Packed suitcase
In ‘Mayadevi’s London Yatra’, Mayadevi’s suitcase for her stay in London is packed a week ahead of her travel, and is kept at the top of the staircase just outside her room. As her relatives come to visit to bid her wishes for the journey, everyone keeps tripping down it and then pronouncing how light the suitcase is. The suitcase is a symbol of Mayadevi’s determination to go to a foreign country without anyone’s help. It is always a symbol of her tyranny and vanity that she likes to remind everyone that she is the head of the house and will keep her belongings wherever she likes. She has packed only a handful of clothes which she means to throw after her visit as she believes that touching a foreign thing would defile her.
Kite
R.C.’s father used to take him to the shores of river Yamuna when he was a young boy to fly kites. They would get dirty wading in the muddy water. Soon after his father died, leaving his family under a lot of debt with two young daughters to be married, and a crowd of relatives imposing on their hospitality for too long. He had to mature very fast in order to get out of his miseries and in doing so forgot his childhood’s free spirit and developed a very strict regime for him and his family to ensure maximum productivity. When his family finally goes on a holiday, and he watches them having fun for the first time, so much so that they forgot him, he realizes how much he had been shackling their spirits and imposing himself on them. The kite is a symbol of his lost childhood.
Anima’s chiffon sari
Anima develops a contempt for British while staying in Simla, where she gets influenced by the Indian Freedom Struggle. She starts wearing cotton handloom saris as a symbol of her support as she can’t freely join the movement due to her husband’s employment with the British. But her husband insists on her attending a party with other British people, which she had to attend wearing a sari made of chiffon which was a foreign fabric. She wears the sari but after multiple humiliating events returns to her house and sets the sari to fire. It is a symbol of her hatred for everything British.
Journey
In all the stories, there is a common motif of journey. All the characters start their journey at a comfortable place in their lives and end up in a situation which is least desirable. The uncomfortable situation forces them to change their outlook and creates the turn in their character arc. The journey is thus, a symbol of the changes going in the characters.
White sari
All the widows in the stories wear white saris and live a life of recluse as a symbol to the loss of their husband. In Indian culture, a widow is expected to wear a white sari not just as a symbol to their mourning but also to represent the fact they have no one for whom to dress up. A widow is not expected to dress up, not even for herself. In ‘Aunts and Their Ailments, Meera’s aunts chastise the fourth woman for wanting to eat chicken as she they could judge that she was a widow from her white sari. In a way, a white sari is a symbol of the lack of life a widow is supposed to have.
