"It's the tyranny of American dream that scares me. First, you don't exist. Then you're invisible. Then you're funny. Then you're disgusting. Insult, my American friends will tell me, is a kind of acceptance. No instant dignity here. A play like this, back home, would cause riots. Communal, racist and antisocial. The actors wouldn't make it off the stage. This play, and all these awful feelings, would be safely locked up."
This is a quote from the beginning of "A Wife's Story". The wife is in the theater with one of her friends watching a play that contains insulting remarks about the women from her home country India. She has been living in New York for quite some time and adapting to the western culture. Naturally, the remarks cause not so pleasant feelings for her but, she realizes the reality of living as a foreigner there and the course of adaption to the culture. She realizes the difference of her home country and America. Back home, the freedom of speech isn't a prevalent thing and sensitive topics and insults that she is witnessing now would immediately be shut down. Here, on the other hand, she has to endure it and face "these awful feelings".
"Even as an adolescent he's batted down all passion; while other students had slipped love notes into expectant palms, he'd studies, he'd passed exams. Dutifulness had turned him into a pariah."
This is a quote about the life of Mr. Venkatesan from the story "Buried Lives". Mr. Venkatesan, an English poetry teacher in a small school in his home town, feels as though he buried his own life in order to be there for his young sisters and the rest of his family. He took his duty way to seriously letting the beauty of life and love pass him by. Motivated by his younger sister's passion to be with the boy she fell in love with, Mr. Venkatesan decides to risk it all and go after his dreams.
"I am a freak. No one who has ever known me would think of me reacting this way. This terrible calm will not go away."
Shaila lost her entire family in a plane crash in which a lot of Indian families living in Canada lost their loved ones. Unlike others, Shaila is overcome with numbness that makes her unable to even cry or mourn. Miss Templeton who works with the families of the victims sees her lack of emotion as a good thing and wants her to speak up to be a model for other affected by the crash. Shaila does not see herself as a model for grief management; on the contrary, her calmness makes her feel like a freak. Her calmness isn't a sign of acceptance; it is a sign of a lost soul.
