Summary
While the first chapter centered around Arjie’s childlike imagining of the traditional wedding ceremony ritual through the game Bride-Bride, the second chapter introduces the possibility for an actual wedding.
A wedding proposal arrives for Arjie’s Radha Aunty from a man, Rajan Nagendra, whom she met while in America. Arjie is consoled by his “expulsion from the world of the girls” (41) by the possibility for a real wedding. Arjie’s Radha Aunty left for America before he could form actual memories of her. His only references are old family photos of her as a child. Arjie fills in his void of memory of her with images of his favorite Sinhalese actresses.
At this time, Arjie is still being punished for the consequential spend-a-day when he was caught playing Bride-Bride. He is still being punished with chores during visits to his grandparents’ home. When Radha Aunty returns she challenges all of Arjie’s assumptions as she plays “Chopsticks” poorly on the piano and unlike a movie star has the dark skin of a laborer and “frizzy hair” (45) like his Ammachi.
However, she quickly wins his favor when she saves Arjie from his punishment work, telling Ammachi that she is treating him like a servant boy. Radha Aunty questions why Arjie doesn’t play with the others but seems to implicitly sense his sexuality and does not press him for the truth. Radha Aunty invites him into her room instead, and allows Arjie to dress up and play with her makeup and jewelry. Arjie questions Radha on when she’ll get married and repeats what he’s overheard the other adults say about the match: that she should accept it “because he’s an engineer and he doesn’t have insanity in his family" (49-50). At this point Arjie’s conception of love and marriage is unsullied and innocent, made up of fantasies from cinema and comic books. Radha humors his suggestions for her wedding.
After Arjie has been welcomed into Radha’s world as a potential bride with access to her makeup and jewels, he looks down on Tanuja, Her Fatness, adorned in the Bride-Bride costume because he now finds the costume pitiful compared to how he imagines Radha’s “expensive Manipuri sari” (51) will look. Bride-Bride is now just a “silly game” (52).
Shortly after Radha Aunty’s arrival, Arjie’s Amma asks whether he’d like to act in the play The King and I with his Radha Aunty. Recalling his jealousy at seeing other children actors who wore costumes and makeup during plays, he excitedly agrees despite his disappointment that the play does not end in a marriage. Arjie and Radha go to rehearsals at St. Theresa's Girls’ Convent.
Aunty Doris, who “had fair skin like a foreigner” (54) but spoke with a Sri Lankan accent, directs the play. At their first rehearsal, the other actors ask Radha to join a discussion started by Anil, another actor, about a song in the play. Anil and Radha take up opposite sides of the argument, delighting everyone with their playful banter. Another actress implies Anil is smitten with Radha, an idea that Radha dismisses. Anil offers Arjie and Radha a lift home that Radha eventually accepts. Radha lies to Ammachi about how they got home and offers no explanation to Arjie. They accept another lift after the next rehearsal, but once they come home they are confronted by Ammachi who is upset that Radha is spending time with a Sinhalese boy and risking perceived impropriety with the Nagendras.
Arjie has difficulty understanding Ammachi’s prejudice against the Sinhalese as most of his friends and his classmates are Sinhalese people. By eavesdropping on Janaki and Radha, Arjie hears Janaki explain that the banana seller told Ammachi about the rides. Radha uses the term “racist” and makes an allusion to an incident in the family that caused Ammachi’s prejudice.
Arjie wants to know what the word means and questions his father about both the word and the incident. Through this conversation Arjie learns that his great-grandfather was killed in the 1950s by the Sinhalese for being Tamil. When Arjie presses for more information, his father replies, “You’ll understand when you’re older” (59). This frustrates Arjie but also helps him understand more of the tensions in his own life, such as why his Ammachi was upset that Arjie was put into a Sinhalese school and also why the Tamil and Sinhalese cricket teams at school show poor sportsmanship to each other.
Janaki reveals to Radha that Ammachi told off Anil’s family, the Jayasinghes, for offering Radha Aunty rides. Janaki and Radha devise a plan for Radha to correct matters under the guise of taking the children to the sea so that Arjie and Radha can sneak away and visit Anil. When Arjie and Radha go to visit Anil they are greeted with hostility from Anil’s father because of the way Ammachi treated their family. Radha apologizes. As Anil and Radha say goodbye, Anil reveals that Ammachi told him about the engagement, but Radha suggests that it is actually more ambiguous.
Arjie realizes that Ammachi was nervous about Anil and Radha being in love and that is why she reacted this way. Arjie doubts that they’re in love because neither of them fit into his conception of love, but over the next few rehearsals, things escalate.
However, the blossoming relationship is interrupted when Anil and Radha are seen in public by Mala and Kanthi Aunty. After their exposure, Anil makes his feelings clear for Radha and argues that they could make their families understand. When they arrive home, Kanthi Aunty tells Ammachi. Ammachi and Kanthi Aunty scold Radha and threaten to take her out of the play. The fight escalates until Ammachi slaps Radha Aunty across the face and then tells her they’re sending Radha Aunty to Jaffna for a month to help her come to her senses.
Radha reveals to Mala Aunty that she has truly become romantically interested in Anil, but Mala Aunty warns Radha Aunty against mixed marriages as tensions are growing worse in the country between Tamils and the Sinhalese. Doris Aunty refuses to let Radha out of the play, and Ammachi reluctantly lets her continue but says she is still going to Jaffna. Doris’ true motive is that she wants Radha to get to know Anil to be sure about her feelings because Doris personally has doubts about her own mixed marriage. She reveals it has been difficult and questions whether her relationship was worth the sacrifices she and her husband made with their families. Radha continues to see Anil and resolves that once she comes back from Jaffna they will wed.
Radha leaves for Jaffna. Arjie continues to get to know Anil and is surprised by how kind and friendly he is compared to the other men in his life. One day after rehearsal when no one picks up Arjie, Anil drives him home to his grandparents’ house. They learn that there was trouble on Radha’s train home from Jaffna—the Sinhalese attacked the Tamilians. Arjie’s Amma speaks to Anil, and Anil’s presence at the house raises tensions among the adults.
As the family awaits Radha’s return, Colombo, where they live, is placed under curfew. When Radha returns, her face is swollen and bloodied and she has difficulty walking. Radha was assaulted by two men with a stick and belt until she was saved by a friend, Mr. Rasiah, who was able to speak Sinhalese.
After her return, Anil attempts to see her but is sent away. Radha Aunty, Janaki, and Arjie’s grandparents come to stay at Arjie’s house for safety and he observes a hardness and shift in Radha Aunty’s personality. At rehearsals, Anil tries to connect with Radha but she spurns him, even accusing him of mistreating her during a scene. After a private discussion with Anil, Radha tells Aunty Doris she is out of the play.
Rajan Nagendra and Radha become engaged. While the rest of the family is pleased with the match and Arjie finally sees his visions of the wedding decorations realized, he does not find pleasure in the ceremony. He finds “something important missing” (97) in the festivities. He cannot bear to watch the ceremony and walks to the back porch where he used to play Bride-Bride and reflects on how naive and innocent his views on marriage had been.
Analysis
This chapter parallels the previous chapter as they both deal with the custom of weddings. In the previous chapter, Arjie creates and plays with a childlike depiction of a wedding but is eventually excluded from this ritual he shares with his female cousins. In this chapter, Arjie has access to a real wedding through his Radha Aunty. However, as Arjie witnesses her love with Anil and the prejudices surrounding that relationship, he becomes wary of the actual ritual as well. The irony of this chapter centers around Arjie’s initial enthusiasm for the wedding against his actual feelings during the ceremony. Once Arjie gets to know Radha Aunty, her relationship with Anil, and the complicated circumstances surrounding her marriage, he has a more nuanced understanding of marriage and the sacrifices involved.
By the end of the chapter, Arjie feels so disillusioned with the wedding that he cannot even bear to watch the ceremony. The King and I, the play that Radha, Arjie, and Anil act in, foreshadows Radha and Anil’s doomed relationship. Before joining the play, Arjie expresses his disappointment to his mother that the King does not marry the heroine. Amma explains that during that time people did not marry outside of their race and that people still tend to prefer to marry their own kind. The same tensions and themes in the play are paralleled in Radha and Anil’s romance. Ultimately, due to their families and ethnic differences, Radha and Anil do not marry, showing Arjie that his innocent fantasies of the wedding are naive in comparison to the actual reality of love in the adult world.
In this and the next two sections of the book Arjie will become close to someone else who is marginalized or forbidden from attaining their desires: Radha Aunty, who wants to marry Anil but cannot because of the Tamil-Sinhalese divide; Amma, who wishes she could be with her former love Daryl, a Burgher; and Jegan, a Tamil friend of Appa’s who is also secretly queer. Arjie forms a “bond with other-gendered subjects of shared oppression,” Sandeep Bakshi writes, finding more in common with, for example, women, than with boys his own age. This bond with Radha Aunty and Amma “highlights the identification of the queer subject with the subjects of patriarchal subordination.”
Darryn Edwards explains how Arjie “develops alliances with each of these characters and coinhabits their liminal spaces with them.” Liminal spaces reveal their importance in the first section, “Pigs Can’t Fly,” with Arjie’s desire to be part of the world of the girls, both in terms of the games and his aunt and mother’s room where they apply makeup and get dressed. Arjie also uses a “metaphysical space: his imagination,” which is where he “engages in a form of gender-play, blurring the lines of the male/female binary.” With Radha he enters the liminal space of the theater, “which provides an overt cover for his covert desires” of dressing up, and is “a safe space for Radha Aunty.” Daryl and Amma use the safe space of the private bungalow, and “the connection Jegan and Arjie share is a private space where Jegan can express his frustration with unfair treatment of Tamils, and where they can coexist in their queerness—albeit subliminally.”
Unfortunately, as aforementioned, there is a similar pattern that all of these characters share: “shame, violence, assimilation or dismissal,” and “a part of the characters is always broken when they give up their final attempts at resistance.” Radha is glumly resigned to marry Rajan, a man she does not love, and her relationship with Arjie is never the same. Amma gives up her quest for justice for Daryl and returns to her unhappy home life. Jegan refuses to be shunted aside in Appa’s company and persecuted for his former association as a Tiger, so he quits and departs. They leave behind their private, liminal spheres and return to the “public”—they are good Tamils, good wives, good daughters. Arjie himself does not follow this pattern, however; we will look at this fact in “The Best School of All” analysis.
