Brick Lane Characters

Nazneen and Chanu’s first child, Mohammad is fair-skinned and beautiful. In him, Chanu sees a chance at greatness that he himself missed. He dies while still an infant of an unexplained fever.

Nazneen’s youngest daughter, Bibi is a born people pleaser. She listens attentively when Chanu gives his lectures on the history of Bangladesh and often joins her mother in her midnight snack sessions.

A third neighbor of Nazneen’s from Tower Hamlets.

A young wife and mother living in Tower Hamlets. She cannot make ends meet on her husband’s salary and therefore must go out and work among the Turks, Jews, and Brits, and is often the target of gossip and innuendo.

Chanu’s boss at the council. Mr. Dalloway is, according to Chanu, an active man and avid squash player. He has red hair and a harelip.

Plump, uncouth, and a chain smoker, she married Dr. Azad for love, but all that love has turned to contempt. Unlike Chanu, she feels no sentimentality for her home country of Bangladesh. As a Londoner and a working woman, she likes her short skirts and her freedom.

A member of the female Bengali Tower Hamlets community, she is a rotund woman who seems always to be expecting another child. Much of the unkind gossip surrounding Razia and Nazneen begins with her.

Unnamed, he seems to Nazneen to be perpetually angry. He is a large man with a furious face who holds down two jobs, one at a doll factory and another as a meat truck driver, until he dies one day, crushed by seventeen frozen cows.

Nazneen and Chanu’s oldest daughter, she often draws her father’s wrath by rejecting everything having to do with Bangladesh. She embraces British culture and hates so much the idea of going back to Bangladesh with her parents that she runs away the night before they are set to leave.

Razia’s daughter. She is smart and driven and is eventually admitted to university.

Doltish-looking and obviously dumb, he and his brother, Son Number Two, often assist their money-lending mother, Mrs. Islam, in the collection of debts. He is rumored to have a white girlfriend and two buttermilk-colored children.

The more attractive of Mrs. Islam’s sons, he has a politician’s face but a brute’s demeanor. When Mrs. Islam comes to collect a debt from Nazneen, he produces a cricket bat and smashes her glass-fronted cabinet as a way of trying to get her to pay up.

Another neighbor of Nazneen’s from Tower Hamlets, she accompanies Nazma to the hospital to visit Raqib. While there, she comments on how all her own children are fit and healthy, which earns her a rebuke from Nazma.

Razia’s young son. He is, for a time, deeply devoted to his studies. Then he becomes a drug dealer and heroin addict. He recovers thanks in large part to his mother’s strength and resolve.

Hussain’s friend, he gives Hasina small trinkets during her time as a beggar.

The scaly-faced, fish-smelling man who runs the garment factory where Hasina first works, he fires her for her rumored sexual relationship with Abdul.

A jute cutter who lives in Hasina’s apartment building in Narayanganj, he is yellow-skinned and ugly, but kind and funny. When she is fired from the garment factory, Hasina sees him as her protector. Later, he becomes her pimp.

One of Hasina’s fellow sewing woman at the garment factory, she shuns Nazneen when rumors go around about her and Mr. Chowdhury. Later, Khaleda’s entire family is killed in a housefire.

Hasina’s first husband is the nephew to the sawmill owner in Gouripur. After marriage, he works for the railway. He beats Hasina for speaking out of turn.

Hasina’s landlady who helps her escape Malek for Dhaka, Mrs. Kashem thinks it better to be beaten by one’s husband than shown kindness by a stranger.

The young Tower Hamlets girl who tries to run away with Shahana.

A fourth friend of Hasina’s at the garment factory, she is now an old woman. Married off at fifteen to a much older man, she was widowed three months later and has had to work ever since. It is her belief that, like Rupban, she was born to suffer.

Always seen in immense Punjabi pajamas and a skull cap, he is loyal to Karim and therefore often acts in opposition to the Questioner.

An African man who joins the Muslim faith in part because of its strict demands on its adherents, he is eventually elected to the board of directors of the Bengal Tigers.

The treasurer of the Bengal Tigers and enemy of Karim, he often brings grisly photos of dead Muslim children to the Tigers meetings in order to motivate the members to do more than circulate flyers and fight their rival gang, the Lion Hearts.

One of Hamid’s workers in Gouripur, he shows up in the village one day in a bright red jacket and grows to regret it because everyone mocks him. Clothing, in his opinion, is serious business.

A moody boy who always keeps a mongoose on a leash. During Rupban’s exorcism he volunteers to accept Rupban’s jinni, and then nearly kills the holy man performing the rite.

The sister of Rupban, she visits Nazneen and her family in the summer of Nazneen’s tenth year and spends the first few hours of the visit crying with Rupban.

Lovely’s best friend, Betty lives in a larger house than Lovely and has her own car and driver.

Nazneen and Hasina used to follow him around when they were girls in Gouripur, where he was considered a lunatic because of his constant reading habit. He kills himself by jumping into the village well, and Nazneen and Hasina feel responsible. They wish they hadn’t teased him so much.

A fakir, or holy man, he is in charge of Rupban’s exorcism, which goes spectacularly wrong.

A cow man in the village of Gouripur, he lost his mind and kidnapped a young girl, taking her into the jungle the summer Nazneen turned ten. This is the same summer Auntie comes for a visit.

The maid to the family that lives next door to James and Lovely, she is completely untroubled. She has an ugly round face, but to Hasina it is prettier than Lovely’s because Syeeda is, unlike Lovely, satisfied with her life.

The barber of Gouripur, Tamizudden Mizra Haque is, to young Nazneen and Hasina, a much-trusted authority in the village. He is always referred to by all three names.

A coworker of Chanu's. Much to Chanu's resentment, Mr. Dalloway seems to prefer Wilkie.

A woman who leaves her husband after discovering he secretly had another wife. However, she ends up in serious financial trouble.

The children of James and Lovely.