When Mr. Pirzada Came At Dine By Jhumpa Lahiri, Lilia, Her Parents, And Mr

Firstly, the war caused a huge problem to Maha, a 12-year-old girl, who lost her parents and her older sister after a bombing in the Muslim area of the city. Moreover, she has to take care of her younger brother who is 6 months old, while they threaten to separate her from him. Maha’s suffering is demonstrated when she explains to Karim, “What’s important is that I don’t have anything left to lose. Except Jad. You say we’ll be killed before we

In the autumn of 1971, Mr. Pirzada comes to Lilia’s house to dine each night. Mr. Pirzada is from Dacca, then a part of Pakistan. He left behind his wife and seven daughters for a fellowship to study the foliage of New England. Since his fellowship provided for only a meager dorm room, he comes to Lilia’s home to eat with her parents and to watch the news of the Indo-Pakistan War. Dacca had been invaded by the Pakistani army and torched and shelled. Thousands of people were tortured or killed. Although Mr. Pirzada writes a letter to his family each week, he had not heard from them in six months.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth is comprised of eight short stories about different Indian families’ struggles in America, many of them going through the immigrant experience. The conflicts are with friends and family, and also with themselves, as each of them attempt to find their own identity along with fitting in with the rest of society. One of the causes of these struggles that because the families in the stories are mixed in terms of generation. Many of the adults in the stories were first generation immigrants from India, while many of the children were raised in the United States, which is the second generation. This led to blending of culture and at the same time, clashes between the immigrant mentality of living and the American mentality of living. In Unaccustomed Earth, Lahiri demonstrates to the reader the important influence of environment, specifically culture and how it impacts parental teachings, on the personality and development of an individuals’ identity, and how the actions and development of characters can affect one’s family and friends; the impact of environment and culture is shown especially by the characters and stories “Hell-Heaven” and “Hema and Kaushik”.

Violence, war, discrimination, and poverty: these issues have long been a part of Afghanistan’s history. Even though things in Afghanistan are getting better, war fills the country, and women and children have to learn to endure abuse, caused by men and the Taliban; they also learn to endure poverty. Considering this, it is no wonder why Afghanistan is in the terrible position it is in now. Many Afghan cities like Kabul are filled with things like violence and discrimination, and the book A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini takes place in Kabul. This book follows the lives of two Afghani women, Mariam and Laila, as they suffer pain and discrimination received from the Taliban and their

All throughout this book, Afghanistan had many switches of power and constant war involving many countries, including the US and Russia. At the end of the book, as things are calming down, Laila says to Tariq, “Maybe there will be hope at the other end of this war, maybe for the first time in a long time.” (Hosseni 386). This quote shows the hope that the people of Afghanistan still had to possess to persevere through the years of war. The war affected thousands of lives in the country, as the war swept through the different cities. This war of especially affected Laila because it resulted in the death of her parents. Afghanistan as a whole had to show tremendous strength throughout the book as they endured through the war. Perseverance is most prominently shown through all citizens during the country’s war.

Farah Ahmedi was eager to escape a war torn country so she could live a better life. “The gate to Pakistan was closed, and I could see that the Pakistani border guards were letting on one through…. I felt desperate to get through...if we got stuck here, what were we going to do? Where would we stay?” (Amedi paragraph 1) She was so worried about the fact that if

The determined girl, Farah Ahmedi, is trying to reach her goal of crossing the border into Pakistan to make her life better. She grew up in Afghanistan, a very horrible place to live. Her brother and father died from a rocket attack, which causes Farah and her mother to search for a better life. When they went to try to cross the gate, they couldn’t go through, which made Farah and

What would it be like to be completely surrounded by war in one’s own home? For two children in The Bite of a Mango and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, this was their everyday reality. The Bite of a Mango follows the life of a twelve year old girl named Mariatu Kamara. A Long Way gone follows the life of a fourteen year boy named Ishmael Beah. Both books are true stories that personally recount the events of how the war affected not only their towns, but themselves as children. In both stories, the families must face unimaginable hardships and obstacles. They must make decisions and navigate through life to determine how to survive and make it through. Despite the fact that Mariatu and Ishmael both has an association with the

This book is one of those tales you will NOT forget for a long time. I sympathized with their challenges, shared in their brief joys, and broke down in their times of tragedy – and they were many! There were times I dumped the book vowing not to continue after someone died (brutally of course). Only to return with renewed hope, much like Harriet – before another tragedy to befalls them. Tonya Holmes Shook, elicited emotions in me I never thought I had. I thought about my grandfather who fought WWII with the British in Burma (Myanmar). The horrors he saw (but never spoke of), that eventually led to PTSD. Anyone who has gone through war can identify with the strife. Physical violence, rape, and murder (including of minors) are themes explored in this book. Sensitive readers

With the Taliban beginning its reigns on Afghanistan, darkness took over the nation. Terror became a more common installment into the minds of the citizens. Hearing the rumble of the jeeps, the bangs of the AK-47s, and the bombs setting off can send a shiver down anyone’s back. Families are torn apart, children forget what play time is, schools are destroyed. The injustice that the Taliban brought is defined through the cruelest of actions. “There are a lot of children in Afghanistan, but little childhood.” (Hosseini, 1) With their regime, the Taliban established radical rules that limited the country to all but making the essential function of speaking, barely legal. The effect of the Taliban begin to spread specifically towards Amir and his family. With the beginning the war, Amir sees his

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini takes a solid focus on the lives of two young women, Mariam and Laila, who grow up in a struggling and turbulent Afghanistan. This book emulates the lives of those who have actually been affected by the extreme changes of power within their culture. From the Soviets to the Taliban, these people are caught in a war they cannot win but must deal with the consequences of. The lives of Mariam and Laila are consumed and silenced by those with power over them, namely males with traditional values. The book conveys the idea that even with an immense amount of destruction and terror wrought throughout Afghanistan, underneath lies a beauty that has been muted but it still provides hope for the future.

The book’s thesis was a young girl’s journey from place to place while a war is outraging in her country. She is forced to leave her country without her parents when she is still young. She grows up in many different places, meeting many different people, and becoming a very different girl. She learns to take care of herself and runs into many problems that she has to solve alone. The topic of the Islamic revolution during and after is discussed, along with the differences in the private and public lives in the middle of a political war. There were some conflicts and differences in families across the community. It also shows how people grow and change, how a war nearby can change a person. When the war started, Marjane was a young innocent girl. When the war developed and she grew, she changed and lied to her parents and started hiding stuff from them. The war forced her to change her personality a bit because of the changes going on in her life.

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

Which induces comfort among immigrants, other selections display this in a more subtle and intricate manner. The two pieces, "The Treatment of Bibi Haldar" and "The Third and Final Continent" both compare and contrast the role marriage plays within the Indian and American communities by observing a transnational couple and a young woman in India who longs to be married.

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.