A Golden Age

Dhaka in 1971, then the capital of East Pakistan, as the Bangladesh Liberation War begins. A widow and her grown children are drawn into the fight from a family house in the planned district of Dhanmondi, past the university where the March crackdown starts, out along the refugee road to Calcutta and a guerrilla camp near the border.

Rehana Haque

Shona, the house in Dhanmondi

March 1971

The widow Rehana Haque has raised a second house, which she calls Shona, in the garden of her Dhanmondi home and lets it to tenants to hold the family together. As 1971 opens, her grown son and daughter gather here while the political crisis in East Pakistan sharpens toward war.

Opening chapters

inferred The house Shona is invented, but the novel places it plainly in Dhanmondi; this marks the centre of that district, the planned residential area laid out for East Pakistan's elite in the 1950s.

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