The Parents’ Play Room
The children were often intrigued by the room in which their parents entertained friends and played bridge with them. The children weren’t allowed inside while a game was in process, so they held the room and the game in awe when they couldn’t understand the names and numbers their parents spoke of. This was the only time their parents were ever in their house, as Mr. and Mrs. Das were very social and often left the children in the care of servants and went to various clubs; thus, the children began to dislike the room. They wanted to have their parents to themselves and plotted a number of ways to get rid of the bridge table. The play room, thus, became a thing to dread and an image of estrangement.
Tara and Bim’s houses
Bim and Tara live in Old Delhi and New York respectively, and their houses reflect their respective personalities. While Tara keeps moving on continuously given the nature of his husband’s job, Bim is firmly rooted in her childhood house. Tara likes to keep her house impeccably clean and adorned, while Bim is hardly concerned with getting the house dusted. Their houses mirror the polar opposites of their personalities. While Tara likes to look presentable to the world and seeks approval, Bim likes to be comfortable to the point of being unkempt—and is completely unabashed about it.
Bim’s Garden
Tara’s first reaction upon seeing her childhood garden is awareness of the lack of maintenance, along with nostalgia. She looks at the dirt accumulated on the trees and wonders why Bim doesn’t bother to have the garden watered. She has an attachment to a pathway with rose bushes where her mother used to stroll during Tara’s childhood, and she is pained to see the weakness of the flowers after so long. For her, the garden holds a special place, for it was where she could get lost and away from her overbearing siblings and unconcerned parents.
Baba
Baba is described thusly: "There was something insubstantial about his long slimness in the light white clothes, such a total absence of being, of character, of clamouring traits and characteristics" (40). Desai indicates that Baba is not quite there by his insubstantiality and his "absence," but there is also a strong sense of his purity and ethereal nature.
