Divakurani's short story, Clothes

Divakurani's short story, "Clothes," recounts the story of an Indian woman, Sumita, as she begins an arranged marriage that takes her to America and introduces her to an entirely new life. I found it fascinating to read, in part because its account of Indian society's view of a woman's role is as different from my own experience as it is from the role women play in American society.

The story begins with a ritual bathing, in preparation for Sumita's bride-viewing, the moment when she will first see the man who is about to become her husband. When I came to the United States to study, two years ago, I was struck by the enormous cultural differences between this country and my homeland. I was especially shocked by the almost unseemly behavior of American women. Now I realize how far I have come in just such a short time, because the concept of having one's future mate chosen by others and presented almost without introduction seems much more shocking to me now than does the American expectation of finding your own husband - or even of choosing not to marry at all.

Sumita's culture, while perhaps a little more accepting of women than some of the Asian and Muslim societies with which I have become acquainted, still sees us as a gender with limited options. Women, at least in the context portrayed in this story, are to be protected and sequestered. I came here alone at age 17, and that kind of freedom would never have been allowed for an Indian woman in Sumita's situati

ew musical notations, and the glistening pitchpipes with the same intent attention to detail that the narrator uses to describe the candybox of buttons, zippers, trims, and threads in the dry goods store. Song compares the attention of the store's patrons to supplicants consulting "the oracle, the stone tablets" of a place that promises revelations of a better life. I felt like that when I contemplated studying music. I believed that it could open up new worlds and give new meaning to everyday life, and I was right. Even as I struggled with the challenge of a difficult musical passage or despaired of ever mastering a complex rhytmic structure, I felt that my efforts were slowly pulling back a curtain to something I would otherwise never have glimpsed. The narrator observes that her mother "was determined that I should sew as if she knew what she herself was missing." My mother encouraged my interest, although no one in my family before me had ever learned to play. I felt at the time that she wanted me to know something that she had not had the chance to study. At the end of the poem, Song returns to the classroom, and this is where she introduces the metaphor of learning to play music through learning to sew. I was sur

Category: Literature - D