In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's short story, Clothes (page 533), Essay

In Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's short story, Clothes (page 533), Sumita, the protagonist, comes to America where she exp - Essay Example Conflicts in the Life of Sumita Culminated through the Symbolic Scheme Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s fictions are generally set against the background of India or in America and mostly they centre round the experiences of the South Asian immigrants especially the women. The story â€Å"Clothes† is not an exception in this regard. The story presents the transition that the protagonist, Sumita undergoes in her life. The story revolves round the transition of Sumita from a young girl to a woman; from woman to a wife and finally facing the climax and the predicament in her life by being a widow. Sumita accepts the tradition of her society and accepts the concept of arranged marriage and marries a man whom she has never met before. She accepts the fact and is shown at the outset of the story to explore the unexplored and know the unknown and with this vision; she whole heartedly starts dreaming of her new life which is going to place her to a complete different socio-cultural milieu. She undergoes a paradoxical transition in her life and that evolves at different times through her clothes and their colours (Almeida, â€Å"The politics of mourning: Grief Management in Cross-cultural Fiction†). Conflict essentially builds up and strengthens the dramatic qualities of any fiction and that conflict does not necessarily mean a conflict with an antagonist in its physical form. The antagonist as in the case is society and the cross cultural transition which treats the existential discourse of the protagonist. Sumita in the US faces difficulty to adept complete change in her attire from eastern styling to that of western. The conflict which she faces is from the transition that she undergoes while changing her identity from wife to a women. One of those dresses includes a T-shirt which is orange in color and symbolizes hope and change on a brighter note. But the destined predicament at the last segment of the story where Sumita has to encounter an unfortu nate incident in the face of her husband’s murder washes all sort of colour and possibility in her life and places her with a confrontation of uncertainty where she is confused to continue her life in a country where the life of her husband was not secured even or get back to the soil i.e. her country from where she was uprooted long back as she fails to identify herself in both the nations and their societies. This is probably the greatest threat encountered by the protagonist of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s short story, â€Å"Clothes† presented in the form of diasporas of existential and identity crisis from the perspective of feminist discourse. Transition in Sumita’s life does not only take place at physical plane but it takes place also mentally. Quite natural to the human nature, it gets reflected through the outward appearance of Sumita precisely through her clothes and its colours. The Indian traditional attire for women is Sari and Sumita at the beginning of the story is seen clad in it fully at one with the tradition of her soil. The selection of each cloth in the story and its colour has a purpose. The story begins with a stage in Sumita’s life when she is about to be a bride and puts a yellow sari, all set to meet her prospective