Brick Lane: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Dinnertime has arrived, and Dr. Azad and Chanu are at the table where Nazneen waits to serve them. Dr. Azad tells them both a story about two young men from their community who have made themselves sick by overindulging in alcohol. Chanu says he plans to take any children he and Nazneen have home before they can pick up such bad habits. Dr. Azad disagrees with such a strategy. He calls it “Going Home Syndrome” and asks Nazneen if she has heard of it. Embarrassed, she is unable to reply. Dr. Azad and Chanu continue to talk of the pull of home, with Chanu claiming that the peasants are drawn more to the land than to their own blood. Dr. Azad admits he’s thought about returning, but that something always gets in the way.

Chanu changes the subject to his many qualifications for promotion. He mentions his degrees and the fact that he has missed very few days of work, even when he was sick with an ulcer. Dr. Azad casually reassures him that a promotion is probably in his future, and Chanu presses the point, asking Dr. Azad if he came to such information from Mr. Dalloway himself. Dr. Azad says he knows no such man. Watching her husband pathetically attempt to curry favor, Nazneen is torn between disgust and pity.

Chanu goes on to tell Dr. Azad about when he first arrived in London. Unlike the peasants who traveled to the country in boats, stowed away like rats, he came in a plane with his degree certificate in his suitcase, hoping to become a private secretary to the Prime Minister. Instead, he was treated like any other immigrant and he had to work hard to get where he is.  He burned all the letters from home in which family, friends, and servants begged for him to send them money, and he made two promises to himself: one, he would become a success, and two, he would return home, but only after he had achieved that success.

While Chanu goes on about his family’s greed and seemingly endless appeals for money, Dr. Azad and Nazneen exchange looks. Nazneen is keenly aware that it is a look she, as a loyal wife, should not exchange with a stranger. When Chanu is finally finished speaking, Dr. Azad declines a second helping and dessert, saying he must go home. He then advises Chanu to eat more slowly and cut down on his meat consumption or he is sure to see him in his office again with another ulcer.

Later, Nazneen is drawn to the television screen while she is cleaning up. She watches while a man in very tight clothing and a woman in a dress that barely conceals her bottom spin around an arena to thunderous applause. When she asks Chanu what she is watching, he tells her “ice skating.” Then she tries to say it, but has difficulty with two consonants in a row—a common problem among Bengalis, Chanu says dismissively. And besides, she won’t be called on to speak much English anyway, he says. Nazneen, though, is eager to learn, and picks up on bits and pieces of English as Chanu talks to her about work, where he sometimes feels undervalued.

Chanu is particularly annoyed by a coworker named Wilkie who, Chanu argues, is always trying to get on the right side of Mr. Dalloway by going to the pub with him. It’s really Chanu who should be the favorite, he says, because he has a degree in English from Dhaka University and can quote Chaucer and Dickens and Hardy. Nazneen focuses again on cleaning, hoping Chanu won’t launch into a long quotation whose meaning she is sure will elude her.

Chanu then goes on to explain to Nazneen that it is the white underclass that is most threatened by men like him. Members of the white underclass, he says, need someone below them in the pecking order. When immigrants begin to out-perform underclass whites, they are motivated to form right-wing populist groups like the National Front. Nazneen wants only to be able to put the dishes away, but Chanu is blocking the cabinets. Eventually, she gives up and leaves them for the morning.

Nazneen cuts the corns on Chanu’s feet while he talks about the evening’s dinner, which he decides was a success, even though Dr. Azad does not know Mr. Dalloway. At one point, Nazneen cuts him too closely and he thinks she has drawn blood. They get into bed, and Chanu is soon snoring. While he sleeps, Nazneen studies his face. It is not a handsome face by any means, but it is kind. Eventually, she gets up and eats leftovers from the dinner she prepared for him and Dr. Azad. She eats at the window, looking out and thinking about the woman who, according to Mrs. Islam, jumped to her death. Nazneen grows convinced it was suicide, and that the woman died smiling, happy for once to defy convention and her family’s expectations. Meanwhile, the tattoo lady is still in her kitchen, drinking.

Nazneen’s days begin to blend into each other, the next almost identical to the last. She cooks and cleans, cleans and cooks. Sometimes, if she’s lucky, she catches ice skating on TV, and on those days, she feels her old self replaced by a new one full of glory and light. The problem comes when she turns off the television and must return to her old self. For a brief time, she is angry and discontented, unhappy with her lot as a housewife.

Nazneen is grateful when ice skating is no longer on the television. Soon she begins praying five times a day, a habit that Chanu approves of, even though she never sees him pray or read the Qur’an. His reverence seems reserved for his certificates on the wall. Some are genuine diplomas. The majority, though, are worthless. Chanu grows worried his promotion is in jeopardy, thanks in part to austerity measures put in place by Margaret Thatcher. Nazneen begins praying that he’ll get his promotion, but the prayer comes after her plea for another letter from Hasina.

One day, Nazneen and Chanu visit the shops on Bethnal Green Road. Nazneen is looking for material for a new sari. She asks Chanu if he thinks a pink and yellow material is nice. Rather than answer her directly, he launches into a theory of David Hume’s, about Relations of Ideas versus Matters of Fact. He illustrates his point by arguing that saying the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible than the idea that it will. When his mind is occupied with such weighty matters, he says, how can Nazneen expect him to have an opinion on a particular sari fabric? Still, he goes into the shop and buys it for her.

That night in bed, Nazneen wonders what Chanu does all day at work. Does he spend his time discussing whether or not the sun will rise with his colleagues? She drifts off to sleep and soon she is dreaming of her home in Gouripur where she and Hasina are girls again, playing together and being doted on and scolded by their parents. She knows now what she would wish for if she could, and it’s not to be in a different place but to live in a different time, and so she knows, too, that her wish will never come true.

Nazneen rarely ventures out of her apartment. This is mostly because Chanu does not want her to. He prides himself on providing well for her, and besides, he says, the people they live among are ignorant and would judge them both harshly if she were seen too often on the street. Nazneen does not protest her near confinement. She accepts her fate and waits for time to pass. Like Rupban, she adopts an air of saintly patience, and while she waits, she thinks of how her mother died. She fell on a spear in a store back in Gouripur. The spear pierced her through the heart. Hamid soon brought home a new wife, but the woman only stayed a month. Mumtaz rarely acknowledged Hamid after that. She saved all her love for his daughters and for Rupban, who died while wearing her best sari.

When Razia moves to a different block of the Tower Hamlets, Nazneen has more reason to leave her apartment. She stays on the estate, though, venturing only far enough to visit Razia, whose company is a welcome distraction from Nazneen’s concern for Hasina. Six months have passed since Hasina’s last letter, and that letter was short and hurried. In it, Hasina wrote only that she hoped Nazneen and her husband were happy and that, while she, Hasina, was not necessarily a good wife, she was trying her best to please her husband.

Razia’s irreverent sense of humor and talent for mimicry takes Nazneen’s mind off her sister. Together, they gossip about their neighbors, including a young man who’d recently taken a beating from his father for being spotted in a pub with a white woman, Jorina’s son, who struggles with a debilitating drinking problem, and Jorina’s daughter, who, at sixteen, was sent home to Bangladesh to be married. Jorina and her husband sent the girl away partially to save her from entering into a love marriage. Razia says such stories make her fear for her son, Tariq, and daughter, Shefali.

Nazneen looks around Razia’s apartment, taking note of the clutter but seeing that Razia has arranged things so that there is still room to grow, should she and her husband decide to have more children or invite family members move in with them. According to Chanu, such efficiency has become a joke among the British, and they’ve even come up with a statistic they say applies to Tower Hamlets: 3.5 Bangladeshis to one room.

Nazneen tells Razia that her sister made a love marriage. Nazneen then recounts her sister’s story, beginning with Hasina’s incredible beauty, which everyone in the village considered a curse. But the marriage had turned out well, Nazneen tells Razia, who then asks if Hasina has any children. Nazneen admits she doesn’t know. Maybe a baby would explain Hasina’s hasty letter. Razia then does an impression of Mrs. Islam, in which she says the love marriages were not a problem in her day. Razia and Hasina laugh, but Razia says seriously that Shefali will marry for love over her dead body.

Nazneen depends on regular prayer, housework, and visits with Razia to remain content in her marriage and life in London. She tells her heart not to beat with fear or desire. If she wants something, she asks Chanu, but she always defers to his opinion. She asks him if he finds the bed too soft. He says no and asks if the bed makes her back hurt. Rather than answering him honestly, she tells him it doesn’t matter; she can sleep on the floor. She points out that, when she becomes a mother, she will sleep on a bedroll with her child. Chanu asks if she’s pregnant, and she tells him she is. Mrs. Islam took her to Dr. Azad and had it confirmed.

Chanu has been hard at work drawing the house he hopes to build them in Dhaka when they return home. He adds a pond and a guest house to the drawing, saying he can’t possibly miss out on a promotion now. One week later, Nazneen gets a letter from Hasina. At first, it thrills her. Then it crushes her spirits, and this time she doesn’t make herself be calm.