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, Bright Lines, there was no question where her story would take place.
After college, Islam finally did have chance to move to New York City, 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.
It's those same blocks that provide the backdrop for her novel, Bright Lines. Her story focuses the Saleems — Anwar and his wife Hashi and their daughters Charu and Ella — who live in a renovated brownstone on Cambridge Place 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.
In the novel, Anwar is a survivor of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, a violent conflict 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 part of the framework of why our parents came here."
But Bright Lines is less about the past than it is a story about the next generation's opportunity to carve a better way of life — one free of repression and shame and instead, 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, 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 previous version of the story misspelled the writer’s middle name. It is Nandini, not Nadini.