"A Real Durwan"

"Mr. Dalal had decided to install one basin in the sitting room of their flat and the other one on the stairwell of the building, on the first floor landing. "This way everyone can use it," he explained from door to door. the residents were delighted: for years they had all brushed their teeth with stored water poured from mugs....Among the wives however, resentment quickly brewed. Standing in line to brush their teeth in the mornings, each grew frustrated with having to wait their turn." This passage shows how people can become spoiled and instead of appreciating something that was given to them as a gift by the Dalal's they can only focus on what they don't have. The author shows the reader the change in attitude about the basin by creating different tones. When the resident first hear of the basins the reader knows they are excited and pleased through the authors choice of words such as "delighted," this along with comparing the basin to the worse process of brushing there teeth with stored mug water creates a tone of happiness." Then the tone changes after the residents had used the basins for a while. The author chooses words like "resentment," and "frustrated," to describe there new feelings toward the sink which creates an impatient tone. This switch in emotion from excitement to impatience displays that human nature that nothing is ever good enough we are always greedy for more.

When Mr. Pizada Came To Dine

Samantha Sokoloff

Mrs. Baione-Doda

19 September 2008



" Mr. Pizada won't be coming today. More importantly, Mr. Pizada is no longer considered Indian." my father announced, "Not since Partition. Our country was divided. 1947." When I said I thought that was the date of India's independence from Britain my father said, "That too. One moment we were free and then we were sliced up," he explained drawing an x with his finger on the counter top, "Like a pie. Hindus here, Muslims there."...It made no sense to me. Mr. Pirzada and my parents spoke the same language, laughed at the same jokes, looked more or less the same. they ate pickled mangoes with their meals, ate rice every night for supper with their hands. Like my parents, Mr. Pizada took off his shoes before entering a room, chewed fennel seeds after meals as a digestive, drank no alcohol, for desert dipped austere biscuits into successive cups of tea. Nevertheless my father insisted that I understand the difference," (Lahiri 25). This passage uses the point of view of a child to display how silly and superficial decisions made my adults can be. Lilia when being explained partition by her father can not grasp how people who are so similar can have so much conflict over the differences they have created. Because Lilia can not understand the differences and instead can only see similarities it forces the reader to question the validity of the differences her father is describing.When her father explains how and why the country was divided he uses very simple analogies for a complex and painful thing and this is representative of how people attempted to solve the issue of making peace between to cultures by simply diving them up. This passage contributes to Lilias journey of expanding her mind to understand a different culture which in the end she discovers is not so different at all.

outside reading part 1

"Shoba looked at him now, her face contorted with sorrow. He had cheated on a college exam, ripped a picture of a woman out of a magazine. He has returned a sweater and got drunk in the middle of the day instead. These were the things he had told her. He had held his son, who had known life only within her, against his chest in a darkened room in an unknown wing of a hospital. He had held him until a nurse knocked and took him away, and he promised himself that day that he would never tell Shoba, because he still loved her then, and it was the one thing in her life that she had wanted to be a surprise." This passage is the tragic rush of feelings and realizations that Shuckumar goes through after his wife Shoba tells him she is leaving him. The passage describes all of the secrets he has shared with her when the power was off leading up to the most painful secret of holding his dead baby. The significance of Shuckumar holding his son in a darkened room is that it makes the reader think back to the other secrets that Shoba and Shuckumar have shared with each other while the lights had been turned off. Darkness is also a symbol of pain and creates an image of emptiness which they had gone through with the loss of a child and now the loss of love for one another.