Conflict In The Half Mother

Bharati Mukherjee’s “The Management of Grief,” and Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” both illustrate female character’s who struggle when they face the tragic loss of their children. In their short stories, Mukherjee and Lahiri both incorporate the journey of grief a mother faces, however both texts offer a vast difference surrounding each woman’s attitudes toward losing children. While Mukherjee’s “The Management of Grief” and Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies” both highlight the overwhelming grief that surrounds the loss of children, Mukherjee’s story allows the interpretation of a protagonist holding onto hope, and finding the strength to accept her tragic loss and move forward. In Lahiri’s story, by contrast, no real acceptance

The death of Amir’s mother launched Amir into the unpleasant feeling of guilt. His mother’s death happened during childbirth; death is an unfortunate risk of childbirth, especially in the past when medical practices were not as advanced. However, Amir sensed Baba blamed him for “[killing] his beloved wife, his beautiful princess” (Hosseini 19). Amir felt ashamed just for being born. This guilt caused Amir to constantly search for forgiveness and acceptance from his father. No matter how hard Amir tried, he always felt he did not live up to his father’s expectations. The guilt derived from his mother’s death was

‘The Mother’ is an allusion to ‘The Soldier’, which glorifies war and the death of soldiers. ‘The Mother’ is the complete opposite, imparting the horrible realities of war, creating a very melancholy and sombre tone.

In the story “Two Kinds”, author Amy Tan, who is a Chinese-American, describes the conflicts in the relationship of a mother and daughter living in California. The protagonist in this story Jing-mei Woo’s mother is born and raised in China, and immigrates to the United States to escape from the Chinese Civil War. For many years she maintained complete Chinese traditional values, and has been abided by it deliberately. This kind of traditional Chinese culture has also affected her daughter profoundly. However, Jing-mei is born and raised in the United States. Despite she has a Chinese mother; she is unfamiliar and uncomfortable with Chinese

Couple executed by their own parents... for daring to fall in love. This case shows that both society and families are our own undoing. Our families have such high expectations and we fear them out of respect. Like two young sweethearts Vidhal and Sonu secret love, led to the barbaric murdered by their own kin. I say that this is heartbreaking to hear that family's that are willing to end their children's lives instead of facing humiliation. But humiliation to what cost. "The girl’s parents decided that the best way out of the situation was to kill their daughter". They were embarrassed because they were of a lower caste, so they decided the only way to rid them of that embarrassment was to kill their daughter. Society has also set up the caste system and it shows that richer or better people are at the top while less people are on the

In this essay I am going to compare the main characteristics of the two most important characters of this book. They were both born in Afghanistan but each of them was raised by totally different families. In spite of not having the same social background after several years they meet one another and live together, as wives of their strict husband Rasheed who refuses modern rights for women.

Amir’s misadventures begin as a boy living in an affluent Afghanistan world. On the day of his birth, his mother hemorrhages to death. Robbed of any feminine influence or comfort, he goes to his overshadowing Baba for love and acceptance. His father denies his only son the tenderness he desires, leading Amir to believe his father despises him. After all, Amir’s

Afzal’s death further infuriated the Kashmiri people. Yet again not only were curfews put in place by the police, but violators executed. At this point, the Kasmiri people have been subjected to 20 years of military occupation. Strides had been made – in 2014 India was going to give Kashmir and Jammu back some of their rights by allowing elections. Executing Afzal Guru seemed to reverse all of their efforts.

The way the daughter tried to solve the conflict with her father shows that she can see her father’s view on the situation and can analyze the fact that her father is only protecting her. After reciting her speech to her father about how the students need to work to destroy the teachers, her father is appalled by what she had written about and tears apart the speech. In anger the calls him a ‘Chapita’ without remembering how he had lost friends and family to the dictator Trujillo. After throwing a fit she remembers how he was still afraid the regime back in the Dominican Republic would find him and his family and that he is only protecting her. The narrator and her mom are in her room later that night, “What we ended up doing that night was

Jhumpa Lahiri’s second story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” presents the relationship between an Indian family and their friend Mr. Pirzada, a Bangladeshi migrant. The narrator of the story is a ten year old girl Lilia who is not aware of the history of the Indian subcontinent related to freedom struggle, civil war of East Pakistani etc. We see that Mr. Pirzada, Lilia’s father and mother take dinner with one another while at the same time they listen to the evening news. Though they are now in America but they want to know what is going on in their native places. It shows their longings for their respective countries though they are

An event that has relation to war today is the tension in the northern region of India, Punjab, where the Sikh holy book was ripped up and thrown. Many Sikhs gathered in a peaceful protest, trying to bring to justice the people who were responsible, but the police ended up shooting and killing two peaceful protestors. Simran Jeet Singh, is one of the authors, who writes on this topic. He takes up this topic, because it represents part of the unjust that happened to Sikhs in 1984 where they were killed and murdered in the thousands by the Indian government. Singh says, “I was born in the United States in the summer of 1984, during the height of the anti- Sikh violence in Punjab” (Singh 1). He goes on to say how he feels the pain of his Sikh brothers and sisters who were killed in the year 1984, for their religious beliefs. Background about Singh shows us the importance of mediated narratives, as they show that Singh is trying to raise awareness about the issues going on in Punjab in an attempt to try to avoid the destruction that happened in 1984. Another one of these authors is Nirmala Ganapathy, who is part of The Straits Times. She takes up the same interest as Singh, as she works to raise awareness on the issues affecting her homeland of India. She writes about why Sikhs have been blocking major roads in India and the influence this has. Her curiosity is what has

In the short story “Girl”, the mother is teaching her daughter how to act and how she should behave each time in everyday life. She is giving speculative lessons on how to do laundry, the mother says wash the white clothes on Monday and wash the colored ones on Tuesdays. She says everything from laundry to ironing; how to make tea, breakfast and lunch; how to arrange for formal and informal dining The mother is trying to teach morals of life, so that when she goes away to different place she can implement what the mother had taught. She wants her daughter to have a respectable life and not to lead life like “a slut”. She thinks that the teenage might change her daughter's life and make her trump. Maybe that's why she takes out her anger and frustration on her daughter. The conflict exists as how the mother ask her daughter to lead life in her way and not giving her daughter personal preference.

In the short story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” by Jhumpa Lahiri, Lilia, her parents, and Mr. Pirzada react differently to Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 because of the different cultures in which they grew up. Lilia is a ten-year-old girl growing up in Boston, Massachusetts. The civil war affects her vicariously when she sees her parents and Mr. Pirzada upset. Lilia’s parents are from India and moved to Boston before Lilia was born. They show concern when watching the news of their homeland in peril. Mr. Pirzada is from Pakistan and moves to Boston for one year on a research grant while his wife and seven daughters still live in East Pakistan. The civil war affects him the most because it is his personal property and his direct loved ones that are in the midst of it all.

Official documents have little say about women and children of the Partition as they were viewed as a collective. Earlier reports on the abduction of women only gave the reader the statistics and brief statements that glorified community nationalism rather than the victims itself. Many failed to dwell into the individual trauma of this particular group (Menon & Bhasin, 1998, p.11). Rani’s testimony was significant in that not only it opened us to another outlook from a witness point of view; it also revealed that people who were not physically involved were also affected psychologically. This was also the only part in the testimony where Rani displayed sympathy and grievance. Her sensitivity and deep connection with these victims correlated with age and gender. Her emphasis on the words ‘young’ and ‘girl’ throughout her testimony evoked our sense of disbelief that people would do such inhumane things to each other (cited in Butalia, 2000, p.271). Her hesitant manner, evident

Before the Partition of India, in 1947, India was considered a country with a reasonably peaceful history. However, during and after the Partition, sexual violence, both towards men and women, escalated, resulting in the rape and abduction of over 80,000 women. Cracking India, by Bapsi Sidhwa, tells a story that highlights these violent acts by both Muslims and Hindus, through the eyes of a disabled young Parsi girl named Lenny, who witnesses first hand the violence of Partition when she mistakenly participates in the abduction of her ayah, Shanta. Throughout Cracking India, Lenny observes as the religions involved in Partition become increasingly violent towards both men and women, within their own religions and against others.