Way back in October 2005, I had asked Adib bhai about his latest venture and he had hinted at working at a novel set mostly in Dhaka and the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Later on he was more specific, suggesting (in his own words) that his “original intention was to write about the way a proud and 'aristocratic' Bengali family implodes after it discovers that one of its young members is involved with a terrorist group training in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. But somehow the novel became complicated with the personal and complicated lives of the Alams. The various strands of the novel include honour killing, a secret love affair, loneliness and the emotionally stunted life of the Bengali-Australian protagonist who goes back to Dhaka to see his family.” This succinct description sums up the novel well.

Adib Khan's new novel Spiral Road (Harper Collins, Australia; 362 pp.) could not have come at a more opportune time. Given the volatile political climate in Bangladesh with the arrests of the Islamicist militants and the quick implementation of their capital punishment, Spiral Road, too, deals with the rising terrorism in the world and reveals the existence of a stronghold in Bangladesh itself. Revolving around the Alam family, a young member of the said family is found to be involved in the movement with tragic repercussion on the rest of the members.

When I had first heard about the inclusion of Chittagong Hill Tracts, my initial inclination was to think about the long-standing unrest between the indigenous population and the government troops. But the Hill Tracts only play as setting. Again, to quote the author himself: “It is precisely because Chittagong Hill Tracts has a volatile history that I chose to use it as a setting for a terrorist base. Most of the action, however, takes place in Dhaka and the ancestral village of the family. I figured that indigenous people would not be too concerned about subversive activities around them since they have a long history of grievance against the governments of both Pakistan and Bangladesh. I know the region fairly well and I had several Bangladeshi friends who were immensely helpful with their knowledge of the Hill Tracts.”

Even so, the novel is more the account of Masud Alam, an Australian-Bangladeshi, who comes to visit Dhaka to see an ill father, to reconnect with a family with whom he had virtually no contact for years and to find himself entangled into the larger issues of international terrorism and counter terrorism. The authorial intent might be to emphasize more on the corrosive effects of terrorism on a family rather than the politics of terrorism itself; nonetheless, the movement does often seem to tower over the more personal stories.

Several Islamic political parties are identified as well as individuals, including the dreaded Bangla Bhai. Masud is quickly brought up-to-date into the local political scenario by his Dhakaite brother: “In the north, there's a fellow trying to establish an Islamic state. Then there's Bangladesh Nationalist Party, Ahle Hadith Andolon Bangladesh, Islami Oikyo Jote, Jamaat-e-lslami, Jagrata Muslim Janata...A new political party crops up every week. And no matter what, a revolution is always on the agenda” (40).

International espionage encroaches in the guise of Steven Mills, a fellow traveler on the plane home whom Masud initially dismisses as an obnoxious passenger. Turns out Mills is an Australian secret service agent working in cohorts with a CIA operative and already has a profile on Masud, on account of his being the uncle of a terror suspect. Also, while in Australia, the fact that Masud was sent a missive by “likeminded brothers” to join their majlis do not help matters in his profiling. Once in Bangladesh, despite his firm belief that the country does not contain a terrorist base, Masud is gradually disproved when he finds an inquisitive journalist being killed and himself being cautioned and then offered a counter spying position by Mills. Masud declines.

What seems to be the larger aspect of the novel is an attempt to make sense of what makes young Muslim men go the “fanatic” way. The narrator is never judgmental or accusing but tries to decipher the disillusionment that his nephew goes through. The fact that Masud himself had his grand rhetoric of patriotic duties disintegrated facilitates his understanding of Omar's transformation. Like Farid, in the movie

My Son the Fanatic or Karim in Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Omar, his nephew, has his reasons for seeking justice with “like-minded brothers.” Omar is U.S. educated and was well-employed. And then 9/11 happened. One day he is picked up and asked the routine questions. Interrogation followed. The nightmarish experience, Omar confesses “crushes your ego with the force of a hammer hitting an egg. You shrink into a cowering mess, covered in sweat, blood and piss. Two broken ribs, bruised chest, legs and arms. A crushed finger” (288). This indignity, then, leads to a larger solidarity with oppressed people of one particular faith, transcending national borders. Masud is forced into Omar's world and fortunate enough to come out, wiser but troubled.

Of the other things in the novel, a secret love affair, impecunious aristocrats and an old uncle marrying a teen aged girl are less consequential to the terror plot. These provide insights into the disintegration of old tangled values of the Zamindari era when conflicted with the more egalitarian concepts of the post-Zamindari

period.

Masud Alam reminded me much of Iqbal Chaudhary of Seasonal Acjustments. While it was only Masud who fought in the independence war, both suffer from post-war disillusionments and abandon Bangladesh for Australia. Both disconnect from family, to return after a prolonged absence to pick up the threads where it was left off. But of course, as Salman Rushdie so aptly puts it: “...we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands...” (Imaginary Homelands 10). Iqbal Chaudhary, thus, returns to Australia, dejected.

Masud's intentions are left more ambiguous.

And both have concerned mothers bent on a matrimonial mission for their errant sons, with a vengeance. There are certain things that I wished were more elaborated. Masud harbors dark secrets that tend to send him into self-reflecting gloom. In conversations with his favorite nephew and through his own narratorial insights, some light is shed into his secrets. But I came out with the feeling that there is more to what he reveals and I finished reading the novel with the nagging feeling that I really did not get to know what it is. The family secrets that Masud gets intimations of remain unearthed and not further investigated. Perhaps, this is to emphasize Masud's halfhearted attempts in his rekindling of home-ties. He has already become a lost soul. Rebecca Sultana teaches postcolonial literature at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.