Gatsby goes to Dhaka: review of Nadeem Zaman’s ‘The Inheritors’

The novel is a tribute to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American classic set amid the rich and powerful of Dhaka

The Inheritors by Nadeem Zaman is a tale about the lifestyle of the rich and powerful in Dhaka, seen from the eyes of a man who left the city along with his parents when he was 13, grew up in Chicago, and has now returned to sell his family’s substantial assets in his native land.

Nisar Chowdhury is a 40-ish aspiring novelist who hopes to write a book about the city of his birth and feels that the trip could provide him with the material for his work. Hence, while attending to the business of the prospective sale, he is also keen to meet people and observe their ways.

Enter Disha, his first cousin, a flamboyant socialite under whose expert guidance Nisar is swept up into the social whirligig of Dhaka’s wealthy, westernised elite.

At the centre of this endless partying, boozing and joint-smoking is Junaid Gazi, a Gatsby-esque figure, who keeps an open house for privileged pleasure-seekers who flock to him like moth to a flame. Gazi also happens to be Disha’s ex-husband, and he is the one who has made an extravagant offer to buy up all of Nisar’s family property.

Zaman introduces some interesting plot elements — Gazi’s continued and desperate fascination with Disha and their turbulent relationship, the corruption and ruthlessness of money power, and so on. It is also a revelation that Dhaka’s crazy rich are not much different from those in Mumbai or Karachi.

However, as you progress through The Inheritors, you begin to wonder if the author deliberately set out to write a tribute novel to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, set in Dhaka. Even the names are a giveaway. Nisar is Nick to Junaid Gazi’s Jay Gatsby, as Disha is an avatar of the gorgeous and callous Daisy. In fact, and you don’t need a spoiler alert here, the story goes right down to the way Gatsby died.

As a fellow worshipper of The Great Gatsby, one totally gets the desire to write something akin to that great American novel. But fan fiction is hardly the realm of a serious author.