You Bring the Distant Near

As the Das women navigate their complex family dynamics and cultural identities, they encounter strife and find solidarity. In the novel’s first four chapters, Ranee and Rajeev’s fighting rattles the Das family. The factors that feed into their disputes are a complicated combination of money problems, personal losses, and Ranee’s lack of agency. In Chapter 1, Sonia postulates that her parents’ marital woes can be traced back to the fact that her mother had no say in the match: “Maybe it’s because she was only eighteen when her parents married her off. Baba got to pick her out of three possible brides, but she had no choice” (16). However, Chapter 10 suggests that arranged marriage, which is a traditional institution in Bengali culture, is not the deciding factor in their marital strife: Ranee recalls that Rajeev was a “sweet man she had begun to love after their wedding, before the pregnancies, the miscarriages, the moves, and the money worries” (170). The Das family moves from country to country because of Rajeev’s work. By the time Sonia is 15, she has lived on four different continents. These moves lead to unstable finances and make their cultural identity, in Sonia’s words, “complicated” (12).