After visiting an island brothel in Bangladesh, the novelist was inspired to write an imagined uprising. She explores the radical fictional worlds where women have the power<\/p>\n
In the spring of 2024, I am finally able to visit Banishanta, the island in southern Bangladesh that has been haunting my dreams. When I\u00a0arrive I find it is little more than a long patch of grey mud, with a\u00a0string of flimsy huts lining a craggy shore. Thirteen years earlier, I was on a\u00a0boat on my way to the Sundarban mangrove forest when a guide casually pointed out the island and told me it was a state-licensed brothel that had been there since the time of the British.<\/p>\n
When I went home, I didn\u2019t want to\u00a0think about Banishanta, because if\u00a0I\u00a0did, I would have to imagine the terrible things the women there were enduring while I lived a life of casual entitlements many thousands of miles away. Yet the women squatted in my imagination, refusing to leave. I resolved to never write about them, because it would say things about the world I didn\u2019t want to know. It was only when I decided I could write a novel, set on a fictional island, about a rebellion of women, that I allowed them in.<\/p>\n
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