Summary
Meena sits on the front step of her family home, eating all that remains of her stolen candy, even when she begins to feel nauseous. She imagines choking on one of the sweets—thinking it good payback for how her parents have shamed her—and is reminded of her seventh birthday, when she almost choked to death.
Her parents had promised Meena a party for her birthday, but had to cancel their plans when Meena’s mother, Mrs. Kumar, fell ill. Meena was secretly happy, because she didn’t have many friends, and disliked family gatherings. Instead, Meena’s parents took her to see a movie in Birmingham, and afterwards treated Meena to a rum baba cake at a restaurant. Meena ridiculed her mother, saying, “I bet you couldn’t make this at home,” greatly angering Meena’s father. He shouted at Meena. Apologizing for his outburst, Mr. Kumar bought Meena a sausage to eat on the car ride home. The sausage got lodged in Meena’s throat and she silently choked—unable to signal to her parents—until a bump in the road dislodged the sausage. Meena spat it out. Meena, surprisingly, “felt thrilled,” considering this the “the most exciting thing that had ever happened” to her. Not knowing what had happened, Mrs. Kumar scolded Meena for spilling all over herself.
After this memory, Meena reflects on her mother’s emotions. Although rare, Mrs. Kumar’s anger can reach impressive heights, especially when Meena tells a lie. However, Mrs. Kumar only ever expresses her anger privately: in public she’s cheerful and agreeable, smiling even when her English neighbors reveal their prejudices. Meena observes the clear divide between her family’s relationship with her English neighbors and her South Asian neighbors: the English never make it past their front stoop, while the South Asian neighbors are treated as family. In fact, Meena and her family call every Asian adult “Auntie” and “Uncle,” despite none of them being related. These “Aunties” all play a role in raising Meena, teaching and scolding her as they would their own families.
Meena remembers a photograph taken of her father the day he left Delhi, leaving behind Mrs. Kumar until he had money sufficient to pay for her emigration. Meena describes the romantic vision she once held of her parents’ courtship, formed through the fragments of stories overheard when eavesdropping on the adults. Meena pictured her parents chasing one another through the streets of India. Her mother later dismissed this as fantasy: Mr. and Mrs. Kumar were introduced by a family member, and the two courted through “proper channels.”
Meena describes the “gentle malice” of her mother and Aunties. Meena remembers once complaining to her mother (in front of her Aunties) about the ugliness of their garden, and how she preferred the gardens of their English neighbors. Mrs. Kumar and the Aunties responded by ridiculing the frivolity of the English: “They have to mark out their territory," they say.
Feeling sick from her candy, Meena looks through the front door to see her parents in the middle of an argument. She thinks about her mother’s upbringing in a small Punjabi village, and her mother’s picturesque childhood memories of mangos and goats and cobras and peacocks. Meena has grown to feel jealous of her mother’s past: it’s a life Meena will never be able to live. Meena recounts her favorite of her mother’s stories: when Mrs. Kumar moved to Delhi, she witnessed a rickshaw driver stabbing a man. Meena likes this story, not because of the violence, but because it blends the “epic with the banal,” and shows that “terrible things could happen, even to ordinary people like me.”
The chapter ends with Meena asking: “When would anything dangerous and cruel ever happen to me?”
Analysis
In Chapter 2, the reader is introduced to Meena’s family life and cultural ancestry. A distinction emerges between Meena’s public and private lives, with her Indian heritage primarily mapping onto her private life: Meena describes this distinction, saying “Whenever we went ‘out,’ out meaning wherever English people were, as opposed to Indian friends’ houses which in any case was always ‘in’…” (p. 25). Sometimes the Kumars try to challenge this delineation between public and private, English and Indian. For example, Mrs. Kumar deliberately wears traditional Indian clothing in public, considering it “part of the English people’s education” (p. 25). Even so, it remains easier for the Kumars to assimilate in public (i.e. to keep their Indian heritage private): Meena says Mrs. Kumar “would get fewer stares and whispers” if she wore British trouser suits (p. 25). The distinction between public and private affects not only the Kumars’ cultural self-presentation, but also their display of emotion. Consider Meena’s description of her mother’s anger, and how Mrs. Kumar hides negative emotions in public: “Of course, no one else outside our small family ever saw this dark side of mama; to everyone else, she was the epitome of grace” (p. 28).
Another, slightly different, tension between public and private can be seen in Meena’s description of the “communal parenting” of Tollington’s Indian community. Meena’s family treats every South Asian individual in Tollington like a relative—calling them Auntie and Uncle—even if they aren’t related by blood. Here, the lines between public and private blur, with non-relatives becoming relatives, neighbors becoming cousins. In describing her Aunties, Meena says: “The Aunties all had individual names and distinct personalities, but fell into the role of Greek chorus to mama’s epic solo role in my life” (p. 29). The Aunties’ private identities are lost in the face of a larger group identity, a “greek chorus”—again, here is a blurring of the public and private. When Meena describes her interactions with the Aunties, she emphasizes the Aunties’ group identity by writing the Aunties as one speaker, with one voice: they say, “Why behave like a boy all the time?… Stand with your legs together… Are those nose drippings on your sleeve?… Why don’t you grow your hair” (p. 30).
Writing the Aunties’ dialogue as though they were a single speaker not only emphasizes their like-mindedness and “shared history” (p. 31); it is also an example of Meena’s tendency to portray facts and history imprecisely. For example, elsewhere in Chapter Two, Meena recounts her mother’s disbelief after Meena has been caught telling lies: “You are only four/seven/nine… Isn’t your life exciting enough with all these stories?” (p. 28), says Mrs. Kumar. Another example is when Meena describes how her neighbor Sandy had complimented Mrs. Kumar, after Mrs. Kumar “had lent [Sandy] butter or given her a lift down to the shops or taken her son, Mikey, in for some pop” (p. 28-29). On one hand, these examples communicate a sense of repetition and routine in Meena’s daily life, with similar interactions occurring, again and again, at different stages in Meena’s life (“four/seven/nine”). Alternatively, these examples show that Meena allows multiple realities to exist at once—an echo of Meena’s belief in an “alternative history” (p. 9), described in the novel’s epigraph. Meena seems less interested in capturing the exact truth of a story, and more interested in communicating the essence of a story.
Sometimes Meena cares about neither truth nor essence, preferring instead a dramatic story. Take, for example, Meena’s understanding of her parents’ marriage. Meena forms a basic understanding of her parent’s marriage from inaccurate sources, eavesdropping on fragments of her Aunties’ conversations: “odd words from which I concocted a whole scenario—‘…Saw her riding her bike round college… At first sight it was… Her parents, of course” (p. 32). Then, Meena dramatizes the story, imagining her parents romantically “chasing each other around old Indian streets” (p. 32). However, as Mrs. Kumar soon reveals, the reality of their marriage was quite different from the story Meena imagines: “We were introduced by an uncle. It was all done through the proper channels” (p. 32). Meena is an inventive child and, when possible, she prefers to bend the truth if it means increasing the drama in her own life—for example, telling a group of kids that she’s a “Punjabi princess” (p. 28).
But Meena’s desire for drama also hints at her naivete. Chapter 2 ends with Meena recounting her favorite of her mother’s memories: when Mrs. Kumar witnessed a stabbing in Delhi. Meena responds to this story by asking, “when would anything dangerous and cruel ever happen to me?” (p. 37). Her question ironically foreshadows the conflict to come in later chapters. At this stage in the novel, Meena would rather face danger than boredom, but by the novel’s end, the reader will see how Meena’s priorities change, by virtue of experiencing her own fair share of tragedies.
