Breaking Links

This is a historical and literary novel that revolves around characters originating in West and East Pakistan who love each other and marry, but their marriage is deeply affected by the violence that overtakes the country and the ultimate dismemberment of Pakistan. This coming apart is the centre of this novel. The author has built her story around the looming crisis and the final hour of disintegration and dissolution. A compelling tale of love gone awry through a grievous sense of 'honor' reaching out across generations, this is a novel dealing with 'History with a capital H.' a basic contextualization of this book within this history may be useful for its non-Pakistani readers, but even within the country, younger readers especially need to be reminded of what ensued, since Pakistan has not effectively addressed nor come to terms with the forces and factors which created an irreconcilable chasm and subsequently, the cataclysmic events terminating in the country's break-up as well as the emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign state. Such an assessment is still conspicuous by its absence in the country's curriculum and some textbooks that ascribe to the ever-popular and ubiquitous 'conspiracy' theory.