Displacement

A specific recurring hardship among the novel’s distinct narratives is a feeling of displacement, as many of the central characters struggle with the personal and cultural challenges of being removed from the circumstances and environs to which they have become accustomed. For example, in Part I and Part II, the respective main characters are expatriates from India who struggle with specific aspects of Indian culture whenever they visit the country of their birth. In Part I, the main character is an Indian man who has lived for the past 20 years in the United States. He brings his six-year-old son on a tourism trip to India. As the narration states, “More than twenty years of life in the academic communities of the East Coast of the USA had defanged him of the easy Indian ability to bark at people considered as servants” (6) He spends much of...