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66 pages 2 hours read

Sejal Badani

The Storyteller's Secret

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2018

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Part 6: “Jaya”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 6, Chapter 26 Summary

When Jaya’s childhood was diagnosed with cancer, the community briefly set up a schedule to cook and donate food to the family, but Lena continued to cook extra food for the cancer patient’s family and drop it off anonymously on their doorstep. When the neighbor recovered, the community threw a party, and tried to thank the anonymous food donor. Jaya’s mother never stepped forward. When Jaya asked her mother why she didn’t come forward, Lena simply responded that “It wasn’t about me” (184).

In India, Jaya thinks about Patrick and their failed phone conversation. She tries to take her wedding ring off, but it stops at her knuckle. Jaya feels a wave of relief and keeps it on. She goes to the market to shop for gifts, and meets Ravi and his dog. They go to Ravi’s house at the edge of the village. Ravi’s house is a “hovel” (186) to Jaya. Ravi never moved into Jaya’s family’s house out of a sense of duty and propriety.

They cook dinner, with Ravi jumping in to help spice the curry as Jaya isn’t familiar with Indian cooking. Though Jaya’s mother was a terrific cook, “she liked to cook alone” (189). Ravi says that Jaya’s mother learned from her stepmother, who required Lena to cook all the family’s meals while growing up.

Jaya remembers eating out with Patrick, and at the thought of Patrick, the darkness that has so far dissipated from Jaya’s mind returns. She blacks out. In answer to Ravi’s concern, Jaya explains that her mind often needs a break when confronted with difficult topics and that she came to India to deal with the blackouts.

Part 6, Chapter 27 Summary

Jaya walks through the village toward the property and tax office to inquire after the three properties now owned by her mother: the family’s house, the English school, and the mill. At the office, Jaya discovers that Lena wrote to the office a week before, relinquishing her right to inherit the three properties. Jaya regards the properties “as essential to the story as the people who spent time in them” (192). She tells the representative that her family has changed its mind—she is in the village to reclaim the properties.

Jaya calls her mother and informs her that she has decided to keep the properties in the family. Lena becomes upset at the thought that Jaya may stay in India for the sake of these properties, begging Jaya “Please come home” (195) in a display of emotion that Jaya has never witnessed before.

Jaya considers how secretive she was after the miscarriages: “my fears, my hurts, and the emptiness that crowded everything and everyone else out. It felt safest to keep it from” Patrick (196). She confesses to her mom that coming to India is a way for her to run away from her problems. Patrick has been calling Jaya’s parents looking for her, but Jaya insists that they are in the process of moving on from each other.

Jaya and her mother connect over the blog pieces Jaya has been writing and Amisha’s story. More and more, Jaya believes that understanding her mother may be “the key to understanding myself” (197). When she hangs up, she returns to Ravi’s house to hear more of Amisha’s story.

Part 6 Analysis

For the first time in her life, Jaya sees true poverty. After the privileges of her upbringing in America, she confronts the abject living conditions rampant in the village: “In my own childhood, I never worried about finding my next meal or having a safe roof over my head. What I took for granted would be a luxury for these children” (186).

Nevertheless, Jaya finds it healing to be in the middle of her ancestral people, surrounded by their culture, struggle, and beliefs. Jaya’s immersion becomes a way to combat her grief. Her immersion is not full, however. Everyone Jaya encounters speaks English and she therefore has no need to learn her ancestral language. Remnants of colonialism allow her life in India to proceed without much effort to assimilate fully; she is a spectator to the poverty around her, knowing that she can always escape it by returning to the US.

In order for Jaya’s character to heal her wounds and move forward in her life, a cycle of struggle must be broken. She addresses the unfinished business of her ancestors by reclaiming the school, mill, and house properties, as well as breaking the cycle of secrecy that her mother and grandmother lived under by publishing blog posts that discuss their lives. This discussion is not damaging but reparative: By breaking a cycle of secrecy, Jaya opens herself up to emotional connection and begins to heal her own and her mother’s wounds: “Actions in the present can help to correct the mistakes made in the past” (194). This cyclical trauma connects to Jaya ancestral culture, as karmic cycles feature heavily in Hindu thought.

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