Imelda Character Analysis

Imelda, the star of the show, is a daughter, wife and mother though none of these in the traditional sense. Imelda, better known as Em, is an enigma unveiled to us slowly through the haze of her ‘condition’. She is revealed through snippets of letters and snatches of conversation. Throughout the novel, the age of the characters, their appearance and the settings are all very vague. It’s like you’re seeing it all through a tinted lens. A lot of things are open to a reader’s interpretation. Personally, I found this a little frustrating and yet, at the same time, I scrutinized a lot of things much more closely than I would have. Therefore, much like a real person, you only know facets of these characters and the rest you deduce to the best of your ability.

Imelda and her parents were from Rangoon. They came in one of the ships to Goa when Japan attacked Burma.

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Sometimes, ‘they’ poisoned the food. She would allow no one to eat a bite of food that came from outside the house. Other times ‘they’ were demanding offerings of clocks, watches, kitchen spoons and college books from the dug up road outside. She cleared her bank account on ‘their’ insistence and simply lost the money. And then there were the people in the fan. Sometimes ‘they’ demanded that she ate a sandwich at three in the morning. One time the people in the fan told her that her son was in trouble. So she picked up her son who was around three or four at the time and set out barefoot. A stranger who saw her took her to a hotel and asked her to sit down. By then her son was wailing and people got suspicious. They heard the crying baby and saw the barefoot woman. They took Em to a police station and the Big Hoom. It is not quite clear if these are hallucinations or delusions. She hears voices telling her to do certain things but at the same time she also believes that the food is poisoned, that her son is in