Summary
Meena returns home to find her parents in the front room, sitting together on a settee. Meena’s father invites her to join them, and begins to tell Meena a folktale about a boy and a tiger. To Meena’s frustration, the tale is an alternate version of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf," a story she’s read many times before. Meena feigns interest until her father has finished.
Thinking about her recent encounter with Mr. Worrall, Meena asks her father if he fought in World War II. He answers no; he was too young, and India had its own political tensions. Meena asks, instead: “Did you do anything dangerous?” Mr. Kumar begins to describe his experience during Partition (i.e. when India was violently divided into India and Pakistan).
Meena first learned about Partition during a family and friend get-together called a mehfil, an evening of communal singing led by her father. At one mehfil, Meena’s Aunties and Uncles grew emotional, and began to recount grisly memories of their experiences during Partition: memories of mass murder and lost family, spoken in a blend of Punjabi and English. Meena had always wanted to know more, but was too afraid to ask.
Now, in the living room with her parents, Meena’s father tells her a new story from Partition: once, two policemen had ordered Mr. Kumar and one of his friends to deliver a package; the package was actually a bomb, and Mr. Kumar unwittingly destroyed a merchant’s house. Hearing this story, Meena apologizes again for lying.
That night, Meena wakes to the sound of ambulance sirens. Through her window, Meena watches as two EMTs carry a body on a stretcher past a line of her onlooking neighbors. It is the dead body of Mrs. Christmas. Meena’s mother joins her at the window, and Meena tells her mother how she had seen Mrs. Christmas earlier that day with Anita. Mrs. Kumar accuses Meena of lying and Meena drops the matter. In silence, Meena struggles to cope with the death of Mrs. Christmas and even blames herself.
Three weeks later, Mr. Christmas passes away, too. Meena’s parents attend a funeral for Mr. and Mrs. Christmas, and Mrs. Kumar leaves the funeral feeling deeply upset: Mrs. Kumar is worried her own parents will die before there is time to see them again. Meena eavesdrops on her parents and reflects on her family. She has only ever seen photographs of her grandparents. Apparently, Mr. Kumar was offered a film contract in his youth, but his highly political father (Meena’s grandfather) prohibited Mr. Kumar from acting. Meena thinks about her father as an actor and singer, and realizes the disappointment he must feel working in an office.
Meena watches her parents comfort one another. Meena thinks her parents are very open in their intimacy and affection, much more than her Aunties and Uncles. Meena struggles to imagine herself in a relationship like her parents’ marriage, a relationship she finds “almost claustrophobic” in its tenderness.
Mr. and Mrs. Kumar end their conversation, and call for Meena. Mr. Kumar reveals that Mrs. Kumar is pregnant, and that Meena is going to have a sibling. “Would you like that?” Mr. Kumar asks. Overwhelmed, Meena turns away, responding, “No.”
Analysis
In Chapter 4, Meena deepens her understanding of pain and tragedy, both through witnessing others’ grief—the grief of her Aunties and Uncles as they remember the violence of Partition—and experiencing her own grief after Mrs. Christmas’s death. Meena values these experiences, seeing them as a part of her maturation: for example, when her father shares a story about Partition, Meena sees it as a “gift to me” (p. 76). But Meena also recognizes her inability to fully understand the complexities of these tragedies: she calls her parents’ memories “a murky bottomless pool full of monsters and the odd shining coin, with a deceptively still surface and a deadly undercurrent. And me how could I jump in before I had learned to swim?” (p. 75). Meena’s incomplete understanding of these tragedies is emphasized by her lack of fluency in Punjabi, the language the adults use when discussing Partition. Meena must piece together their tragic memories using only a fragmentary understanding of Punjabi, a literalization of her fragmentary emotional understanding of their tragedy.
But Meena’s difficulty in understanding her and her family’s emotions is not necessarily a sign of immaturity; in Chapter 4, Meera Syal explores the difficulty of communicating emotions through words. For example, Meena’s elders do not initially communicate their grief through language, but rather through music, singing along to Mr. Kumar’s mournful ghazals. Consider Meena’s description of the word “Wah,” which the Uncles shout during the ghazals: “The word had no literal meaning, mama told me later, but what word would there be for these feelings that papa’s songs awoke in everyone?” (p. 72). Through music, the Aunties and Uncles are able to communicate feelings that lack any lingual equivalent. The abstract and non-literal nature of emotion is also shown in the way Meera Syal writes scenes of intense emotion. When Meena first hears the stories of Partition, she says, “My heart was trying to break out of my chest” (p. 74). Similarly, when she sees Mrs. Christmas’s corpse, she says, “my head began swimming, the back of my head suddenly turned to sticky ice” (p. 78). In order to properly communicate Meena’s emotions, Meera Syal turns to abstraction and poetics: personification, exaggeration, and metaphor.
The theme of lying returns in Chapter 4 when Mr. Kumar shares his story about Partition, and how Mr. Kumar was deceived into delivering a bomb. Mr. Kumar’s story provides a clear argument against lying: deceit is a tool used to manipulate others, in this case manipulating Mr. Kumar into committing violence. And yet, a positive usage of deceit occurs shortly thereafter: when Meena asks Mr. Kumar if the bomb killed anyone, he begins to tell the truth, before deciding it best to hide the truth from his daughter: “I don’t… No. Of course not. No” (p. 76), he says. Author Meera Syal seems interested in the paradoxical nature of lying: it can be used to hurt, and, simultaneously, it can be used to protect.
Though tragedy pervades Chapter 4, the novel maintains its stylistic comedy through Meena’s exaggerated, ironic narration. For example, when Meena learns that Mrs. Christmas has died, Meena quickly assumes that she and Anita may have been responsible: “Maybe me and Anita Rutter were murderers… we were joined in Sin, and we would have to carry around our guilty secret until we died” (p. 78), Meena says. This is an example of dramatic irony, wherein the reader understands that Meena and Anita could not have possibly killed Mrs. Christmas: the two girls merely ran by the Christmas’s house, hollering. Another example—the use of black comedy—follows Mr. and Mrs. Christmas’s funeral: when Mr. Christmas is buried at an Anglican Church in a neighboring village, Mr. Ormerod is “deeply upset” because this burial “selfishly deprived Tollington and our church of its first funerals for five years” (p. 79). There is a certain irony in calling the dead “selfish.” But these are not necessarily laugh-out-loud moments. In fact, by using literary modes typical of comedy (i.e. irony), Meera Syal almost increases the sense of tragedy by drawing attention to the contrast between the novel’s normal (in this case: comedy) and present circumstances (tragedy).
Elsewhere in Chapter 4, we see another usage of comedy: it is used by the adults to comfort one another during their recollections of the horrors of Partition. When the adults grow increasingly mournful, Mr. Kumar intentionally uses comedy to lighten the mood—he is “deliberately upbeat” in Meena’s words (p. 74). Mr. Kumar says, “But I thank God, because if I had not gone to Delhi, I would never have met Daljit…’ Then the room broke into cheers and relieved laughter” (p. 75). Meeting tragedy with laughter can be a useful coping mechanism—here, we see how it can “relieve”—but it must be done carefully to be successful. In this example, Meena likens Mr. Kumar to a captain “steer[ing] his friends away from the rocks that might shipwreck them all” (p. 74). Meena uses metaphor to emphasize the risk-aversion and care involved in Mr. Kumar’s light-hearted jest. This stands in contrast to Anita’s careless response to tragedy, wherein Anita stands “grinning and shivering with cold” (p. 79) as she watches Mrs. Christmas’s corpse pass. A question we might ask while reading Anita and Me is: when is it appropriate to pair comedy with tragedy?
The chapter ends with Meena’s parents revealing that Mrs Kumar is pregnant, and that Meena will be an older sister. This symbolically emphasizes Meena’s emotional growth during Chapter 4, spurred by Meena’s increased knowledge of mature topics like death and love. Both metaphorically and literally, Meena is no longer the baby of the family.
