feelings of loss and grief and reveal the aforemen-
tioned paradigmatic shift. As the young widow in
the story opts to stay in the United States and be
independent, her assertion is marked by her de-
parture from the confined role prescribed for wid-
ows in India. Her strength is physically represented
as she discards colorless widowhood for a new life
of color. “The Word Love,” “ Doors,” and “Affair”
explore sexual relationships more openly prac-
ticed in the United States. In “The Word Love,” the
pleasure and guilt of engaging in sexual relation-
ships outside of marriage is mulled over, and the
cross-cultural misinterpretations of such relation-
ships are revealed. “Doors” examines the risks of
crossing the cultural divide through the depiction
of a souring marriage between an Indian woman
raised in America and an Indian man raised in
India. “Affair” reveals the different rates at which
immigrants adapt to the culture of the new land,
suggesting that arranged marriages could adapt to
the concepts of love marriages. “Meeting Mrinal”
explores the inability and unpreparedness Indian
women experience when dealing with alien con-
cepts such as divorce and single motherhood. In
“A Perfect Life,” common threads running through
the two cultures are revealed. When the flawless,
sanitized life of a successful, professional woman
is disrupted by her intense desires to protect and
nurture a homeless boy, she realizes that desires
for motherhood are not culture-specific. “The
Maidservant’s Story” and “The Ultrasound” are
set in India. The former recounts a young woman’s
disbelief as she recognizes how a beloved relative
destroyed the life of a maid by having sex with her
while his own wife was away having their child.
“The Ultrasound” explores the devastating effects
of a mother-in-law manipulating her traditionally
sanctioned authority to force the termination of
her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy. Both stories re-
veal that the adoption of new cultural values is not
the cause of ugly and unethical ways; instead, it is
the willful abuse of culturally sanctioned power
that causes people to behave unethically.
In “Bats” and “Silver Pavements, Golden
Roofs,” Divakaruni tries to understand the psyche
of the victims of domestic abuse and the compel-
ling forces that keep them locked in abusive re-
lationship. In “Bats,” domestic violence is viewed
from the perspective of a child as she observes her
mother’s complicity in the cycle of violence from
the father. As the mother repeatedly flees and re-
turns to the cycle of abuse, the child fails to com-
prehend her mother’s self-destructive behavior. In
“Silver Pavements, Golden Roof,” domestic vio-
lence is viewed from the outside. The narrator, a
houseguest who has recently arrived in the United
States to pursue higher education, is sickened by
the sight of her high-class, sophisticated Aunt
Pratima being abused by her low-class husband,
Uncle Bikram. Aunt Pratima’s behavior cannot
simply be categorized as codependency of abuse
because her compassion for her husband appears
genuine and crosses stringent class-lines that are
rarely transgressed in India. In “Disappearance,”
another story about domestic abuse, the narra-
tor is the abuser himself. Through her deft use of
irony, Divakaruni lets the abusive husband reveal
his controlling behavior, his emotional and sexual
abuse of his wife and his obsession with her rejec-
tion of him.
Sukanya B. SenapatiBacho, Peter 21