Brick Lane

This symbol frequently enters the novel both in the literal meaning of a woman falling from her window, and metaphorically, with a woman brought low by her sexual behavior. This is a key symbol evoking multiple characters’ reactions to various fallen women. The key thing distinguishing the sisters is that Hasina courts the fallen state through her unstable life and yet is haunted by the specter of her mother as a woman fallen by the three spears in the storeroom.

Brick Lane is a symbol of Bengali culture inserted into the urban Western environment, just as bricks are crafted from natural materials. Mythically speaking, this is the border of the known world. Brick Lane is where Bengali culture spills from the shops into the streets. This is a world where the uprooted immigrants can feel at home outside of their residences. Beyond Brick Lane is an alien world of Western capitalism where people are always rushing about. One has to go beyond Brick Lane, as Nazneen does in her first solitary adventure, in order to meet the challenge of the outer world, beyond the security of family and nation.

The number three is a frequent motif in this book. This number reveals the third path that is understood in physics as quantum entanglement, the third path of the unknown place of balance and compromise. The momentum in this direction opposes Rupban’s decision to succumb to the fate of the three swords in death, just as an accused man in the village is surrounded three men wielding clubs.

The Tattooed Lady is a sphinx-like character that never speaks but sits and watches over the London hamlet. Her sphinx-like presence marks the border between conscious and unconscious, the primordial world, as a tattoo is the primitive marking on the body externalizing internal feelings through external signage. The tattooed lady sits silently at the border between the security of the home and the uncertainty of the larger world.

This is a mechanical instrument that is a tool of both Bangladesh’s oppression and liberation. It is therefore neither a good or bad symbol, but a machine that the protagonist uses as a tool of her emancipation. The purchase of the sewing machine through a usurer’s loan keeps Nazneen confined to her home, working long hours to pay a debt that can never be repaid. Like sweatshop workers in Bangladesh, she can’t escape her condition no matter how hard she works; the capitalist game will always defeat her. She can’t find her emancipation until she confronts the evil moneylender with her accounts. Finally, she makes her own calculations and uses numbers to free herself from her ties to the duplicitous woman who makes money from others’ misfortunes, enforcing her control through her henchmen sons.

The name of this gang enters the narrative as a foreshadowing of the erotic relationship that Nazneen will have with her energetic young employer. She changes from this love affair and “feels that she was watching television in black and white and now in color.” Her body and soul merge through this love affair with the man who foretells of his seduction through the tale of the Lion Hearts. Ultimately, she becomes the aggressive lion in her determination in crossing the barricade boundary to find her daughter and save her from danger.

This ominous bag represents the black void of the unknown where evil lurks is all the more threatening because it can’t be seen. The peering into the void of Islam, with the denial feminine power, is a metaphor for Nazneen’s life journey of learning to transform herself through her feminine cultivation and coming to terms with her beloved sister’s lifestyle of passion.

This figure is a political activist who is never given a family name or a physical identity. The archetypal label represents the coming of Judgment Day, with his role to catalyze the collective emotion resulting in general mayhem and unrest, which will in turn lead to constructive change.

The family watches the disaster of September 11 on television, transfixed. “This is the start of madness,” says Chanu. To the immigrants, this symbol translates as the collapse of understanding and the rise of questioning over global power. This external symbol of the towers’ destruction is an outer reflection of the external collapse in the community building within Tower Hamlets in London as well as Nazneen’s inner collapse from trying to maintain a precarious balance between opposing forces and cultures. In a broader cultural sense, the event marks a paradigm shift that brings the tensions between opposites to a head.