BackBook Review | Mirror City
This ambitious first novel, set in Bangladesh, is undone by its own cloying genteelness
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Shadow people
Standing on the staircase of No. 677, Road 32, Dhanmondi, it is easy to believe in ghosts. The imagination needs only a little rein to hear the sound of heavy boots, fleeing footsteps, childish screams and the thud of rifle-butts. The bedrooms, viewable through heavy grilled gates, are furnished in the fashion of 40 years ago. Such articles of clothing as are visible are shrouded in plastic. The lights are dim, the passageways narrow. Most morbid of all are the spots of blood on the stairs, preserved in glass cases. In the world’s most macabre shrine to murder, breathing is simultaneously oppressive and a borderline offence.
Dragged to the site of the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s first president, on a visit to Dhaka a couple of years ago, I found myself gasping for air after bare minutes. Though we abandoned the “tour" quickly enough, the sense of violation impregnated—and carefully nurtured—was not something we could put behind us. It is not something that Bangladesh has been able to put behind itself either, as evidenced by the fact that the country’s politics continues to be dominated by two rival descendants of the chief actors of the pre-dawn drama of 15 August 1975.
The murder of Sheikh Mujib—though he is never named—is at the centre of food historian Chitrita Banerji’s debut novel Mirror City, literally and metaphorically. But if you’re expecting to encounter any of the horror or helplessness of that day through her characters, you’d be disappointed. Almost to a person, they live life curiously at a remove.
While anointing a flawed character as the sole prism into a fictional world, all but the most accomplished novelists are likely to falter. To counter the protagonist’s sense of “remove"—transferred wittingly or otherwise to the reader—it would be essential to build robust peripheral characters, capture a sense of place and time and, perhaps most critical, create a believable matrix of incident and interaction through an astute assessment of history and a sharp ear for dialogue. Banerji, unfortunately, fails on most of these broad counts, particularly characterization and conversation.
The biggest shortcoming is the peculiarly shadowy husband, Iqbal. Uma thinks back on happy times the two spent in the US, but can’t quite find that person in the man who now shares her bed. Strangely enough, she doesn’t seem to want to find out what’s wrong with him either. His all-male friends’ circle—which quickly becomes hers as well—is only marginally better defined. The motivations of the two most intriguing supporting figures, Maqbul and Nasreen, are examined cursorily; they are cast aside unceremoniously once they have served to complicate Uma’s life.
Notwithstanding the plot line similarities between Mirror City and anything out of the “Fiction" section of a 1970s Indian women’s magazine—“the story of one woman in a troubled marriage and her search for happiness in an unsympathetic society"—the failure of this novel lies principally in its overarching ambition. The author, who delineates so delicately the culinary differences between West Bengal and Bangladesh to underline her protagonist’s loss of identity, flounders while paralleling the unravelling of Uma’s life with the slow corruption of the newborn nation.
If the philosophical core of Mirror City is the earthy poetry of Baul legend Lalon Fakir—from which the novel takes its name—its undoing is its bhodrota, the genteelness so treasured among the Bengali middle class on either side of the border, especially in the denouement. A little more passion (and not only in the bedroom) and a few flesh-and-blood characters would have gone a long way in helping Mirror City to hold up a mirror to life.
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