Why this book

Nasrin wrote this book not as invention but as testimony. When a mosque was destroyed in India in December 1992, real mobs swept across Bangladesh, and real Hindu families were hunted. She set down the horror while it still burned — and paid for it with exile.

The Story

Meet Sudhamoy Dutta, an aging doctor in the heart of Dhaka. In the war of 1971 he bled for Bangladesh's freedom, certain the new nation would belong equally to Hindu and Muslim. Therefore, though he is a Hindu in a Muslim land, he has never once let himself feel like a stranger here.

He shares a modest, well-loved home with his devoted wife Kironmoyee and his restless grown son Suranjan. But their peace rests on cracking ground, for year after year their Hindu neighbors have quietly sold their houses, slipped across the border into India, and never once come back.

Suranjan is thirty-three, jobless and proud, a stubborn secularist who cherishes his Muslim friends and once loved a Muslim girl. His younger sister Maya is warmer and more practical — but far more frightened, for she remembers exactly what fear has already cost this fragile family.

Then, on the sixth of December 1992, the news arrives like a blade. In India, a Hindu mob has torn down the centuries-old Babri Mosque. But the rage does not stay across the border. Within hours, across Bangladesh, furious crowds begin hunting the nearest Hindus they can find.

Temples are set ablaze. Shops are smashed and stripped bare, idols shattered, homes marked in the dark and torched. Therefore Maya begs her family to hide at once inside the house of trusted Muslim friends, exactly as hundreds of other terrified Hindus are already scrambling to do.

This is no scattered outburst. Across the whole country, thousands of homes, shops, and temples are gutted in a matter of days; families who lived side by side for generations turn overnight into hunter and hunted. But the government looks away, and the newspapers fall strangely quiet.

But Sudhamoy will not move an inch. This is my country, he insists; I fought to build it, and no riot on earth can turn me into a refugee on my own soil. Therefore he bolts the door and waits, still trusting a nation that has already begun to forget him.

Suranjan refuses to flee as well, though for his own reason. To run, he feels, would betray everything he believes — that Bengalis are one people, never Hindu set against Muslim. Therefore he stays put, insisting his lifelong friends would never let a single hair on their heads be harmed.

As the days grow darker, the old doctor remembers. He remembers being spat at as a Malaun, an infidel; remembers land quietly stolen, promotions denied, his childhood temple defiled. Therefore an old wound tears open inside him — perhaps he was only ever tolerated here, and never truly wanted at all.

Meanwhile Suranjan waits by the telephone for his Muslim friends to call — to ask if he is safe, to offer him shelter. But the phone stays cruelly silent. One by one the brotherhood he built his whole faith upon turns its face away, and dread settles into his bones.

He thinks of Parveen, the Muslim woman he once loved and lost to her family's objections. Even now some part of him aches for the country's promise of oneness. But the streets outside answer him with fire, teaching that his tender secular dream was always a dream and nothing more.

By now the family is trapped: Sudhamoy clinging to his homeland, Suranjan clinging to his ideals, Kironmoyee and Maya only wanting to survive the night. But outside, the violence draws closer, street by street, until at last it reaches their own quiet lane.

Then the mob is at the door. Men force their way inside, shoving past Suranjan and his crippled father. Therefore, in the shrieking chaos, they seize Maya — the daughter, the heart of the house — and drag her out into the burning night as her family is held back, powerless.

Maya does not return. Frantic, Suranjan runs through the smoke-choked city, pounding on every police station, every hospital, every silent friend's door in search of her. But no one will lift a hand to help him, and no one will say where his sister has been taken.

The loss finally breaks Sudhamoy's body. Grief and terror flood through him until the old freedom-fighter collapses, half his frame paralyzed, laid helpless in his bed. Therefore the patriot is felled at last — not by any foreign army, but by the very country he gave his youth to free.

Through it all, Kironmoyee endures in aching silence — cooking, praying, holding a shattering household together with her bare hands. She has already sold her wedding ornaments to buy a safety that never came. Therefore her quiet suffering becomes the truest measure of everything this family has lost.

Suranjan's wounded faith curdles into blind rage. Betrayed by every ideal he ever prized, he commits a monstrous thing — he lures a Muslim woman home and violates her, striking wildly back at an entire people. But the cruelty brings him no relief, only a deeper, sickening shame.

He stares at the man he has become and is revolted. In answering hatred with hatred, he has murdered the very secular soul he once wore like armor. Therefore he learns the oldest, bitterest lesson — that violence spares no one, least of all the hand that finally reaches for it.

Days pass in a ruined house — Maya vanished forever, Sudhamoy paralyzed, their home no longer any kind of shelter. Therefore Suranjan, the one who swore he would sooner die than run, at last says the unspeakable words: the family must leave Bangladesh for India.

But the most devastating words fall from Sudhamoy himself. The man who fought for this soil, who for a lifetime refused to abandon it, parts his trembling, paralyzed lips and whispers that yes — the time has finally come to go.

And so the Duttas gather their grief and prepare to abandon the land they helped set free, joining the long, weeping line of the exiled. The nation keeps its flag, its anthems, its pride — But it has hollowed itself out by casting away its own children.

What it means

This is the shame that Nasrin dares to name. Not the shame of the hunted, but of us all — every nation that lets religion outweigh a shared humanity, that trades a neighbor for a mob. When a homeland betrays its own, the disgrace belongs to everyone.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.