Dhaka appears as the setting of Hind’s remembered married life with Muhammad Sufyan, before their move to England. The novel gives the city no extended present-day scene or physical description; its importance lies in the life Hind recalls there, and in the contrast between that earlier household and the bitterness she later attaches to exile.

Dhaka and the Sufyan household

Hind had entered marriage as a gentle and accommodating wife to an erudite schoolteacher in Dhaka. She brought Muhammad Sufyan cardamom-scented tea while he stayed up marking examination papers, and tried to make herself worthy of his broad learning. His reading ranged across religious and literary traditions, and Hind admired the pluralistic openness of mind that this breadth represented.

Her response to that household culture was practical as well as intellectual. She struggled with books by Bibhutibhushan Banerji and Tagore, and worked toward a corresponding eclecticism in the kitchen, learning to prepare South Indian dosas and uttapams as well as Kashmiri meatballs. As Muhammad Sufyan embraced the subcontinent’s varied cultures, Hind’s own engagement with plurality took the form of cooking and eating its different cuisines. The remembered home in Dhaka is thus associated not with a single fixed tradition but with learning and cultural mixture made ordinary through study, meals, and marriage.

From remembered home to departure

The later account of Hind’s departure recasts the marriage through a very different sensibility. After she refused further sexual relations, Muhammad Sufyan began staying out late and became involved in politics, eventually joining the Communist Party. Hind had initially thought he was visiting prostitutes; she came to treat his political commitments as a kind of ideological witchcraft. She blamed that involvement for the sudden move to England, the hardships and humiliations of immigration, and her permanent separation from the village she had left behind.

Her accusation that England was Muhammad Sufyan’s revenge for her refusal makes migration, in her telling, an extension of marital conflict. The narrative presents this as Hind’s interpretation, not as an established explanation of the move. Dhaka belongs to the earlier life from which the family’s migration carries them away, while her later recollections make the loss of home inseparable from grievance toward her husband.

Narrative significance

Dhaka’s limited appearance matters because it supplies a concrete place for a past that Hind later remembers through anger and displacement. The contrast between her earlier effort to participate in Muhammad Sufyan’s intellectual and culinary pluralism and her later denunciation of his politics shows how sharply her account of their shared life has changed. The city is not developed as an independent setting; it functions as the remembered domestic world before migration, against which Hind’s sense of exile in England takes shape.