Point of View

While Lenny is a child during these events, the novel’s point-of-view is somewhat more complex. Lenny is the obvious point of view. She narrates the story, which is then filtered through her eyes. The reader cannot know anything beyond what Lenny herself knows. The reader can only learn along with Lenny. For example, it is revealed in one of the early chapters that Lenny does not know the history of the Parsee religious community—how Parsees came to be in India, nor where they came from. In order to impart this information to the reader, the novel uses ColoneL Bharucha’s speech for the Parsee community as a didactic device. While Lenny learns this information, so too does the reader.

At the same time, there are two different Lenny characters operating in this novel because it is apparent from the sophistication of the prose...