In the following essay on Bharati Mukherjee's writings (The Middleman and Other Stories, The Wife's Story, and Jasmine, authors Sant-Wade and Radell examine Mukherjee's process of fashioning a literary identity for a female protagonist in alien cultures.

The female protagonist in one of Bharati Mukherjee's prize-winning short stories, from the collection titled The Middleman and Other Stories, is shocked when her landlord lover refers to the two of them as "two wounded people," and thinks to herself that "She knows she is strange, and lonely, but being Indian is not the same, she would have thought, as being a freak." The Indian woman, Maya Sanyal, who is the central figure of the story, "The Tenant," recognizes her strangeness in America and her appalling loneliness, but she resists being recognized as a "freak." No doubt this term occurs to her when her current lover, Fred, a man without...