Marry me,” and making insulting, kissing sounds towards me – pwoch pwoch. Suddenly I felt a strong tug on the back seat and a voice I had heard before, saying in broken English, “I love you darling. Returning home from the site of the accident in a man-drawn rickshaw, the narrator is followed by two cyclists – young men who had earlier been at the accident – who torment her with lewd and humiliating remarks: An ugly incident occurs when the father accidentally brushes against a rickshaw on the road – a typical ‘accident situation’ where people gather, tempers rise and mob behaviour threatens to take over (224-226). “Without being told”, the narrator – now recalling her teenage years – claims, “each of us recognized that our safety was compromised when we were alone” (217). For instance, the family is now found to gather together in common spaces of the house, making sure they bolt or shut down unoccupied sections, even during the day. The collective paranoia of being attacked reaches a high when fear dictates the daily routines of family members (217). The fear of being assaulted, kidnapped, or at least, of being verbally intimidated, begin to mount. Hate speech graffiti begins to appear on the compound wall. With increasing civil unrest and (what the writer refers to as) “lawlessness” in the mid-1970s, the family is pressed more and more to give up their home and to migrate to safer and stabler planes. #Hebe little girls skin#The novel hints at the persistent fear of sexual predators: those who are more likely to prey on the three girls owing to their skin colour, faith and entitled background. But, overriding both these concerns, there is a perpetual fear for the lives of the children – all girls – who are thought of being as predated on by the ordinary non-Catholic, Hindu community. The narrative pays close attention to the many security and safety precautions the family elders had taken, from the keeping of dogs, parrots and geese, to being particular about locks and bolts. Secondly, the family lives in a general fear of their house being broken into – a fear ignited by their economic stability and their minority status as an ethno-religious group. The possibility of a similar riot breaking out anytime and their family being targeted during such a crisis is an overwhelming worry. First, the ugly but raw memory of the massacres at partition are fresh in the minds of the elders. There are two immediate shadows which haunt the de Souzas. Their westernization, Catholic faith, English language and ancestry had set the de Souzas – in spite of their resonableness and generosity – on hostile terrain, while post-independence India is seen to head steadily down a widening gulf of disparity and economic want. Hebe de Souzaīeing Judeo-Christian, the de Souzas – by birth, social standing, culture and faith – represent and embody an order which, to the common man, is both alienating and festered with entitlement. #Hebe little girls free#But, hovering over and incessantly challenging to break through their walls are the nationalistic impulses of a new nation, set free from centuries of western domination. The central artery of the novel is the story of three young girls growing up in a comfortable middle class home of socially established parents of upwardly mobile ancestry. Narrated as being set in 1995 through a frame which looks back at a child and young adulthood spanning from 1958 to 1974, the narrative as a whole retrieves, through retrospective recollection, the memory of a dislocated childhood past. In Black British (Ventura Press, 2016), Hebe de Souza presents a powerful picture of the growing post-independence insecurity and vulnerability of a Jewish Christian Indian family who, for generations, had been living in Kanpur, and their ultimate exodus and uprooting from home.
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