She loses her children for a few years before her circumstances improve, and she is able to bribe a judge to decree that her children be returned. Her brother-in-law and his wife, who are childless, argue that her children are better off living with them in Karachi. When Iqbal succumbs suddenly to a heart attack, Rehana is left with two small children to bring up. Rehana is born in Calcutta, sees her sisters married off and sent to Karachi, and is herself married - neither by choice, nor against her wishes - to a businessman, Iqbal, in Dhaka. The absurdity and futility of these dislocations is realised in a remark by Rehana who, when asked about which side she supports in East Pakistan's war of independence, says, "I'm not sure I'm a nationalist". As territories from north-west and east India became Pakistan, so, in 1971, East Pakistan became Bangladesh. And one of those countries was itself divided from birth, poised peculiarly - so thinks Rehana Haque, the protagonist of Tahmima Anam's debut novel A Golden Age - "on either side of India like a pair of horns". The arbitrary redrawing of borders on the Indian subcontinent in 1947 left it broken into two states, necessitating the largest migration of people in history.
The British empire in India was never so careless and cynical as when it left.
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