"Forty-Five a Month"
The story’s very title suggests the central focus of “Forty-Five a Month.” That figure refers to income and the plot mechanism is as simple as an overworked, underpaid father promising his young daughter the one thing she wants most: to go see a movie. The quiet desperation of the father is expressed through hyperbolic metaphor:
“this child was growing up all alone and like a barbarian more or less”
"Like the Sun"
The title of this oft-anthologized story is half a simile that leads naturally to ponder what, exactly, the author is suggesting is comparable to the sun. Fortunately, the reader is not tasked with trying to piece together clues to figure out the missing metaphor. The narrator makes it plain in the opening line:
“Truth, Sekhar reflected, is like the sun.”
"Second Opinion"
Similes are a means of comparison that allows one thing to make a metaphorical association with another. This can also be a valuable tool for delineating character through a recurrence of similar associations. The author takes the opposite approach in “Second Opinion” by revealing the fragmented self-identity of the first-person narrator who in just the opening paragraph uses similes to compare himself to a variety of unlike thing:
“I stole in like a cat”
“Like a hunter stalking in the jungle”
“I was lord of my own universe”
“But all this was only a mask.”
The title character in the story “Iswaran” is the focus of another remarkably series of similes which all lead to the metaphorical conclusion quoted above that his behavior, for all its eccentricity, is merely a persona:
“He was treated as a sort of thick-skinned idiot. But he did not care. He answered their attitude by behaving like a desperado.”
"Gateman's Gift"
The protagonist of “Gateman’s Gift” is musing upon his endowment: retirement with a pension after twenty-five years of faithful service. The gift bestowed is what some would refer as the greatest gift of all: time enough to spare. Or, the narrator frames it with the poetry of metaphor:
“an immense sea of leisure.”
