Interesting
Passages
Suddenly she was
standing here with the doctor, guarding these three doors with the three
patients behind them, and the doctor inviting her to a concert of
eighteenth-century European music in the middle of the riot-torn city—so that she
began to laugh and laugh (80).
They still could not
say, could not define the unsatisfactory atmosphere of their home. They did not realize now that this
unsatisfactoriness was not based only on their parents’ continual absence,
their seemingly total disinterest in their children, their absorption in each
other. The secret, hopeless suffering of
their mother was somehow at the root of this subdued greyness, this silent
desperation that pervaded the house.
Also the disappointment that Baba’s very life and existence were to
them, his hopeless future, their anxiety over him (130).
‘No one,’ said Bim,
slowly and precisely, ‘comprehends better than children do. No one feels the atmosphere more keenly—or
catches all the nuances, all the insinuations in the air—or notes those details
that escape elders because their senses have atrophied, or calcified’ (149).
Vocabulary Terms
ectoplasmic: relating
to emanation from the body of a medium.
myopic:near-sighted,
narrow-minded
crepitation:making
a crackling sound
Interesting
Dialogue
‘Old Delhi does not change.
it only decays. My students tell
me it is a great cemetery, every house a tomb.’ (5)
‘And then the British built New Delhi and moved everything
out. here we are left rocking on the
backwaters, getting duller and greyer, I suppose. Anyone who isn’t dull and grey goes away—to
New Delhi, to England, to Canada, the Middle East. They don’t come back’ (5).
‘So, I only have to bring you home for a day, Tara, and you
go back to being the hopeless person you were before I married you.’ (17)
‘All of us abroad are, in varying degrees, ambassadors. I refuse to talk about famine or drought or
caste wars or—or political disputes. I
refuse—I refuse to discuss such
things . . . I choose to show them and inform them only of the best, the finest
. . . eternal India’ (35).
‘No,’ Tara readily admitted.
‘I only felt it. The thoughts—the
words—came later. Have only come now!’
(157).
‘You can have all the time you want with them,’ Tara said
graciously, helping to hand over the empty cups, ‘and influence them as much as
you like. In our family, aunts have that
prerogative. Like Mira-masi had’ (172).
‘I didn’t ask you to it,’ Bim said roughly. ‘You didn’t need to. Don’t be silly,
Tara—it was all so long ago.’ / ‘Yes, but’ cried Tara desperately, turning
towards the house now, and Bakul, as if against her will ‘but it’s never
over. Nothing’s over, ever’ (174).
Similes/Metaphors
Although they spoke softly, no louder than a pair of birds
to each other . . . (3)
The day stretched out like a sheet of glass that reflected
the sun—too bare, too exposed to be faced (21).
A cloud of mosquitoes followed her, hovering over her
flattened head and the two pointed ears, like a flimsy parasol (69).
She was not soft or scented or sensual. She was bony and angular, wrinkled and
desiccated—like a stick, or an ancient tree to which they adhered (111).
They had settled about her head and shoulders till they had
wrapped her about in a helmet of chainmail that glittered, gun-metal blue, and
shivered and crept over her skin, close-fitting, adhesive (135).
. . . some of the meals that arrived on the table were just
a long procession of little saucers with little portions smudged onto them,
like meals for a family of kittens (147).
‘Time the destroyer is
time the preserver’ (182).
Striking Imagery
and Aural Description
Only the pigeons cooed on and on, too lazy even to open
their beaks, content to mutter in their throats rather than sing or call. (9)
It seemed to her that the dullness and the boredom of her
childhood, her youth, were stored here in the room under the worn dusty red
rugs, in the bloated brassware, amongst the dried grasses in the swollen vases,
behind the yellowed photographs in the oval frames—everything, everything that
she had so hated as a child and that was still preserved here as if this were
the storeroom of some dull, uninviting provincial museum. (21).
She leant out from the crowd on the step, waving back, and
saw him abandoned, scraps of paper blowing about his feet, the lamplight
striking onto and ricocheting off the bald spot on his head. Then she disappeared into the bus and forgot
him completely (93).
She felt that they must be the same length, that his
slightness would fit in beside her size, that his concavities would mould
together with her convexities. Together
they would form a whole that would be perfect and pure (166).
There is some link formed between the man who leans forward
with a match and the woman who bends her head towards that light, as Bakul and
Bim did. (36)
Filial Passages
All her life Tara had experienced that fear—her father had
killed her mother. (23)
. . . he went through the day without addressing a word to
them on his way out of it or into it.
They knew him only as the master of the entrance and the exit (53).
He hoped, like Byron, to go to the rescue of those in
peril. Instead, like Byron, he lay ill,
dying. Bim was sure he was dying. Her eyes streamed with tears as she buttoned
up his shirt. ‘Shall I read to you,
Raja?’ she asked with a brave gulp (60).
How much his mother’s son he was, she said to herself: he
had inherited her gift for loading the weight of his self-sacrifices onto
others (92).
It was as if his parents, too aged, had given birth to a
child without vitality or will—all that had gone into the other earlier children
and there had been none left for this last, late one (103).
Bim’s big-sisterliness would always be linked with that
ruthless and cynical chopping of her long hair, Tara felt. It grew again, as Aunt Mira assured her it
would, but as straight and lank as it had been before (119).
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