MARIGOLDS

Mr Chetram's very existence reverberates with the “...the history of this strife,-this longing to attain self conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better truer self”; W.E.B Du Bois, The Souls Of Black Folk. Incarcerated by claustrophobia, away from home , his life is punctuated by misery,squalor and sordidness. The angst of the migrant, entrapped in an alien land, often surfaces in the sudden acts of violence. An attempt to reassert his existence as a human being, in the dystopia of stasis Chetram is seen to destructively break the doll's head and even beat up his wife unnecessarily towards the end. Chetram's enunciation of the melancholy encompassing “The incurable distress of a vacant,bright Sunday!” turns our gaze to the much similar monotony of Jimmy's(Look Back In Anger) life prompting him to resort to anger and resentment “God how I hate Sundays!.......A few more hours and another week gone. Our youth is slipping away.” It is the emptiness of a nonfunctional life that instills morbidity in both these characters.The atmosphere of chaos and discord is occasionally painted with the positive images of the “school garden” and the dream of a “vast, open field of heavily blowing marigolds”. The 'marigolds' symbolize a deep yearning to escape from the limbo of nonexistence,of inaction. However, the act of mouthing the flower even before his wife could know about it brings about a crashing of the unrealized moment of the dream scape. Thudded into a realm of confusion, unable to associate with the “imaginary homeland”...”Silence” is his “secret weapon”.

Sayanti Mukherjee

PG I