Tinkling Anklets
In the story "When Anklets Tinkle" the sound produced by the title object is forwarded as proof of the existence of ghosts. The alleged presence of ghosts is merely a sales ruse, but eventually the truth is discovered: the anklets are worn by loose girls visiting a tenant in the night. This causes one of the characters to transform the titular jewelry into a symbol of the sexual double standard which grants leniency to male desires which it does offer equitably to female desires.
Books
The title story is narrated in the first-person by an inexperienced young girl obsessed with books, especially fiction and especially novels of romance. Such is her love of reading that at one point the language explicitly turns to symbolism that compares her obsessive desire for books to a drug. The drug is really not the books themselves, actually, but the knowledge—often of a forbidden nature—which can be gleaned by reading them.
Rape
The young girl with the overwhelming fondness for reading has an older sister. "Incantations" is really about the marriage of the sister to Nikhil and how that marriage is a living hell defined by rapes at the hand of her husband's brother. The link between the marriage to the Nikhil and submission to the brother as being inextricable is impossible to miss and symbolically situates marriage for Indian woman as being equitable to the offense.
Siddharth
The story "Bahu" is narrated by a wife who winds up rebelling fully against the stifling rigidity of Indian culture which places undo expectations upon the wife by the family of the husband. Siddharth is her husband who shows neither the will nor the ability to stand up for his wife against the relentless pressure of his family. In this way he becomes a symbol of the weakness of the individual man within the larger patriarchal structure of Indian culture.
Home
In nearly every story in the collection, home is situated symbolically not as a place of warmth to return to as a welcome bosom, but as a place from which to escape. Home represents the place where the wife in "Bahu" feels like an outsider amongst her in-laws. Home is the place where the older sister in "Incantations" is violated on two different levels by two different "husbands." Home is site where double standards are routinely accepted by being ignored. Home for many of the women populating these stories is little more than a symbolic prison.
