Curfew

Good ending – interesting image of them running to get to the church / hostel before curfew in that even though we don’t know her religion, it seems as if she’s run to a different culture, as if the pebble had washed downstream and the current had altered it beyond recognition and so all one can do is make their away anew in the same old world. Everyone is running to and from something anyway.

Curfew

She has all the opportunity and freedom and love in the world and yet it doesn’t mean anything to her. She chose her own husband, had a great education, the potential for a career – but nothing comes from it – it’s as if her inability to find satisfaction is what killed her baby, just as in The Lost Ribbon.

Curfew

Though not rape, it is pretty much sexual assault when the West African boy kisses her at the club and then says he actually wants to meet her friend. I don’t understand people like this.

The story does do a good job of making her seem as if she doesn’t exist, as if there is no home at all 4 her, but it’s not exactly riveting reading, it’s like reading the memoir of a fog – beautiful, but lacking substance

Curfew

“He had been the only person to survive, and had not spoken a word since” so no mention of Kavitha? I wonder what happened there?

Curfew

Gotta admit, this story is boring so far. I don’t know these characters so when they sit around sipping wine and being sad I have no reason to care why.

Curfew

Who is Minoo?

No shortage of food or money in this story. We began with poverty and hunger, but now the main characters have enough money to travel to Italy and eat very nice food. Have they “arrived”? What does “arriving” even mean since that implies anything else is not arriving, is not home, is not a place but rather a space between places.

Curfew

Is the pebble she dropped in the river the same as from the previous story, only this story is taking place years later and he is the boy all grown up with a family of his own? Both stories begin on a journey – this time it’s a raft. Fitting that the final image of landscape in the book is of a river since rivers have often come up in the book as dividing and cutting and as time flowing past.

Kavitha and Mustafa

The boy was not travelling with his father – then I wonder who he is. He’s got a hell of an arm to have hit the truck as it passed (I wonder if that’s one of the truck drivers who pulls into the town in The Road To Mirpur Khas?

And so she seems to have started a new life with her as the boy’s mother – she had miscarried so this is a new start for her.

Kavitha and Mustafa

So that was the plan to just grab the boy and run out. Makes since they are all probably going to be killed, but I have to admit that it seems like a pretty weak plan – though what else are they going to do?

Kavitha and Mustafa

The boy’s childish belongings suddenly take on more meaning than her own jewelry. She somehow now has a greater responsibility for these objects and she seems to share a deeper comradeship with the boy than with her husband.

Kavitha and Mustafa

Is she thinking of overpowering the bandits? What difference does it make if there is one guard or three “outside the door”? And is this what the boy meant when he pointed to his ear – did he mean for her to listen or did he mean something else? She sees him smile so she thinks they are on the same page, but are they?

Kavitha and Mustafa

Interesting how she only think that her shoes are going to get ruined after Ahmed attacks the bother with his machete (again, sort of like a movie – No Country For Old Men when Chigur keeps his feet from stepping in the blood and wipes them after killing the wife). She’s very distant – which makes sense considering the situation she’s in – better to be distant than panicked I suppose.

Kavitha and Mustafa

She watches the young couple and how happy they appear to her, but do we really know? Makes me think of Hitchcock’s Rear Window where we can watch and watch but do we really know anyone, either from across the street, across the map, or across the bed? In fact she seems to like watching people – the people on the train and well as her neighbors.

Kavitha and Mustafa

“in the time since they had married, it seemed to her that she’d lost most of her preferences”. Of course since the marriages are arranged it’s not unusual for neither person to be happy, but it does speak to the broader definition of a union in which when you’re forced to be with someone (willingly or not) you have to shape yourself to fit in that space, like being in a crowded bogie.

Kavitha and Mustafa

Makes me wonder how I’d fare in such a situation – I don’t know if I’d be any less fearful than the middle-aged man who panics which then winds up causing him to be in even more danger.

Kavitha and Mustafa

I’m surprised there aren’t more scenes in this book with trains considering how important trains are to India. Everyone also has a plan for dealing with looters who stop the trains and rob everyone – obviously there is no police and since they are in the middle of nowhere then there isn’t going to be any protection.

The Road to Mirpur Khas

Did she buy some poison to kill him so that she’d be rid of him? It sure seems like he’s dying at the end of the story and besides, he is useless to her.

The Road to Mirpur Khas

Is she pretending her husband has left her (or is he actually dead)? If she’s pretending then that would make sense since she’s selling herself every night to the truck drivers and it would be easier to pass herself off as an “unrestored woman”. Perhaps that was what the camp she was offered was all about?

The Road to Mirpur Khas

He really is an idiot just giving the truck driver his money in exchange for the rotten potatoes. Still, I wonder how long I’d last in a place like that. Granted, I’d be more cautious but I wouldn’t last much longer.

It’s too bad Arya can’t run their little operation; she at least has sense but in a Muslim world she’s stuck with an idiot who’s ruining their lives out of pure ignorance.

The Road to Mipur Khas

She is, for the most part, devoid of any emotion. No wonder since she’s married to someone with no sense which means she has to have sense for both of them and in a country at civil war then a young woman is going to be more than aware of what might happen to her, regardless if she’s married.

Were the ducks real? Did he image that? Were they so close to water without realizing it?

The Road to Mirpur Khas

He’s very poetic, “It was almost as if the water, as soon as it hit my body, was turning into birds, their wings warm and quivering and soundless”. No wonder he’s so poor and otherwise dreaming of where he can pick mangoes whose skin is unlike his own. Only dreamers think this way, not people who are practical. The most terrible curse is to be a dreamer and to be poor.

The Road to Mirpur Khas

Did his wife sell herself for money?

The Lost Ribbon

Heartbreaking line, “it is easier to look at death than at pain”.

This was very much like the story in The Brother’s Karamazov where the mother had killed her children because of how terrible her life was and that the point was that we can’t judge another person because we don’t know what they are going through, even if they’ve done something terrible.

The Lost Ribbon

It’s odd how someone so old as the midwife feels that life in this world is too much. She’s lived all these years, given birth to seven and helped with others, yet she is totally unsentimental and just sees life as a burden. There is no joy here.

The Lost Ribbon

The scene where she picks the food out of his beard is one of those odd memories we all retain for no reason and can’t seem to forget. It might not even mean anything other than it’s a memory that makes up who were are which itself is odd because that means we’re made up of a lot of things that don’t make sense to us, thus does life make any sense?

The Lost Ribbon

The act of her counting the colored lentils is not too different than people playing solitaire to pass the time – seems all she’s ever been able to do is pass the time, the fact she’s lived to be over 60 is almost a shame. “All that trouble for nothing” (p 112)

She then compares the colors of the lentils to her lost ribbon, stolen just as she will be stolen when she a little older.

The Lost Ribbon

I wonder if the ribbon is not only referring to her daughter’s yellow (not white) ribbon, but also refers to a part of herself, such as how she was raped at 14, and also of the way memory works where we don’t remember everything we’re more like “pebbles skipping across a pond” and what is lost is the time spent in the air before impact. She’s also describing involuntary memory a’la Proust.

The Lost Ribbon

We start off with a murder and she compares this act with the summer heat and failure of the monsoons. It’s an interesting choice to introduce a character who is killing their child via strangulation and then justifies it by saying “If you [I] don’t kill her, he will”. Obviously something bad is also going on – I wonder if this will follow in Dostoevsky’s story of the mother murderer in Brothers?

Blindfold

I mean the ending is almost the exact same as the Shawshank Redemption. But since I would assume almost everyone is familiar with this story, perhaps the Rao wanted to play on the idea but only tell it from the warden’s point of view (Bandra) and how she, despite her cruelty, was not able to get Zubaida to fear her – she should have known when the girl challenged the snake without fear.

Blindfold

Zubaida (the girl) keeps repeating her name – perhaps so she doesn’t forget or out of defiance, as if speaking a name brings it into existence.

Bandra’s cruelty is not just to keep the girls in line, she’s actually full of hate and jealousy and malice – she hates these girls. And that’s odd because to hate them means she’s not indifferent to them (which would be crueler), she has an attachment to them.

Blindfold

The violence is so matter-of-fact, so cruelly common – she just grabs the girl, tackles her, binds her up, and nobody does anything about it – not even the women. And then they way she’ll deal with the girl’s father, by sending her thugs to beat him as a lesson and not even giving him the agreed upon money. Her cruelty is banal – she doesn’t even let the girls have windows – no hope. No wonder she’s tired.

Blindfold

Quite a leap to go from being married to a man 27 years old than you who dies and leaves gambling debts to deciding to just sell what’s left and start a brothel. Nobody just ups and does that so something else was going on that made her even consider it let alone actually carry it out. And that she thinks the girls actually like her means Bandra is really good at lying to herself.

Blindfold

Sad to think this is still going on in the world where children as young as 4-5 years old are “bought” from their “impoverished” parents and then sold into sexual slavery. Interesting how Bandra is on the outlook for the girls’ mother or sisters and that she transacts with the father, not the women. She knows what she’s doing would probably get her killed if the women caught her.

Unleashed

Of course she shares a moment with Jenkins, a man who is most likely not interested in women. Such is her lot in life to not find the right “outstretched hand” p73).

Unleashed

I was reminded of Marie de France’s lais, Laüstic (the one where the jealous husband kills the nightingale to keep his wife from standing at her window to see her lover and throws the bloody corpse at her chest where it leaves a bloody mark). The killing of the bird in this story is like the death of any love she might find, as if Cupid has been replaced by a sniper who only kills.

Unleashed

“It got to where I didn’t know if I was trying to prove them wrong, or to prove them right” = slut / un-slut – stuck somewhere in between? Strange to be defined by language like that, especially in a language that is not native to your country. It’s like being stabbed with language, like a stem piercing the heart, or like the image of Meena’s abortion, or having Sean force himself in their mouths when they were kids

Unleashed

So many poems have been written about flowers being given to lovers with which to poetically ‘pierce’ their heart like cupid, yet here it’s a flower stem that literally turns out to pierce someone’s heart. So if cupid shoots us in the heart with an arrow to make us fall in love, whoever the god of affairs and divorces is stabs us in the actual organ heart with a flower.

Unleashed

The scene where she jokes with her husband about how to pronounce her name, Anju is like “un-like” an the “un” is telling since she might be a sort of un-person, someone without a centered / grounded identity, as if an un-ness is baked into her un-name and un-identity. Thus ‘Unleashed’ is An-leashed. No wonder she’s a linguist – she’s trying to make sense of her own name.

Unleashed

The scene where she jokes with her husband about how to pronounce her name, Anju is like “un-like” an the “un” is telling since she might be a sort of un-person, someone without a centered / grounded identity, as if an un-ness is baked into her un-name and un-identity. Thus ‘Unchained’ is An-chained. No wonder she’s a linguist – she’s trying to make sense of her own name.

Unleashed

That is a disturbing image of the boy, Sean, raping the girls even though they are all still in elementary school. And then he tells everyone what he made them do to him and so now they have a reputation as being other lesser / dirty. Interesting how she describes the word “slut” as being “so perfect in its way,” “It was a wave pounding a shore.” She then describes the tearing of virginity.

Unleashed

Though they are technically free in America, “Here , all the dirt and noise and crowds of India were gone, and we could lie on a wide expanse of grass undisturbed, the sky spinning around us blue and empty and feverish with light”, but they really aren’t free on this land – they are a people without a home no matter where they go.

Unleashed

“You still can’t have the gun” is pretty mush what the British who controlled India were saying to the Indians the whole time – those who have the guns have the power and those who didn’t have the power were no different than the American “Indians” who were oppressed as well.

Unleashed

It’s the 1980’s which we learn from Jenkins who seems to have become a hotel doorman in New York and, obviously, hasn’t forgotten a thing about India. I wonder if this is a story on which the central character has forgotten and lost touch with being Indian, which would contrast with Jenkins who is white, unlike Anju, but hasn’t forgotten anything at all. Thus who is “more truly Indian”?

Unleashed

Right away there is a decadence to the lives in this story where someone can get drunk and pass out in an elevator and have a British servant help you back to your room. No wonder this story takes place in New York, not India – none of the lives we’ve seen thus far would have been able to experience not only the lifestyle, but even having a dream that they are late for school seems beyond their experience

The Imperial Police

Interesting scene between Abheet’s wife and Jenkins, especially how he didn’t know Abheet’s inability to salute had been because of an injury which he never said anything to Abheet about. In a way Jenkins treated him as a perfect equal and looked past his differences – perhaps the way Jenkins wished others had looked past his. Wonderful story.

The Imperial Police

Wow, amazing scene of Jenkins gathering in Abheet’s hair and weeping at the loss of this man.

The Imperial Police

Beautiful moment when Abheet holds Jenkins’ wrist to steady him from shaking and how in all this time Jenkins has just wanted so form of human connection, that he’s been “concealed” for too long.

The Imperial Police

Jenkins is a man without a home either, just as the Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs are without a definite (legal) idea of what their home and land looks like. Everyone is adrift, even the English, at least for someone like Jenkins whose past will prevent him from ever going back to England.

The Imperial Police

It seems as if Rao is suggesting that Jenkins is gay, between his fantasy about Abheet’s hair on the pillow, to what is most likely a sexual scandal with him (as a boy) and the older, impeccable Mr. Templeton. Is he attracted to neatness? Is his resentment towards Abheet sexual? Could the feelings go both ways?

Interesting scene about gas-lighting when he was caught with Mr. Templeton.

The Imperial Police

He’s making an assumption that because Abheet’s salute is (perhaps) insolent, that there could never be order: “How could a country even hope to govern itself with such obvious lack of self-control?” even though Abheet seems to be in complete control of himself and it is Jenkins who is the problem. But he’s in charge, he has the authority so the resentment spins round like the fan he hates.