56 pages • 1 hour read
Brick Lane
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Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Nazneen is born sickly, with a death rattle. The Bengali villagers maintain a vigil around the dying child. Her Aunt Mumtaz wants to take her to the city for treatment, but her grandmother Banesa stands by Nazneen’s mother’s decision to let fate take its course. Rupban believes the child’s surrender to fate will make it stronger. This bears out when on the fifth day, the child chooses life over death by taking her mother’s milk.
Nazneen’s sister, Hasina, is Nazneen’s direct opposite. When she is 16, her “unbearable beauty” is revealed to be a liability when she elopes with the nephew of the sawmill owner.
The scene switches to 1985 London. Nazneen is living with her new husband, Chanu, in Tower Hamlets, a Muslim residential community. She is to spend the afternoon preparing dinner for their first guest, Dr. Azad. This opportunity to prove herself as a wife is hampered by worries over her sister, whose letter brings news of her love marriage and hints of darkness brewing under the surface. As Nazneen ruminates over the question of fate, she has an impromptu visit from her neighbors, Mrs. Islam and Razia. Nazneen hears the news of a woman falling to her death sixteen floors into the courtyard.
Nazneen triumphs over the time constraints and the dinner party is successfully prepared, leaving her free to accept Dr. Azad’s invitation to join the men for discussion about the “Going Home Syndrome.” Chanu understands this immigrant affliction, as the ties to their native land stronger than blood. The doctor is more cynical, declaring their people never truly live in their new home as long as they are trying to return to their native land. Chanu reveals how he is always expecting something that will make his life in London worth living, not realizing he just may have found the very thing by taking Nazneen as his wife.
Chapter 2 Summary
Transfixed by an ice-skating duo on television, Nazneen learns the English word for ice skate. This exchange with her husband reveals her handicap; she has no English, yet the passage reveals how she is learning to trust her powers of observation. She realizes her new husband is a dreamer. He is watching television rather than studying for his “imminent” degree and projects his own circumstances onto the characters; just as condemns the television character for expecting a promotion after socializing with his boss, he can’t see that he was seeking to raise his own social status by socializing with the doctor of his boss, Mr. Dalloway.
The description of the cramped apartment makes it obvious that Chanu has not made physical space for his new wife. Nor has he made the emotional space for a new orientation to the world. Rather, in Nazneen, Chanu has gained a passive audience for endless pontifications. This only serves to boost his ego into a fantasy life of the learned man he lacks the discipline to become.
Nazneen gets out of bed and ponders about the fallen woman. Then, she has a revelation. She realizes that the woman must have jumped from the window as a last desperate act of self-determination. The reader has this truth reinforced by the sign of the tattooed lady across the way, the sphinx-like specter of the fate awaiting the women if they don’t follow the proscribed steps to happiness.
Chapter 3 Summary
As Nazneen settles into the daily rhythm of caring for her new husband, Chanu eases into an additional marriage benefit: a passive new audience for endless talk fueled by lofty ambitions. His wall of certificates establishes his perceived worldly importance, thereby reinforcing Nazneen’s confinement as caretaker wife. She notices that she has seen him with many books, but never with the Koran. Her powers of perception reinforce the truth that drives a wedge in the arranged marriage: despite the jokes, humming, and smiles of happiness, her husband’s eyes are too focused on distant targets to rejoice in the simple pleasures of daily life. Yet, Chanu’s exalted image of himself is also duplicitous. For example, he insists that she is lucky to have married an educated man, yet his inability to rise socially keeps his partner confined to the Muslim immigrant norms, thereby reinforcing the societal code that keeps her from venturing outside the compound.
Nazneen isn’t truly present in her life either; she escapes by fantasizing about her youth in the village. This retreat into the past causes her to her worry about her sister, yet her helplessness reinforces her mother’s “just wait and see” attitude, summing up the cultural conditioning of women as appendages to men.
This chapter contains a crucial passage in which we learn of her father’s regular temporary disappearances from home and her mother’s eventual permanent disappearance. The father’s characterization Amma (Mother) as a saint is borne out when her body is discovered leaning low over the sacks of rice in the storehouse, a spear staked through the heart. The reader now has a solid picture of the “fallen woman” haunting the two sisters through life. The secrecy surrounding her death, pierced by whispers of Nazneen’s father’s infidelity and memory of her mother vowing to commit suicide haunts the sisters’ obsessive correspondence. As a youth, Nazneen never questioned the mysteries surrounding her mother’s ritualistic death, such as why she was wearing her best sari, though it wasn’t a holiday, and why her aunt Mumtaz then turned on her father, never to speak to him again.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
Nazneen is marked from birth by the visceral symbol of an iron fist in her mother’s belly, triggering labor. The baby’s death rattle is a symbol marking time with the sound of each breath. The five days of refusal to eat symbolizes the proactiveness of the child to set its own course in an indifferent world. Nazneen’s mother instills her with a personal mythology of “wait and see” which gives her a stoic, enduring character.
Nazneen settles into her new husband’s cluttered apartment in Tower Hamlet 1985 at the age of seventeen. The name of the housing complex in London where Nazneen is taken in 1985 to live with her new husband Chanu is a forewarning of the Twin Tower collapse, in that the first piece of news taking place is a woman falling to her death. Her husband has a goal of establishing a mobile library in the complex; this reflects the lack of intellectual resources for immigrants and his ambitions to establish himself in the world through knowledge.
In her new home, Nazneen is immersed in the clutter of urban immigrant life. The first neighbor that catches her attention is the tattooed Lady. This Sphinx like character serves as a powerful specter regarding the role of the body in determining fate, the circumstances of a life marked on the body. The only nature she experiences is through memories of her native village. The plastic furniture indicates the sterility of the western world she has entered. The clay animals are mere representations of the natural world left behind for the urban city and its artificial notions of success. The scattered books and papers are symbols of her husband`s disorganized approach to bettering his social condition through learning and rising in society through an academic degree.
The question of fate moves from reading her sister’s letter to a realization that time spent in reverie is tempting her husband’s displeasure. This realization is then externalized by visit from two women that will be instrumental in Nazneen’s development: Rania and Mrs. Islam, who tell her about a woman who fell to her death in the complex. This image of the fallen woman symbolizes the tension Nazneen feels in being delayed in her dinner preparations by a social visit. It indicates she is embarked on a tightrope walk in which two worlds will have to be bridged to keep her from falling.
There is an indication of the shift in gender crucial to Nazneen’s evolution. This takes place through the countersexual reference to Virginia Woolf. Chanu’s boss is named Mr. Dalloway and, like Nazneen in these opening chapters, Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s female character is engaged in a single day’s preparation for a dinner party. While both books are set in London, the parallel establishes how the boundaries between inner and outer worlds are even more pronounced for an immigrant Bengali woman in the early 21st century than for Woolf’s protagonist in the early 20th century. This juxtaposition with gender between the Dalloways reveals how both Nazneen and her husband have active inner lives that bump up against the cultural and economic restrictions in the outer world for immigrants. The choice of name sums up the state of Chanu’s aspirations to become important in society; when the doctor can’t recall Dalloway as his patient, the narration reveals the lack of importance of Chanu’s boss, and therefore Chanu himself, in the outer world.
Dr. Azad’s invitation for Nazneen to join the men at the table is a gesture symbolizing Woolf’s countersexual Dalloway. The inclusion in male conversation designates a new world in which a young woman’s dependence on her husband, taken for granted in the village, is to be continually challenged in a new environment. The immigrant needs to adapt, and the shift between Dalloways makes the limitations of both men and women all too apparent.
Chanu’s dream for bettering his social standing is given a chance to be realized with his new wife. Ironically, in fulfilling her expected role as a Bengali wife, Nazneen is initiated into a level of Bengali immigrant society the doctor represents for Chanu, in which women are treated as equals. The doctor takes his leave repeating Chanu’s phrase, “just think” with some medical advice: that Chanu eat more slowly. This makes it clear that to “just think” with the head disconnected from the body is a useless distraction.
Nazneen’s first experience with a male and female ice skating team on television is a symbol of the “sacred marriage” of opposites, the masculine and feminine. Her husband teaching her the world in English for ice skating also reveals her handicap in not speaking the local language.
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