A Raindrop Falling
Tears welled up in Lela 's eyes as she turned her back toward her husband while they lay in bed. She could barely breathe. She fought hard not to cry. Her heart felt so heavy as though it would burst at any moment. It was not only the words Ravi used, but also the way he had spoken to her; and the tone he used. She lied motionless, trying to scan her thoughts for any time that Ravi might have ever spoken to her in such demeanor. No, not really. He had been acting it little out of his ordinary lately. Lately, he seemed short-tempered and even arrogant at times. Like the last time she asked him he wanted to have a cup of tea. It was customary that whenever one was making a preferential choice of drink that the other would naturally offer the same. "I 'm making tea, would you like a cup?" She recalled how he snapped at her. "No, did I ask for a damn cup of tea?"
Ever since talk of Vishal coming to stay, Ravi 's behavior has been altogether different. Lela thought that she could really trace it back to around the first time Vishal 's father, Lito Khair, came from Bangladesh to visit them. Lito Khair was a successful and powerful businessman in his country. That was about a month ago. Since then, Ravi began acting out of the ordinary. What is ordinary anyway, Lela wondered?
Lito had traveled to New Jersey with his youngest son to visit…and to ask the boy 's Ravi Bhai (a formal and respectful Bengali meaning for uncle) for a family request. He came to bestow guardianship of the recently-turned 16 year old Vishal upon his Ravi Bhai, as if he were granting him an honor. Wasn 't it more of an imposition than an honor, Lela thought? Lela and Ravi had only been married for three years. They were still in the first ...
... middle of paper ...
...r when Lela was at work.
Ravi quickly fired back at her, "That sounds like rubbish to me. I don 't really care for your philosophies. He is my uncle 's son. I 've already told Lito that we will accept guardianship for Vishal whether you agree with that or not, and whether you like it or not!" What caught Lela off guard was the startling response that was so unlike Ravi. The past four years they had been together, Ravi was always respectful and considerate in regarding her input. Lela felt like she had just been sucker-punched. It was the cold disregard and disrespect that was hurtful. His words were cutting.
"Goodnight, Ravi," she said softly as she positioned herself for sleep. Quietly weeping, Lela closed her eyes and pondered a quote from the Maharish Mahesh Yogi: "Just think of any negativity that comes at you as a raindrop falling into the ocean of your bliss."
Nilanjana Sudeshna Lahiri, an Indian by descent, was born in London in August 1967, to a Bengali immigrant Indian parents. “Jhumpa” is the nickname easier for the teachers remember his name. The Lahiri family moved from England to Rhode Island when Jhumpa was two years old. Her father was a librarian at Rhode Island University and her mother was a school teacher. At age of seven, Lahiri started to embrace writing about what she saw and felt. While growing up, Lahiri lived two lives: An Indian at home and An American outside of the home. Despite of living most of their life in the western world, Lahiri’s parents called “Calcutta” their home unlike Lahiri who thought Rhode Island as her hometown. Lahiri always felt her family had a different li...
In Drea Knufken’s essay entitled “Help, We’re Drowning!: Please Pay Attention to Our Disaster,” the horrific Colorado flood is experienced and the reactions of worldly citizens are examined (510-512). The author’s tone for this formal essay seems to be quite reflective, shifting to a tone of frustration and even disappointment. Knufken has a reflective tone especially during the first few paragraphs of the essay. According to Drea Knufken, a freelance writer, ghostwriter and editor, “when many of my out-of-town friends, family and colleagues reacted to the flood with a torrent of indifference, I realized something. As a society, we’ve acquired an immunity to crisis. We scan through headlines without understanding how stories impact people,
In the poem By Watching, Hiram Larew uses signature craft techniques to show the realization that people can regain their conviction in God by conquering the doubt in their mind’s eye.
The death camp was a terrible place where people where killed. Hitler is who created the death camp for Jews. The death camp was used for extermination on Jews. This occurred on 1939 – 1945. The death camps were in the country of Europe. Hitler did all this because he didn’t like Jews and the religions. The book Night is a autobiography written by Elie Wiesel. The poem called First they came for the communist written by Martin Neimoller is a autobiography.
...d and left with little cultural influence of their ancestors (Hirschman 613). When the children inadvertently but naturally adapting to the world around them, such as Lahiri in Rhode Island, the two-part identity begins to raise an issue when she increasingly fits in more both the Indian and American culture. She explains she “felt an intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new”, in which she evidently doing well at both tasks (Lahiri 612). The expectations for her to maintain her Indian customs while also succeeding in learning in the American culture put her in a position in which she is “sandwiched between the country of [her] parents and the country of [her] birth”, stuck in limbo, unable to pick one identity over the other.
J. Eng. Lit. Cult. becomes merely “Street” as (does) Lingayat Street, Mudliyar Street and half a dozen others in Toturpuram” (5) in a gesture of egalitarianism whose effects are literally, as well as symbolically, disorientating. The sense of displacement is compounded by changes that have occurred on the street itself over the last few decades- “instead of the tender smell of fresh jasmine.... in scented sticks and virtue, instead of the chanting of sacred hymns the street had become thud with the haggling of cloth merchants and vegetable vendors, (and) the strident strains of the latest film music from video parlours” (5-6). The incursion of these loud and nestling registers of cultural change into the sanctuary of Sripathi‟s study mirrors more significant assaults on his sense of traditions including most worryingly, the refusal of his children to lead the lives he has imagined for him: his daughter Maya has broken off her engagement to an Indian man to marry a Canadian with whom she now lives in Vancouver, and his son Arun has rejected a tradition job in favour of a career as an environmental activist. Sripathi responds to the affronts by ceasing to communicate, literally, in the case of Maya, with whom he has stopped corresponding, and figuratively, with Arun and the rest of his family, through a retreat into an increasingly self enclosed world. The narrative traces the gradual expansion of his consciousness, a process initiated by Maya‟s death in a car
In the world of teenagers everything seems to come and pass by so quickly. For instance the beginning of senior year. In Spite of being happy and excited were also generally nervous and anxious to see what our future holds. As senior year comes to an end, It then becomes as temporary as the summer sun but also the boundary of our life before we enter adulthood. Even then our future is still undefined.
‘The Falling Soldier’ is one of many poems by Duffy which deals with the subject of human mortality. Duffy expresses what could have been over a harsh reality; this is characteristic of her as also seen in ‘Last Post’ and ‘Passing Bells’ which both seem to be largely influenced by poet peer Wilfred Owen’s personal experiences of war. In the ‘The Falling Soldier’ Duffy paradoxically captures the essence of Robert Capa’s famous photograph of a man falling after being shot during the Spanish Civil War (1936). She employs the form of an impersonal narrative voice, using second person to question the possibilities, to explore the tragic and cyclical nature of war. The futile reality of war contrasts to her central theme in ‘The Bees’ anthology of bees symbolising the grace left in humanity.
It was not expected for Salim to let Latika out because he never wanted her to interact
At home in Nepal, Ama was Lakshmi’s role model, and even though she wasn’t able to provide Lakshmi with the luxuries that their neighbors had, “her slender back, which bears all troubles- and all hope- was still the most beautiful” to Lakshmi (McCormick 7). Even though she was not dynamic, I fell in love with how she inspired Lakshmi through her trials and her representation of the strong, hard-working women in Nepali culture. There were also a few other static characters, most of which I did not like at all. Her stepfather, Auntie Bimla, Uncle Husband and Auntie Mumtaz were the figures of authority that Lakshmi associated with her tortured existence in India, but in the midst of the hardship, there were characters that provided just as much light to Lakshmi’s life as there was darkness. For example, the young tea vendor lifted Lakshmi’s spirits with his polite gestures of free tea when she couldn’t afford it, as well as keeping her on the right path when Lakshmi was tempted to buy alcohol to soothe her misery (McCormick 224). Along with Lakshmi’s friend Shahanna, he too was taken away and I was convinced of Lakshmi’s impending doom even more than she herself probably was. All seemed dark until the second American came with his “digital magic”. By using his camera to show her pictures of rescued girls, this brave man was able to convince Lakshmi
Li-Young Lee’s poem, A Story, explores a complex relationship between a father and his five year old son. Although the poem’s purpose is to elaborate on the complexity of the relationship and the father’s fear of disappointing his son, the main conflict that the father is faced with is not uncommon among parents. Lee is able to successfully portray the father’s paranoia and son’s innocence through the use of alternating point of view, stanza structure, and Biblical symbolism.
In the Indian culture, marriage is different from another culture's point of view. In the film Ravi decides to break a two year relationship from an American woman before he attended his family trip to India, which coincides with
Did I Miss Anything? is a poem written by a Canadian poet and academic Tom Wayman. Being a teacher, he creates a piece of literature, where he considers the answers given by a teacher on one and the same question asked by a student, who frequently misses a class. So, there are two speakers present in it – a teacher and a student. The first one is fully presented in the poem and the second one exists only in the title of it. The speakers immediately place the reader in the appropriate setting, where the actions of a poem take place – a regular classroom. Moreover, the speakers unfolds the main theme of the poem – a hardship of being a teacher, the importance of education and laziness, indifference and careless attitudes of a student towards studying.
In this book writer has also used the perspective of psychoanalysis to examine lahiri’s fiction and it has also used different ideas of Sigmund fraud, Andre Greene and Julia kristeva. The book comprises of four chapters and the first chapter of the book Diaspora Hereafters pertains the gap between first generation and second generation. First generation In Unaccustomed Earth is Indian American Immigrants with their American born children living in a community of diaspora, maintaining their American identity and also resisting their parent’s love for past life, migration experience and their memories of their mother country (1). Jhumpa lahiri’s interviews always gives an indication that after her parent’s death she felt she had lost her identity (2). The second chapter is Revenant Melancholy which deals with Kaushik crime and exile. The third chapter is Dead Mothers and Haunting which describes intentions of Hema. The fourth chapter is Future of Diaspora which explains the loss of immigrants’ identity and loss of mother land. Still this books lacks in describing immigrants predicaments due to shift in their identities. Though researcher has defined the problems of immigrants but lahiri’s play of continuous shifting identities is not even touched by
Growing up during a time of violent political upheaval in Sri Lanka, Arjie travels an especially bittersweet journey into maturation in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy. The adults in Arjie’s extended family mostly belong to an older, more conservative generation that attempts to fit Arjie into society’s norms. The adults that Arjie meets in the community through his family are individuals who prompt him to see past the confines of his childhood, and it is Arjie’s peers who give him the extra push to understanding himself. With guidance from his extended family, his adult friends, and his peers, Arjie is able to discover his identity through understanding the impact of race and gender on his life.