady marking her defiance at not being “taken home.”
Chanu’s mental divisions are in contrast to his wife, who is experiencing the world at the peak of her sexual awakening. Nazneen’s feeling is that each life is no more than a blade of grass in the whole that she now feels to be part of life in its entirety. At last, she doesn’t submit to a particular man, but gives herself up to a greater power. With this happiness, she is reborn with a new sense of self that gives her delight in her family, work, and the joy of daily life.
Yet, in a powerful inner reflection, Nazneen remembers how she would position herself at the window to signal the coast as clear and yet equated the fires of hell with the fever of flesh, making their pleasure “a crime and the sentence was death.” These reflections are the most powerful sections of the novel, revealing the transformation of desire in and “out of the bedroom.” She wonders how “such a weak woman” who had been raised to submit to her father and her husband “could unleash a force so strong.”
This self-knowledge is put into practice when Nazneen holds back from telling her friend Razia about her love affair with Karim. The narrative provides clues in the unsaid through the shopping trip of the two women. When Nazneen mentions “the man who brings the sewing for me” her friend instinctively reacts with characteristic humor through sexual double-speak: “The middleman? The boy who comes?” Nazneen’s response to her friend’s probing is to pull out a roll of cherry-red cotton jersey and examine the stretchiness of the material in her hands, as if determining her own capacity to endure limitations.
Nazneen collapses from the tension of trying to balance her multiple roles of wife, mother, and lover. In her delirium, she experiences her mother’s ghost refusing to come up to her and trying to pull her down to the floor, proclaiming: “You have to endure”. This is fate calling her down, collapsing from the weight of the karma she has set into action through her erotic adventure with Karim. The tension between “up and down” is the struggle of needing to forge her own path into a bold new life rather than follow her mother’s physical descent into death.
Chanu’s care for his family during his wife’s illness reinforces his valuing of the real life over the illusion of his dreams. When the doctor asks about his petition, he is happy to dismiss it. He states with pride his intent to disavow the mere possibility of his wife’s adultery: “My wife is very, very calm. No one is calmer than my wife. She has nothing to get excited about.”
Yet, revealing the danger in the excitement of the revival of her love affair are the symbols of the cat and mouse that reveal the lovers’ game; Karim works the mouse to find the text revealing the danger of their renewed sexual liaison and she brazenly observes him as “mouse watches a cat”. From this new place of uncertainty, she reveals herself in a new position of power where she can dismiss Karim. Nazneen’s evolution from her feigned stoicism into detached stillness reflects the unexpected shift of power between the lovers in which she finds herself on the winning side of their power dynamic.
This inner marriage between the opposites is played out externally during the meeting for the mela, where Nazneen experiences inner peace in public. She has attained satisfaction in co-creating a celebratory space for the community where she can guide her family to rejoice. This centering is manifested in the empowering image she creates, seated on an invisible throne beside her passive dreamer husband and before her activist lover taking charge of the meeting.
