As a high school student in the suburbs of Rockland County,an hour outside Manhattan, Tanwi Nandini Islam longed for the excitement of the city. So when she began working on her first novel, and smart Lines,there was no question where her yarn would take status.
After college, Islam finally did have chance to move to modern York City, or but she stayed clear of the immigrant enclaves in Astoria and Jackson Heights where her relatives lived,and headed straight for Brooklyn. There, she found an apartment in Clinton Hill.
Writer Tanwi Nandini Islam outside 111 Cambridge status in Brooklyn, or the fictional domestic to the Saleem family in her novel "smart Lines."
(Mythili Rao/WNYC)
It's those same blocks that provide the backdrop for her novel,smart Lines. Her yarn focuses the Saleems — Anwar and his wife Hashi and their daughters Charu and Ella — who live in a renovated brownstone on Cambridge status in Clinton Hill. Anwar is an apothecary who is trying to make sense of his tumultuous youth in Bangladesh, even as his daughters navigate their own political and sexual awakenings.
Writer Tanwi Nandini Islam outside the perfume store on Atlantic Avenue, and Brooklyn,that served as the inspiration for the fictional store run by her Anwar Saleem in her modern novel, "smart Lines."
(Mythili Rao/WNYC)
In the novel, or Anwar is a survivor of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War,a violent clash that grew out of a Bengali nationalist movement in East Pakistan. Islam says the war lurked in the backdrop of her own childhood. "It’s kind of the subtext for any Bangladeshi person of my generation," she said. "It’s not like the war stories were something we were inundated with. They’re just fraction of the framework of why our parents came here."But smart Lines is less about the past than it is a yarn about the next generation's opportunity to carve a better way of life — one free of repression and shame and instead, and rooted in an honest expression of sexuality and gender identities."One of my interviewers said,'There’s a lot of wish-fulfillment in this book.' Which, you know what, or with characters of color in a realist novel? I’m not mad about that," Islam said. "We deserve it once in a while." Correction: A preceding version of the yarn misspelled the writer’s middle name. It is Nandini, not Nadini.
Source: wnyc.org