The award-winning poet Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s first collection of short stories, Arranged Marriage , was published in 1995, and in 1996, it won the American Book Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award for Fiction, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize for Fiction. The collection was well received by the public, quickly becoming a…
Tag: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Meeting Mrinal – Setting
Immigration from India to the United States Indian immigration to the United States was uncommon before 1900; Hindu beliefs discouraged it, as did the British colonizers of India, who restricted the movements of the Indian people. In 1946, the Luce-Celler bill was signed into law. This law permitted one hundred Indians per year into the…
Meeting Mrinal – Literary Devices
Setting The story is set in two locations: India, where Asha was brought up and married and which is presented only in her memories and California in the United States, where she now lives. As well as being two separate countries, India and the United States have two different cultures and sets of social expectations….
Meeting Mrinal – Themes
Women Caught between Two Cultures “Meeting Mrinal” shows the predicament of Asha, a woman who grew up in India, had an arranged marriage according to Indian tradition, and then had to adapt to a new lifestyle and culture as a divorced woman. The first change, taking place before the story opens, comes when she immigrates…
Meeting Mrinal – Characters
Asha When Dinesh asks his mother how the meeting with Mrinal went, Asha admits that she “made a mess of things.” She offers to tell him about it over some hot milk with pistachios. Smiling, he agrees. As she prepares the milk, she plans the letter she will write to Mrinal to tell her the…
Meeting Mrinal – Summary
When “Meeting Mrinal” opens, Asha, the Indian-born protagonist, who now lives in California, is somewhat guiltily preparing a ready-made pizza for her teenage son, Dinesh. Asha’s husband, Mahesh, with whom she had an arranged marriage in India, has left her for a younger white woman. Though Asha used to spend hours preparing complex Indian meals…