Aijaz Summary

When he praised her art of painting and poetry, she finds in him a friend. In course of time, she gets attracted towards him. She likes to watch him when he was busy in stage performance. Her feelings towards Aijaz are in fact her search for love in her husband Hemant. When his attitude towards her is changed, she tries to get that emotional fulfillment from Aijaz. Manju Kapur portrays Aijaz’s personality in the following manner:
He was of medium height, his body compact. His face was the clear delicate luminous brown of freshly rained-on earth. His lips were a darker brown than his skin, and his eyes were black and narrow. While working he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, allowing Astha to view at her leisure his round arms, hairless, smooth and muscular. He had prematurely grey hair,

6. Gender Discrimination in the Society:
Astha becomes victim of the male dominated tendency. Manju Kapur has described Hemant’s real nature in only one sentence. She writes, “Between Anuradha’s birth and Himanshu’s, Hemant changed from being an all-American father to being an all- Indian one” (Kapur 70).
Astha becomes too distressed to enjoy little things of life due to the changed mentality of her husband and his emphasis on having son heir. She constantly thinks about her next baby. She becomes so distressed that she also starts thinking of having a son. It is a very tragic thing that being a woman, she too starts thinking against womanhood. She loses her own identity as an educated, modern woman and behaves like typical orthodox woman. She too wants a son to satisfy the family members. Kate Millet points out in Sexual Politics:
Under patriarchy, the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described. As both the primitive and civilized worlds are male worlds, the ideas, which shaped culture in regard world to the female, were also of male design