BEGC 103
INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH
IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment July 2023 & January 2024
Section A
Q 1. Explain the reference to the context of the following:
(i) With candles and lanterns.
throwing giant scorpion shadows
On the sun-baked walls
They searched for him.
Ans. Reference: These lines are taken from Night of the Scorpion by Nissim Ezekiel.
Context: Ezekiel gives the picture of a real incident in his family. On a rainy night in the village, the poet’s mother is stung by a scorpion. At this time, the poet focuses on how the superstition and scientific temperament work.
The neighbours swarming like flies and trying to mitigate her pain by various methods reflect the essence of community life.
The father embodies the skeptic, rational approach. In the last lines, a telling effect is achieved when the mother heaves a sigh of relief on her children being spared by the scorpion. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The experience is distinctly Indian and the imagery vivid and sensitive. ‘Night of the Scorpion’ evokes superstitious practices still prevalent in the society.
It also established the link between the domestic surrounding community. The poem demonstrates effective use of parallelism.
(ii) Fed on God for years
All her feasts were
monotonous For the only
dish was always God And
the rest mere condiments.
Ans. Context: These lines are taken from poem ‘Blood’ by Kamala Das.
Explanation: In a restraint tone and tautness of language, the poet has expressed a remorse feeling at having failed to abide by the values linked to the old house and the grandmother.
At the literal level, the poem tells about the remote ancestry and the old blood of her family. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The great grandmother was deeply religious having been “Fed on God for years”, and proud of the purity of her family’s blood.
However, she was concerned about the dilapidated old house. The speaker had promised her that she would renovate the house when she grew up and became very rich.
After she grew up, she failed to honour her words and retrieved the house from ruin for she “had learnt by then/most lessons of defeat”.
Towards the end, the poem’s allegorical significance is apparent when the poet substitutes the fall of the old house with the fall of her own old values and blames herself for the damage done to the family.
(iii) And afterwards we climbed a tree, she said,
Not very tall, but full of leaves
Like those of a fig tree,
And we were very innocent about it.
Ans. Reference: These lines are taken from poem Looking For a Cousin On a Swing by A.K. Ramanujan. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
Context: The poem “Looking for a Cousin on a Swing” has 23 lines written in simple diction and unadorned style with irregular metre. A boy and his cousin feature in the poem. The boy is the narrator.
The use of “then” and “now”, and “before” and “after” conveys a time sense. The poem depicts a scene when the boy is six or seven and his cousin four or five. They are on a village swing, sitting against or facing each other.
The poet uses “innocent” to convey their act. After that, they climb a tree which is not very tall, and ‘full of leaves’. They were innocent about all that they did on the tree. The poet recalls the childhood days in India.
He tries to depict the past events to give a comparison with the present. His attitude to his past is neither sentimental nor nostalgic, but ironic.
The impact of the poem comes from what’s happened to the cousin, the little girl who was “innocent” about feeling her cousin or climbing up a tree.
The girl, now a grown up woman, is still looking for that experience, but the innocence is not there. She now lives in “cities with fifteen suburbs”.
Now she goes on hunting for companions of her lust. She is ready to ‘give’ herself to anyone but for asking “if someone suddenly sneezed”. The theme of the love though it is not stated explicitly.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
(iv) Some are purple a gold-flocked grey,
For her who has journeyed through life midway, Whose hands have cherished, whose love has blest
And Cradled fair sons on the faithful breast.
Ans. Context: These lines are taken from ‘Bangle Sellers’ by Sarojini Naidu.
Explanation: The poet says the heart’s desire of a bride is the rich red colour of her bangles. The would-be bride reacts to the laughter of his close friends as they tease her about her coming marriage.
She sheds tears as she leaves for her husband’s house. The bridal laughter and the bridal tears are like the bangles she wears, “Tinkling, luminous, tender and clear”.
‘Bangle Sellers’ relates to the different stages in a woman’s life and each stage has different bangles appropriate to it. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The “rainbow- tinted circles of light” carried by the bangle sellers to the temple fare are lustrous tokens of radiant lives/for happy daughters and happy wives’.
The poem focuses on the radiance and not on the desolation. The poem links the description with reflection in ‘Bangle Sellers’. The poem has 4 stanzas of 6 lines each rhyming aa bb cc.
Q. 2. Discuss the brief history of short story writing in English in India.
Ans. Interest in stories is as old as human history. Before the art of writing was known, early human beings must have narrated tales to one another.
They were perhaps transmitted by word of mouth from one generation to the next. The oldest recorded example is perhaps the Egyptian tale of The Two Brothers dating from 3200 B.C. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The Jataka and Panchatantra tales are India’s contribution to the world of stories and have continued to interest people through the ages.
These along with fables of Aesop, stories in the Bible and the tales from the Arabian Nights are all precursors of the short story.
The short story as a literary form emerged in the early 19th century. However, the term ‘short story’ was used in the second half of the nineteenth century. The reasons that cause the rise of the short story are:
(a) Rise in the number of reading public. More and more people started reading fiction.
(b) Increase in the number of periodicals that could publish fiction;
(c) Surge in literacy; education was now more widely accessible;
(d) Hurry and pace of modern life.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The first three factors also caused the rise of the novel in the 19th century. These days people do not have the time to read such long stories.
Short stories can be read while travelling or relaxing and do not need a substantial investment of time.
The Development of the Short Story We will know about some well-known story writers, who were masters of this art.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864): He is an American novelist and a short story writer.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849): Poe is a famous 19th century American short storywriter. Both Hawthorne and Poe have written about the unusual and the terrible.
Their stories are full of horror and the supernatural. Poe’s ‘The Mosque of the Red Death’ is an appealing short story.
Guy de Maupassant (1850-93): A French writer, Maupassant is one of the masters of the short story. He wrote about the private joys and sorrows of individuals instead of about momentous events.
With his acute observation, he portrayed the world as he saw it. His stories move swiftly and logically giving only the essential details of character and situation.
His stories end with a sting in the tail or an ironic twist that takes the reader by surprise.
‘The Necklace’ is an example. A pretty and vain young wife of a clerk wants a higher social status and borrows a diamond necklace from a rich friend to wear at the Minister’s ball. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
She is a tremendous success as even the Minister notices her, but the fabulous evening brings the seeds of tragedy, for she loses the necklace.
She suffers a ten-year period of drudgery and deprivation to buy a necklace to replace the lost one.
When she finally reveals this to her friend, from whom she had borrowed the necklace, the friend remarks: ‘But mine was fake!’ This, then, is the sting-in-the-tail, a technique that Anton Chekov (1860-1904), the Russian master of the story also adopted.
Chekov’s stories probe the tragic element of the small things in life. ‘The Kiss’ is the story of a shy young man who, during a dinner party, ventures into a dark room and he is kissed by a young lady who had probably mistaken him for her lover.
The young man develops an absurd romantic dream around the incident which only shatters when he finally realizes that the kiss was not meant for him. Chekov explores the pathos of the situation.
R.L. Stevenson (1850-1894): His stories feature evil action and moral corruption. Thomas Hardy’s (1840-1928) Wessex Tales carry a sense of tragedy that pervades all Hardy’s work. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
Henry James (1843-1946) and Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) were interested not so much in brevity as in form.
The conventional short story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Stories written at present are more open-ended, in the sense that there is no clear beginning, middle and end.
In India, the short story as a literary form is popular in all the regional languages. Many of the short stories written in vernacular languages are translated into English.
Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao, Anita Desai and Kamala Das are some of the famous Indian short story writers in English.
Writers are now writing different types of short stories. There are the short stories published by popular periodicals and ‘literary’ short stories.
These stories racy and full of interesting incidents. We read them for enjoyment. When we read a ‘literary’ short story, we get enjoyment and get an understanding about life and human nature.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
Q. 3. Analyze the novel The Binding Vine and discuss the techniques followed by Shashi Deshpande in it.
Ans. We shall discuss some salient features of the novel.
Plot
The plot of The Binding Vine has three strands running parallel. It has the stories of three women, Kalpana, who is comatose; Mira, who is dead; and Urmi, who discovers life’s meaning through the stories of Kalpana and Mira.
These women are different in age and time.
The main plot revolves around Urmi and her grief at Anu’s death. The stories of Mira and Kalpana are the two sub-plots that join the main plot.
The total effect is of a unified story – the story of women’s lives, their fears, problems and aspirations. The Binding Vine does not have the traditional pattern of unity of time and action. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The action moves back and forth with the past and the present overlapping. Set in the India of the 1980s, Urmi, Vanaa, Harish, Kishore, Inni, Dr. Bhaskar are all members of the Indian urban middle class, while Shakutai and her family are from the lower class.
Mira, Baiajji and others belong to the time past. The time-shift is managed through the interweaving of the subplots to bring them close to us.
The two subplots – Mira and Kalpana – are intricately woven with the main plot of Urmi. Urmi and Mira are related but they are separated by death. Urmi and Kalpana are strangers but they are united by human concerns.
Mira’s writings provide the bridge; in the Kalpana-Urmi relations, Shakutai becomes the link. Although the plot does not have a traditional beginning, middle and an end, the overall effect is of a unified whole.
The plot of the novel has progression and it is not a static plot. It advances convincingly and reaches its climax with memory, flashbacks, pre-conscious and subconscious reflexes.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The Binding Vine has many strands running side by side. It has two rape cases, reported after they have already happened.
However, rape is not the central event. The novel starts with Urmi grieving over the death of her infant daughter Anusha.
The novel also tells about several other deaths reported at short intervals – Baiajji, Aju, Urmi’s father, Mira, Sulu and Kalpana’s near-dead condition.
The novel focuses on women who are desperate with grief. The novel also has violence, fear, insecurity, rape and memory.
Urmi gives the unifying strand by interacting with other characters and her comments on them. The novel is divided in four parts but joined by this common strand.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
Part One has Urmi’s grief at her loss. An important streak in her character is revealed in the starting of the novel. Urmi harbors a kind of grudge against her mother.
Urmi’s strained relations with her mother is revealed slowly to heighten the suspense.
Urmi and Vanaa discuss how Urmi, as a girl, used to wear the badly-stitched dresses made by Baiajji, rejecting the beautiful, expensive dresses brought by her mother.
She complaint that Inni has never been a mother to her. Urmi remembers her Baiajji with deep affection, but she is oftenrude to her mother. This sets the tone for mother-daughter tension.
Towards the end of the novel, Inni tells Urmi that the decision to send Urmi to Ranidur was taken by her father without consulting her.
It reveals two aspects: one, in the patriarchal system and second, a woman suffers in silence. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
After that Urmi realizes her mother’s agony. She feels sorry for Inni. It leads to Urmi’s growth.
The narrational technique used in the novel is first person. Urmi tells the story. Events flow back and forth without and various strands are linked smoothly through Urmi.
The narration opens with Urmi’s shattered state of mind: the death of Anu reminds her of several deaths in the family, the fear of death and the human ability to get over it.
During the mourning period, she knows about Mira through her poems. She gets the trunk containing Mira’s writings and knows about a woman’s life from yet another angle.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
Urmi also knows about Kalpana, the rape victim. Kalpana is in a coma, and she knows about her through her mother Shakutai.
Elaborate descriptions in the novel are given by Mira and Urmi’s comments on them. Comments, conversations and memory also tell about various situations in the novel.
The structure of the novel is the essential organizing principle. It is not only the “subject-matter”, but a combination of component parts put together according to the principle of decorum.
The characters, action, style of narration and dialogue are all used in a befitting manner. It is the arrangement of the constituent parts.
The structure of The Binding Vine is based on the stories of three women, but the responsibility to reveal the stories is given to Urmi.
She tells her own story of grief and in the process knows about two other women. It exposes the patriarchal system and the novel comes close to a feminist novel. The plot revolves around the themes of death, rape, fear and violence.
The death of Anu, Urmi’s infant daughter, makes her hysterical. She realizes that she is not the only sufferer but there are other women who have greater sufferings.
The stories of Kalpana and Mira are significant and they get attached to the main plot.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
Point of view is the perspective through which the novelist presents his characters, events, episodes, actions and setting.
This is the narrative technique adopted by the writer. The Binding Vine is told from the point of view of Urmi. Everything happens around her or within her purview.
She is the judge, the commentator and the prime mover in the novel. The reader knows the episodes through her. The characters too come to life, as Urmi wants them to.
But Shashi Deshpande does not make her all powerful. Urmi’s comments are countered and balanced through situational facts.
We know Urmi through her words and actions, as also through her motives and interactions with people around her. The other characters gain personality through her. She determines to fight to be her “self”.
This is a big resolve. Urmi is grief stricken and she has to struggle to get over it. Urmi unfolds her life story through her memory, through flashbacks and through the present.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The first person point of view has limitations because one person has to tell whatever he/she sees, experiences and thinks.
But, to get over this, Shashi Deshpande uses the diary technique. Mira is given a voice because she has written down her thoughts. These are Mira’s thoughts as interpreted by Urmi.
Kalpana’s story comes to us primarily through Shakutai. Shakutai is not the narrator of the novel, but she gets the duty by circumstances.
Urmi does not know Kalpana at all. Then how would she narrate her story? The point of view is Urmi’s but the narration is Shakutai’s. As a mother, she tells Urmi, how her daughter behaved, how she looked and how smart she was.
Urmi reacts to her description and generates a discussion, which further reveals some more facts.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
Urmi is the bridge that links the stories and gives them meaning. Her comments are revealing. As Shashi Deshpande observes, “Urmi is more than a filter, a medium through which the other stories come through…”
The Binding Vine as a Stream of Consciousness Novel
Stream of consciousness refers to a narrative technique by which a writer chooses to tell his story.
William James used this phrase for the first time to characterize the unbroken flow of thought and awareness in the waking mind. James reference was to psychology.
In literature, when a story runs in the mind of the main character, his senses seem to work in the past. The character remembers his past and the flow of thought takes us back and forth. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The thoughts, memories, feelings and past associations create the world of the novel. We see and feel everything in relation to the character.
To describe the scenes, the novelist uses interior monologue, long introspective passages, flashbacks, dreams and fantasies.
In interior monologue, the characters reveal their thoughts and feelings by talking to themselves.
The time is not clock time; it is psychological time. Clock time is a measure to determine time in terms of duration – hours days, weeks, months and years.
Psychological time has no relation to clock time; it is experienced by the individual and is subjective. Psychological time shifts constantly from past to present and to the future.
Many writers have used the stream of consciousness technique but we cannot say that they all followed a similar pattern. They have perfected it from time to time by making minor changes, keeping the main pattern intact.
The Binding Vine is a stream of consciousness novel because it is told from the consciousness of the main character, Urmi.
It is through Urmi’s laments that what happened to Urmi, her daughter died and she is grief-stricken. Her consciousness works through associations.
Urmi’s staying with her grandparents through her thoughts going back and forth reveal this fact. From her conversation, interior- monologue and her thoughts, we know her feelings.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
Her childhood was a happy one, but she missed her parents and held Inni her mother, responsible for sending her away.
Urmi often makes use of the interior monologue when she comments on life situations and Mira’s philosophy of life.
For example, we do not know that Mira was raped in marriage; we only know that she dreaded her husband’s advances.
Urmi comments, “What has happened to Kalpana happened to Mira too”.
This comment is not spoken out, it is nonverbal and yet, it is revealing.
A powerful example of interior-monologue is Urmi’s summing up at the end of the novel. It gives us solid proof of Urmi’s optimism, her philosophy of life, her strength and her success in getting over her grief.
In the beginning of the novel she resolves,
“I will not break” and by the end she shows that she is not broken.
The time used is psychological time but it is intermingled with clock-time in the Kalpana episode. Kalpana’s rape takes place in the present but we know through Shakutai. Now, it is Shakutai’s memory that is at work.
The present is revealed with the day-to-day happenings in Shakutai’s life – Sulu’s suicide, her husband’s visit and Prakash’s wayward behaviour.
Shakutai reminiscences only when she is recounting some past experience. Otherwise it is her present that is more saddening and the future that is scary.
During this period, Urmi also lives in the present and records her movements in clock-time, like her visit to darhaskar, her stroll on the sea-shore and the second visit of Amrut. Past and present mingle.
Q. 4. Discuss the style and themes of the poems of Kamala Das with special reference to the peomsprescribed in your course.
Ans. My Grandmother’s House was published in Kamala Das’s first collection of poems Summer in Calcutta in 1965. The poem has a wistful and nostalgic theme.
The house is almost made into an entity. It epitomizes innocence, happiness and all things positive, things that are associated with childhood.
In this poem, Das reveals her desperation and frustration with her present life. The poet had spent a part of her childhood in this house she talks about.
Giving a special place in the poetry, she is nostalgic about the house and grandmother’s love.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
A hot noon in Malabar is implies a deeply felt yearning for the past, for a state of joyfulness the poet did not find in her adult life, crushed under the weight of a traditional male-dominated society.
The home is associated with love, affection and joyfulness in contrast to the vacuous present where there is no love.
The poet reminds her husband that once she was also the object of love and affection. In her grandmother’s house she had felt secure and protected.
The poem, thus, is an expression of her intense longing to be back at that home which signified nurture and sustenance, a house that supported creativity.
There is also a wistful air in the question “that she too had lived in such a house and was proud and loved…”IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The whole presentation reads almost like a fairy tale as she writes that once upon a time, in the past, the poet had led a happy life but that is all gone now.
The loss of her grandmother also led to the loss of the protection provided by the house.
Now she leads a life of abject poverty, a poverty of love and affection and begs for crumbs from strangers. The image of begging and the dog highlight the misery of her present existence.
The confessional tone is brought out in the reference to her life. The poet addresses the spouse. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The use of the word darling denoting affection adds an appropriate note of familiarity but it also manages to convey a tentative note to the entire relationship..
The word “least” in the last line suggests her desperation. While the theme of lack of love in the domestic sphere is very much a part of Das’s world, the note of wistful yearning is equally typical.
The image of the snake is also a recurrent image in Das’s poetry. The dilapidated house, closed windows overrun by vegetation is where the slithering snakes embrace books.
The snake’s embrace is suffocating, life threatening. The sexual overtone can hardly be ignored. In “The Stone Age” she refers to the lover’s hand as a “hooded snake”.
The evocative quality of the line “pick an armful of darkness” is extremely impressive.
A sense of deep and brooding melancholy hangs over the entire visualization where there is a preponderance of darkness, death, blood that is cold, windows that do not see and air that is frozen which conveys to the reader the poet’s state of mind.
Hence, it is said that Das’s poetry is intensely autobiographical. Though on the surface it seems that Das has an acute obsession with love, at a deeper level it just reveals a woman’s insecurity in a society where she is just an object rather than an agent.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
The poem “Blood” describes her beloved Nalapat house and gives an account of the aristocratic lineage of the house and the members in it.
It is done through the lamentations on the part of her great grandmother who seem to be chiding her for having neglected the tradition and conventions of such a family. The house which is very old is now in a dilapidated state.
It symbolizes for her the crumbling down of a social system, the matriarchal system which the family followed.
Kamala Das feels that she has failed in shouldering the responsibility of upkeeping the family tradition which is to be done through the female line in the family.
A feeling of having betrayed her great grandmother gnaws at her always because of this. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
There is a hidden confession from the poet of her having distanced herself from the matriarchal tradition and a feeling of guilt over the thought that she may have dishonoured the family with her unconventional behaviour as she herself suggests in My Story.
Therefore, she asks forgiveness from her ancestors. She feels that she has let down her family and its traditions because of her failure to feel proud of having been born in such a house. Thus, there is a nostalgic longing for a past in her works.
A past when she enjoyed the comforts of a matriarchal joint family. But this longing does not deter her from accepting change or considering modern out looks as inessential. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
To her change is necessary so as to bring a progressive attitude in people. But this should not be brought forth at the expense of tradition.
Besides, she also does not favour change disregarding all feminine qualities in women.
Q. 5. Critically analyze the story The Other Woman by Dina Mehta.
Ans. “The Other Woman”, which was published in the collection of short stories, The Other Woman, and Other Stories (1981), gives a humorous and a highly ironical account of the domestic conflicts between Maganlal and his wife.
The story reflects on shallow sophistication and a superficial understanding of the “aesthetic”.
Maganlal, a married man of thirty-six, suffers from insomnia and has phobia of the darkness.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
When the story starts, it is night and he has switched on all the lights in the house except for the room where his wife, Vimla, is sleeping.
At his reading desk, he sits to work on his manuscript but his thoughts are on his wife who has accused him of something serious and then has fallen asleep in the middle of his explanations.
He married Vimla three years ago and now his fanciful image of a docile wife has been shattered.
During the marriage, people gossiped that he had won the hand of Vimla only because of his wealth as Vimla’s brother had squandered away his dead father’s money leaving the family in destitute.
Then Maganlal had not paid attention to the talks because he was proud of his success as a scriptwriter for six super hit Hindi movies. He considered himself a brilliant writer.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
Maganlal imitates Hollywood movies but adds the right mix of all the popular ingredients like comedy, fusion music and dance, romance and action but this does not, to his mind, take away anything from his brilliance.
He is proud of his creation, the character of Jit Bharati played by the actor Nikhil Fernandes, who is now a superstar because of his scripts.
In fact, he wishes to have Nikhil’s good looks which, he suspects, are appreciated by Vimla. However, Vimla’s brother makes fun of him and his writing.
Maganlal is thinking about all this sitting at his desk with his manuscript. He tries once again to focus on his work but his mind drifts away into other thoughts.
The story is continued by relating Maganlal’s thoughts as he sits there.
Maganlal’s friends ask him to devote more time to his family jewellery business than to his writing, but he finds satisfaction and pleasure in his writing and the success of the movies even though all the profits are minted by others.
The source of Maganlal’s riches is the jewellery business and not his successful scripts.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
On this, he and Vimla have a heated argument. Vimla, who has a degree in English literature, expresses her opinion that her husband’s stories lack aesthetic depth.
Vimla asks Maganlal to follow writers like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Samuel Beckett who have been admired for their artistic endeavours.
Vimla’s conditioning, part of which derives from her education and part from her brother, has led her to respect and admire a specific type of art and hate another.
Maganlal does not understand much of Vimla’s critique of his work but is very upset that his wife should look down upon the writing he is so proud of.
He gives vent to his frustration by asserting that he is the master of the house and would do as he pleased.
However, no more he can write about Jit because Vimla’s criticism brings down his own dissatisfaction with the “bumptious” or conceited character to the surface. For this he is losing his sleep.IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
After many days of restlessness following the incident, Maganlal decides to write a new type of story, one which Vimla would be proud of.
He starts devoting all his time to the script and even works late at night on it. Besides, unlike h work which he discussed with Vimla, he keeps this script secret from everyone.
Vimla mistakenly attributes Maganlal’s changed behaviour to the assumption that he is having an affair with another woman. This is a humorous as well as an ironic turn in the story.
Maganlal’s confusion at this sudden charge convinces Vimla of his guilt and all his explanations fall on deaf ears.
In the subsequent days, Vimla tries to make Maganlal ‘confess’ the name of this imagined other woman and her methods for doing so involve everything from seduction to prayers. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
At this point. It is revealed that the night when this story opens has followed just one such day of fighting between the husband and the wife.
Maganlal is still sitting at his desk without having written anything. As the dawn approaches, a tired Magnalal returns to his bedroom to sleep for a few hours. He is woken up by the sound of voices from the living room.
Sunil, Vimla’s arrogant, good for-nothing brother, claims to disdain money in favour of ‘higher’ things in life but often borrows it from Maganlal.
Vimla leaves the two men alone to talk. Sunil makes a rude joke about the fact that he had not thought a dull man like Maganlal can have an affair with any woman. Sunil pompously demands that Maganlal take an oath of never cheating on his wife.
Maganlal feels offensive and slaps Sunil and shouts that he would never leave the other woman come what may. IGNOU BEGC 103 Solved Free Assignment
Of course, the other woman does not exist, but Maganlal wants to make it clear that he would not be dictated to by a wastrel like Sunil.
Hearing this, Vimla comes running from the bedroom and pleads with Maganlal, crying at his feet.
Taken aback, Maganlal is about to help up his wife when he realizes that he must not give any opportunity of retaliation to Sunil. He asks Sunil to leave the house, and then turns to Vimla.