"This unique book throws open a window on world unknown to most Westerners. The word Meyebela, girlhood, was coined by Taslima Nasrin because no precise term existed in her native language for a female's experience of childhood. This seemingly small omission speaks volumes about the fate of millions of girls and women living in societies in which females are treated as second-class citizens. Renowned Bengali dissident Nasrin is an exception. Precocious and well educated, she managed to pursue careers as a physician and a writer, and in telling her own story is able to speak for others." "This moving and informative memoir covers the period from Nasrin's auspicious birth on a Muslim holy day to the threshold of womanhood at fourteen. The sensitive portrait of Nasrin's parents - her philandering physician father obsessed with the importance of education, her mother desperately retreating from powerlessness into fanatic devotion to religion - chronicles the extremes that pull at a young girl's world. Always an observant and curious child, Nasrin's questioning mind and acute awareness of the injustice and suffering endured by her mother and other women force her to begin in early adolescence to define for herself what is true and just. Nasrin takes the reader on an unforgetable journey to a place and time that will seem quite distant to the Western reader but which remains little changed today, and for millions of girls and women is the only world they know."

The Year of the War -- My Birth, Akika, and Other Events -- Growing Up -- Ma -- Snakes -- The Peer's House I -- Religion -- The Culture -- The Peer's House II -- Favorite -- Love -- Return I -- Blood -- Phulbahari -- The World of Poetry -- Lying Cold on a White Bed -- Return II -- The House of Termites -- After the War.