How did you approach getting acclimated to the Bangladeshi community in England, which is obviously a different world?
Chatterjee: I met a lot of women in and around Brick Lane and I spent time with them. They cooked lunch for me, and they told stories about their lives. These women I met were all in their late thirties or mid-forties. At the time when I met them, they were very confident women all doing things on their own, but they told me stories which were quite similar to Nazneen. A lot of women had come to England when they were very young–sixteen, seventeen years old–and transported from Bangladesh to this alien land in an arranged marriage situation. They’d never met their husbands before they got married, they didn’t speak the language, they didn’t go outside their apartment for years because they were so scared. There was one woman who told me that she was so scared of anyone Caucasian or any other race that she would just sit in the flat while her husband wasn’t there. There was no communication between her and the rest of the world. There was a local vegetable seller who would come to dro
