The Storyteller's Secret

Jaya cries for the love lost between her grandmother and Stephen; she also realizes that Lena doesn’t know her biological parentage. Jaya connects her inability to have a child with her mother’s ignorance: “In our loss I am linked to my mother” (314). Jaya resolves to tell her mother Amisha’s full story.

Along the river’s edge, villager woman wash clothes in the river as children play. Ravi cautions her against snakes. Jaya asks why they don’t just kill the snakes so that no one has to worry about a child accidentally getting bitten. Ravi shoots down this idea: “Who is to say to whom this land belongs? The snake would argue it is its home that we have disturbed. Its poison may be its only defense” (315). Jaya is deaf to this idea, arguing that people are more important than snakes.

Ravi and Jaya walk through a henna ceremony, one component of the marriage rituals common in the village. As they watch the bride and groom, Jaya realizes that she “never thought to have an Indian wedding” (316) when she married Patrick. Jaya yearns for Patrick and the years they spent in happiness together.