Skip to main content

The Village By The Sea.

The Village By The Sea - Anita Desai.


Plot Overview-

The novel’s action takes place in a rural area in India, in a fishing village near the sea. The novel follows the life of a small family forced to live in poverty. The parents are unable to take care of their three children so the oldest children, Lila and Hari, assume the roles of adults in the house. Lila takes care of her ill mother and takes care of the house while her brother works in the fields in order to financially sustain his family. We find that the family ended up that way after Lila and Hari’s father was tricked into believing that if he paid a large sum of money, someone will find him a job in Mumbai. The man ran away with the money and the father stopped working and started drinking excessively which put a strain on the family.

Realizing that their father was no longer able to provide for them, the children started to take care of themselves. Hari began to think about ways in which he could help his family better and their prospects seem to get better when it is rumored that a factory was planned to be built in their village. Hari tries to have a realistic view on whether he was going to find work in the factory.
Their situation changes when the De Silva family comes into the village. Lila and Hari start helping them and become their servants. Finding out about their situation, Mr. De Silva offers Hari a job in Mumbai in a car wash. At first, Hari is suspicious of his offer but then analyzes his situation and reaches the conclusion that his sister will never be able to find a good husband without money and that it was now his responsibility.
Hari decides to go to Mumbai with other villagers but doesn’t say anything to his sister. When he arrives in Mumbai, he searches for Mr. De Silva but doesn’t find him. Hari is helped by one of the servants in the house who introduces Hari to Jagu. Jagu agrees to let Hari work in his restaurant so Hari sends home a postcard letting his sister know where he is and that he was going to send his earnings to them from that point on. Life is hard for Hari in Mumbai but he keeps his promise and continues to send money home.

While working for Jagu, Hari meets Mr. Panwallah who takes Hari under his wing and starts to teach him how to make watches and how to repair them. During the time Hari was in Mumbai, Lila is helped by the De Silva family. Mr. De Silva, takes Lila’s mother to the hospital and with the proper care, she slowly starts to get better. When Hari returns to his village, he decides to start a small business raising animals while thinking that he will able to open his own watch shop in the future. The novel ends on a positive tone, Hari and Lila’s situation improving greatly in comparison to how it was in the beginning of the novel.


.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Dance of the Eunuchs.

The Dance of the Eunuchs - Kamala Das. Summary- Included in the collection Summer in Calcutta(1965), 'Dance of the Eunuchs' is one of the most remarkable poems of Kamala Das. This is another autobiographical poem written in confessional style that symbolically portrays the poetess's personal melancholy in her own life.  'Dance of the Eunuchs' vividly conjures up the atmosphere of a hot, tortured, corrupt, sterile and barren world through vivid symbols and images. The dance of the eunuchs whose joyless life reflects the poet‘s fractured personality is a noticeable piece of autobiographical poetry. Kamala Das has vividly visualized the world of vacant ecstasy and sterility through numerous functional images and symbols in her poetry. In fact Eunuchs try to eke out a livelihood by dancing. Their dancing is mechanical and painful. The conditions and the climate are forbidding. The spectators are merciless. Even God seems to add their woes. The eunuchs...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mystic Drum.

The Mystic Drum - Gabriel Okara. About Poet. Gabriel Okara is a Nigerian poet and novelist   Okara’s   Poetry  is based on a series of contrasts in which symbols are neatly balanced against each other. The need to  reconcile   the extremes of experience (life and death are common themes) preoccupies his verse, and a typical poem has a circular movement from everyday reality to a moment of joy and back to reality again. Summary. The drum in African poetry, generally stands for the spiritual pulse of traditional African life. The poet asserts that first, as the drum beat inside him, fishes danced in the rivers and men and women danced on the land to the rhythm of the drum. But standing behind the tree, there stood an outsider who smiled with an air of indifference at the richness of their culture. However, the drum still continued to beat rippling the air with quickened tempo compelling the dead to dance and sing with their shadows. The ancestral gl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Minority

Minority- Imtiaz Dharker I was born a foreigner. I carried on from there to become a foreigner everywhere I went, even in the place planted with my relatives, six-foot tubers sprouting roots, their fingers and faces pushing up new shoots of maize and sugar cane. All kinds of places and groups of people who have an admirable history would, almost certainly, distance themselves from me. I don’t fit, like a clumsily translated poem; like food cooked in milk of coconut where you expected   Ghee or cream, the unexpected aftertaste of cardamom or neem   . There’s always a point that where the language flips into an unfamiliar taste; where words tumble over a cunning tripwire on the tongue; were the frame slips, the reception of an image not quite tuned, ghost-outlined, that signals, in their midst, an alien. And so I scratch, scratch through the night, at this growing scab on black and white. E...
Post a Comment
Read more