Summary
Narrated by an unnamed first-person narrator, “The Quilt” opens with the narrator commenting on how, when she throws a quilt over herself in winter, the shadow the quilt makes on the wall appears to sway like an elephant. The image evokes memories from the past. However, she warns, the quilt-inspired memories are more terrifying than romantic. The narrator then begins to explain the memories she associates with elephants and quilts.
As a little girl living in India, the narrator fights with her brothers and their friends. Her aggression confuses her. Her other sisters are busy drawing admirers to themselves, but the narrator fights with anyone she runs into. When the narrator’s mother (“Amma”) goes to Agra for a week, she leaves the narrator with Begum Jaan, the mother’s adopted sister. The mother knows there is no one in Begum Jaan’s house—an opulent Indian Muslim household—that the narrator can get into a fight with. The narrator says it is a severe punishment: Begum Jaan’s quilt is etched in memory like the scar left by a blacksmith’s brand.
The narrator digresses to explain that Begum Jaan’s parents married her off to Nawab Sahib because the public considers him virtuous. No one has ever seen a nautch girl (dancer) or prostitute in his house, and he has performed hajj—the holy Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca—and has helped other undertake it. Nawab Sahib has a strange hobby, however: he keeps an “open house” for students, inviting “young, fair, slender-waisted boys” to live with him and paying their expenses.
When he married Begum Jaan, Nawab Sahib “tucked her away” in his house like he does with his other possessions. He forgot about her, and the “frail, beautiful” lady of the house wasted away, anguished and lonely. The narrator wonders when Begum Jaan’s life began: when she made the mistake of being born, when she came to the nawab’s house as his bride and “started counting her days,” or when she watched through the drawing-room door as an increasing number of “firm-calved, supple-waisted” boys were treated to delicacies from the kitchen. She would glimpse the boys in their fragrant, flimsy shirts and feel as though she was being dragged over burning coals.
The narrator explains that Begum Jaan tried to get her husband to pay attention to her, resorting to night-long readings of the Quran, amulets, black magic, and other techniques to retain his straying affection. But Nawab Sahib continued to ignore her. Turning to books, Begum Jaan found no relief, only becoming depressed by the romance and sentimentality.
Begum Jaan lay awake yearning for love. She wanted to burn her clothes because there was no reason to dress up for a husband who was “too busy chasing the gossamer shirts.” He didn’t allow her to go out. Her only company was free-loading relatives who would stay for months, eating her rich food and getting warm clothes made for themselves.
Begum Jaan wondered why a person must live, particularly a life like hers. Then Rabbu, a woman Begum Jaan hired as a masseuse, “rescued her from the fall.” After hiring Rabbu, Begum Jaan’s thin body began to fill out, her cheeks glowed. Rabbu’s special oil massage brought Begum Jaan back from her half-dead state. The narrator says you won’t find the recipe for the oil even in the most exclusive magazines.
Ending her digression to explain Begum Jaan’s past, the narrator says that Begum Jaan is around forty years old when the narrator first meets her. Reclining on a couch, Begum Jaan looks grand and important, sitting regally in a purple shawl. Rabbu sits behind Begum Jaan and massages her waist. The narrator is fascinated by Begum Jaan’s looks and wants to sit beside her for hours, adoring her. Begum Jaan’s complexion is marble white; her hair, perfectly parted down the center, is black and bathed in oil. Sometimes Begum Jaan’s face seems to change shape and look as though it is the face of a young boy.
Analysis
The cryptic tone of the story’s opening lines establishes the suggestiveness that characterizes the telling of “The Quilt.” Not able to declare what exactly happened to her as a little girl, the narrator signals to the reader that the memories she associates with her quilt making an elephant shape are traumatic—“more terrifying than romantic.” In establishing the narrator’s terror, Chughtai cryptically introduces the major theme of child sexual abuse, and hints at the traumatic event at the heart of the narrator’s reticence.
Chughtai introduces the themes of patriarchal oppression, class oppression, and homoeroticism—particularly unacknowledged homoeroticism—with the character of Nawab Sahib. Although he marries a woman, Begum Jaan, and is known publicly as a man of great virtue, the Muslim nobleman’s lack of interest in female dancers and sex workers is not indicative of virtuousness but of homosexuality; once she is married to the nawab, Begum Jaan discovers he has no sexual interest in her.
Nawab Sahib’s and Begum Jaan’s arranged marriage is one of convenience, allowing the nawab to maintain his standing in the community as a man of virtue. In reality, he ignores Begum Jaan and her sexual needs, installing her like a possession in her gender-segregated wing of the household. Meanwhile, she watches a stream of young males enter the nawab’s section of the home. The suggestive tone of the narration means nothing is declared outright, but the nawab’s “strange hobby” of inviting young male students to live with him while he pays their expenses implies that he fulfills his sexual urges with them. While the ages of the students are not given, the narrator describes them as “young, fair, slender-waisted boys,” which hints at a significant age difference between the nawab and the boys.
In addition to the power imbalance that comes with the age difference, the nawab is a nobleman, giving him economic and social power over the students who come to stay with him. With this combination of details, Chughtai presents a circumstance in which the reader can infer that child sexual abuse is happening in the nawab’s male-only portion of the house, which Begum Jaan only glimpses through from where she and the female servants are sequestered.
Feeling oppressed by her husband, Begum Jaan tries what she can to woo him, but fails. Powerless to influence him but having to obey him nonetheless, Begum Jaan falls into a depression, wasting away like a neglected houseplant. It is only once Rabbu, the masseuse, enters her life that Begum Jaan regains her vitality.
Continuing with her suggestive tone, the narrator discusses the “special massage oil” that brings Begum Jaan back to life—a euphemism for the sexual release Rabbu brings to Begum Jaan. In this way, Chughtai returns to the theme of homoeroticism with an instance of situational irony: While the nawab satisfies his sexual needs with boys in his side of the house, Begum Jaan fulfills her needs with the help of a hired female servant.
