The grandfather paradise
Meena remembers visiting her family home in southern India where she would see her grandfather in his garden, surrounded by mango and cashew trees. This memory became a symbol in her mind. In that symbol, she categorized her childhood innocence, her now lost feelings of family and paradise, and the pure mystery of life and time. There is archetypal significance to the symbol; the kind patriarch in a lush garden has long been a symbol for happiness.
The move to Sudan
When she has to leave her home in India to move with her father to Sudan where he has a new job waiting, Alexander's life changes drastically. It isn't as easy to describe as it seems. Not only does her experience change in the literal, obvious way, but also in another more sublime way. The move brought types of change that she had not considered before. Her cultural identity and assumptions were no longer reinforced by her community, and she was a newcomer and an outsider in a community with deep roots. The move symbolizes her perplexing experience of human culture.
The Sari days
On certain days, Alexander remembers being a child and choosing to wear a sari, even when she wasn't exactly required to do so. Then, on the next day, perhaps she wore something completely different. These fashion experiments are living symbols for her complicated sense of identity. She doesn't necessarily "belong" in Sudanese culture, but then again, she isn't necessarily opposed to Sudan, so she experiments in changing and adjusting herself. The sari represents her desire to adapt to her new habitat.
Post-colonialism and self
One might not look at this memoir's depictions of childhood and walk away saying, "Clearly it's a metaphor for post-colonialism!" but the author does see a connection. Because her life took her from India to Africa to England, she is able to reflect on the history of European colonialism (especially English colonialism) with a unique appreciation. She explains that to her, her memories are like a documentation of the cultures that European colonialism sought to exploit. That makes her sense of English identity at times confusing and hard to understand.
Life and meaning
All in all, this memoir isn't about one person's life. Rather, the memoirist paints herself as a martyr to a broader experience of life. By seeing life from three places, India, Sudan, and England, she is shown the breadth of human culture. In those places, the people from those places take their cultural assumptions for granted, but to her traveling mind, she sees them for what they are. They are artifacts of the past. Perhaps her thesis for life's meaning might be to appreciate the beauty of one's cultural experience of life while advocating fairness and equality for people who are systemically oppressed by cultural assumptions.
