The second is when she’s sitting on a public bench in Dhaka’s Ramna Park, talking to a stranger, hours past the unshakeable curfew that had been set for her. Twice in the course of Leesa Gazi’s Hellfire, the novel’s protagonist, Lovely, recalls a proverb that her mother often repeated to her and her younger sister, Beauty, when they were younger: “An ant grows wings when it’s time to die.” The first time is while thinking back to the time she started a romantic relationship with her cousin, Riaz, one of the very few outsiders who had been allowed to enter their family home.

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To hellfire and back