Shahriar Shaams reviews Nadeem Zaman’s The Inheritors (Published by Hachette India, 2023) and observes it to be a disservice to Dhaka.
Bangladeshi fiction in English is notorious for its peculiar worship of Dhaka city. There is an odd sense of romanticism in how Traffic-jams are endured, how characters enjoy having tea at tongs, or suffer through bribing higher-ups. These desires to be of Dhaka, to call it their own, enough to write of it—surely stems from insecurities of never truly being a part of the city. Nisar Chowdhury, the narrator of Nadeem Zaman’s sophomore novel The Inheritors, we find, has been raised in the US. If his family had not immigrated and stayed back in Dhaka, his alienation to Dhaka perhaps would not have been much absolved either, for he belongs to a privileged class, whose Dhaka is surely of the more tedious version, limited to tennis at the club and parties at home, and everyone knowing each other through distant relations.
Zaman’s The Inheritors (Hatchette India, 2023) is billed as a retelling of The Great Gatsby. Its narrator, the tiresome Nisar is Nick Carraway. Junaid, the mysterious rich man in the apartment next door is Jay Gatsby. Nisar’s cousin, and Junaid’s ex-wife, Disha is Daisy—but why Nadeem Zaman chooses to sample Fitzgerald’s work for his novel is lost on me. The novel could have done away with these influences, and no one would have noticed much. The book, I gathered in the end, need not have been set in Dhaka either.