“And without even fully understanding it I had smeared myself with their restlessness, assigned myself the same thankless task of finding and creating a home that would hide the clutter of my life in its gracefully organised rooms.”

It wasn’t that home for her was an unhappy place. Neither was Dhaka where her home was. It was her family – a charismatic, godfearing father who fell from grace when he lost his job and became distant, and a mother who suffered from unrealised dreams of stardom as a singer and yearned feverishly for solitude and freedom. And then the beautiful home they planned to live in was rented to strangers. The disquiet “hung like a pall” over Maria; the lovelessness ingrained in her subconscious.

One of her early memories of growing up was to run away with her friend Nadia without even understanding why she wanted to escape. As she grows, every decision she takes becomes an escape from something else.

She moves to New England for university at eighteen. She decides never to let herself get attached to the idea of a home. She seeks a kind of homelessness that would “constantly keep her on the move.” Yet she falls for Yameen, a fellow Muslim expatriate born in Tanzania, a man who doesn’t turn out to be as she had imagined.

Instead of finding happiness, they both tumble into an abyss of infidelity, alcohol and abuse. Later, an affair with a deeply religious American man helps her to “let go of self-punishing behaviors and embrace imperfection – in herself, her parents and her own tangled history – with love,” notes the Kirkus Reviews.

From Dhaka to New England to New York and to Dhaka again, Beloved Strangers goes back and forth like bursts of memories. It’s a memoir that describes itself as one that’s about “growing up and growing away, a meditation on why people leave their homes and why they sometimes find it difficult to return.”

Published in 2014.