You Bring the Distant Near

Ranee Das is the embittered, shrewd, and lonely matriarch of the Das family and one of the novel’s main characters. She grows up in a village in Bengal and has no choice but to marry the man that her parents chose for her. A series of misfortunes and disagreements, especially “the miscarriages, the moves, and the money worries” (170), drive wedges between the couple, and Rajeev and Ranee’s marriage is plagued by frequent fights for years. While she often feels dissatisfied with her life, she takes great pride in her two daughters’ education, which is seen in the way that she dresses up for Tara and Sonia’s first day of school in New York: “Ma has been wrapping and tucking the green silk sari around her slim waist. She’s applied lipstick and eye pencil, twisted a dozen golden bangles on each wrist, strung two necklaces around her throat” (49). While enrolling the girls at school, Ranee demonstrates her shrewd negotiation skills when she persuades the principal to squeeze Sonia into the gifted program. As Sonia observes, “Ma always gets her price” (58). Ranee is a lonely character, and her isolation intensifies markedly after her husband’s unexpected death. Much of Ranee’s loneliness is tied to her culture’s gender roles.