In her novel Incandescence, Mehreen Ahmed deposits the reader directly into the House of Chowdhury, a tumbledown, formerly magnificent home in what is now Bangladesh. The house itself, which is the novel’s showpiece, is an “imposing two-storied brick building” standing very close – both physically and metaphorically – to “the far end of an alley… a disreputable site where scandalous affairs took place… a hotbed for runaway lovers.” Through her vivid and poetic language, Ahmed bestows on the reader the status of an honorary Chowdhury: a privileged child of a once wealthy and important family, though one riddled with scandal. As a Chowdhury, we must watch, helpless, as our spouse leaves us for a younger, more exciting partner, as the walls of our house come crashing down on the most innocent of us, as rains dilute the lassis our faithful servants hand to wedding guests, witnesses to a marriage that will, if history tells us anything, end up being a bad idea.
The story opens with Mila Chowdhury contemplating her grandmother’s journals and her own misadventures in love, and through her and her grandmother’s memories we learn about this varied family going back decades, including their struggles to survive colonialism and war, battle personal temptations (often losing), and finding comfort and communion in small acts: in pouring tea, in fixing a broken radio, in quietly loving stepchildren who only want their mother.
As Ahmed describes in her opening note, the novel is a rumination on ethical behavior, “on the exploitation of the characters to the extent of what to expect from life,” but it does not judge its characters for their many mistakes, and thus makes it impossible for us to judge them. Instead, we root for Mila, despite her headlong rush into marriage with a person she doesn’t know well. We also root for Prema, looking past her infidelities and abandonment to her passion to make the most of her life and to love whom she loves, despite the difficulties. Those characters who seem to be mostly victims of other people’s blunders are awarded with our sympathy, too, but it is the flaws which make Ahmed’s gorgeously-rendered characters, and the imperfectly perfect House of Chowdhury, glow so bright.
impspired (2022)