The “India” Group should answer
two of the following:
Q1: When Bibi is banished
to the storage room for fear of infecting the child, she tells her friends, “Don’t
worry, it’s not as if they’ve locked me in here...The world begins at the
bottom of the stairs. Now I am free to discover life as I please” (170). What
does she mean by this, and why might this be the beginning of her “treatment”?
Q2: At the end of “The
Third and Final Continent” the narrator likens himself to an astronaut: “While
the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained
in this new world for for nearly thirty years” (198). How can an immigrant be
like an astronaut, and how else is he—and all of us, actually—heroes exploring
distant worlds?
Q3: How is Bibi a lot like
Boori Ma from “A Real Durwan”? Though both are outcasts, why are they also necessary
to their little neighborhoods? Similarly, why are they both undervalued by
those closest to them?
Q4: The narrator of “The
Third and Final Continent” has an arranged marriage with Mala, which he regards
“with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it was
expected of every man” (181). When does the marriage become more than a duty
for him, and why, unlike the other marriages in this book, does this one
actually seem to work?
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