Similarities Between Hema And Kaushik

The mother’s revelation of her one sided secret love for a Pranab, to her daughter, when she herself is recovering from her broken heart, forms an intense bond between the mother and daughter, a bond of connection, understanding and sharing. The young protagonist Usha towards the end of the story says, “My mother told Deborah none of this. It was to me that she confessed; after my own heart was broken by a man I’d hoped to marry” (83).

In the three interconnected stories in the second part, together titled “Hema and Kaushik”, the first is told from the point of view of the young female protagonist Hema; the second from the point of view of the male protagonist Kaushik; and the last, in third person conveys a nostalgic and ultimately tragic experience. The stories look at the relationship between childhood friends, who later become strangers and eventually lovers, until death drew them apart.

The stories dived into three definite phases trace the lives of Hema and Kaushik from childhood to adulthood. Beginning in the year 1974, amidst a tightly knit Bengali circle in

Attending an old school friend pam's wedding at Langford, the couple takes time together to think over their own relationship, their disagreement, the fading love and most of all the sexual tension. Amit has harbored A secret, the crush he used to have on Pam, as a young boy, but when finally he tells Megan about it,”... the information fell between them, negligible now that he had told"(104). At the wedding, Amit ends up talking to a complete stranger about his marriage, “...he considered for a moment, actually, it was after the second that our marriage sort of he paused, searching for the right word-disappeared"(112). The tension between them is the result of the cultural hybridity that Amit has been American showing no trace of Indianess, an over powering influence of his American