SYNOPSIS
This story features an Indian immigrant family living in Singapore. The father is determined to use Singapore only as a stepping stone to migrating to the West. The story helps you to better understand the thoughts, feelings and problems of immigrants who come to our country. What pushes them to migrate from their homeland? Why do they feel disconnected and lost in the new country? What do they do to try and fit in? These and other questions are tackled in the story.
NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE
The story features first-person narration by Meena, the daughter. We see the events in the story as well as the other characters through Meena’s eyes and what she hears. We are also introduced to an immigrant’s view and thoughts about life in Singapore.
CONFLICTS
SIBLING RIVALRY between Meena and Mahesh as they struggle to find their own identity.
FAMILY AND MARITAL CONFLICT: the father wants to migrate to USA but the mother and children prefer to stay in Singapore. But the father makes the decisions.
INTERNAL CONFLICT with Mahesh trying to overcome his learning disabilities by showing he can climb a mountain. He rejects his identity as a slow learner and wants to carve a life for himself as someone who can accomplish great things.
CONFLICT BETWEEN THE HOME AND THE EXTERNAL WORLD—Meena’s father does not want his family to fit into Singapore and make it their home. He emphasises their family ties. But Meena is curious about the outer world of Singapore—she tries to make friends with other residents and wants to get to know the Ang Mo Kio estate she lives in. This is part of growing up where we leave the comfort of family love and home culture and venture out into the larger world of the neighbourhood, school, and later our workplace.
THEMES
GENDER POWER—the story shows how the father has more power than his wife. He decides where the family will migrate to. Although his wife clearly wants to live in Singapore, she seems to have no say in the matter--the father applies for a job in India without even telling his wife of his plans to uproot the family from Singapore. The entire family seem to be pawns in the father’s hands. Unlike her mother, who silently bears the husband’s domination of her, Meena rebels against her father by trying to get to know and appreciate Singapore. Her desire for gender power can also be seen in her fights with her brother, in her mocking his dyslexia and his ambition to climb Mount Everest.
Do you think the story suggests that females are more prone to a desire to settle down and put down roots whereas men are quite happy to live rootless lives? Even while her husband is still formulating his plans to move out of Singapore, Reshma, his wife, “strove to establish a sense of belonging” in Singapore, quickly sewing drapes and ordering paint samples for the flat.
THE PLIGHT OF IMMIGRANTS—Through Meena’s narration, we encounter the difficulties of being an immigrant. Meena and her family have to adapt to a strange culture and lifestyle, which are very different from India. It requires courage for them to try local food and to be open-minded in recognising the positive aspects of their host culture but they do manage it. However, their life is tense and lacks security as they move from country to country, looking for a place that will give them opportunities for a better life. The story portrays immigrants as always living in transition, not belonging properly anywhere but always wanting desperately to belong, to fit into the adopted country.
THE COMPLEX DYNAMICS OF FAMILY LIFE—No family is purely happy or miserable. Family life has its highs and lows. In this Indian immigrant family, we find much love between the parents and children, as seen in the tender way the father carries his daughter from the HDB balcony to her bed and in the sister rescuing the brother from his parents’ humiliating discussion of his poor performance at school. But there is also gender domination of mother by father. We should also not forget the guilt felt by the parents that their carelessness had caused their son’s learning disability. This guilt in turn leads to them focussing attention on the son, causing the daughter to feel neglected and take her resentment out on her brother.
EDUCATION AND LEARNING DISABILITIES—Mahesh has dyslexia and other learning abilities, which leads to poor performance in school. The story shows us how this causes anxiety in parents as schools and teachers often make them feel that they are to blame for the child’s performance. Reshma, for example, gets a call from Mahesh’s teacher telling her that her son’s grades are slipping and that he should work harder. Reshma becomes distraught and bursts into tears. But before she does that, she tells the teacher that her son is focussed on an important project of becoming the first Singaporean to climb Mount Everest. This reveals to us that she feels pressure to depict her son as someone important and not just a school failure. The story deals with parental guilt about their child’s learning problems and shows how it affects family relationships badly. In fact, the family had decided to emigrate, to leave their ancestral country because they were looking for a place that could tackle their son’s learning disabilities. These attitudes also affect the child himself, making him feel inferior and small. However at the end of the story when the parents learn that Mahesh’s learning problems were not caused by parental negligence, they relax and are therefore better able to help their son. The story suggests that both parents and society should not get emotional and worked up about children’s learning disabilities but rather take a more relaxed attitude towards this.
SINGAPORE IDENTITY—This story offers readers a portrait of Singapore as seen through non-Singaporean eyes. Meena comments on the HDB estate as being “so newly and neatly plannned that it looked exactly like a builder’s model”. The simile of the builder’s model suggests the perfection of the design but also hints at a certain artificiality in our environment. But she does acknowledge that Singapore “looked like plans whereas India had been a tangle of overlapping blueprints”. This time, the simile of plans and the metaphor of multiple blueprints are used to contrast Singapore’s determination to construct an orderly and productive future to India’s supposed tendency to have many ideas that don’t quite end up as reality. Reshma, the mother, too compares Singapore against India, noting that in Singapore they even advertise a market whereas in India “these things just happen”.
The story is dotted with references to the Singapore urbanscape, to local imagery of the POSB, the Econ Minimart, a Tuition Centre, 7-Eleven , to wet markets, and to the “MRT gliding across the sky like a banner advertising progress”, which depict Singapore as modern, multicultural, consumerist and commercial. Meena seems to thoroughly approve of this. Rather than viewing it as sterile, she alludes to Singapore’s ability to make “the world’s most impossible terrain out of concrete steps and steel railings.”
But there is also a repeated pattern of images that allude to Singapore’s small size and to life lived on a minor scale. As the father notes, you won’t find a mountain in Singapore. Meena herself notes how in “the adjacent block, brightly-lit windows revealed lives played out in miniature”. She sees schooolgirls polishing Bata canvas shoes, a man sneaking a quick cigarette, and a couple kissing “chastely each night”.
CHARACTERISATION
Below are capsule portraits of the main characters. Your TASK will be to find evidence in the text for these claims. Can you find passages and examples from the story that illustrate these character traits? Use the material to write a two-page report on the character.
Dad—the unnamed Dad seems to be close-minded, prejudiced and shallow. Unlike his family, he is unable to see anything positive in Singapore. He assumes that Europe and North America will offer the best opportunities and lifestyle for his family. He also has fixed ideas about what a good life would entail: for him, only houses that have roofs and yards (i.e. landed property), not apartments, are authentic homes. Ironically, he leaves India to seek a lifestyle that India itself had offered him (houses with roofs and yards)! Conventional in ideas, he views the man as the head of the household and does not see his wife as his equal partner. He does however love his family.
Mother—Here are some adjectives I would use to describe Reshma: loving, loyal, open-minded, fair, adaptable and long-suffering but also fiesty and imaginative. Despite being cooped up in the flat, she also appears to have a zest for life.
Mahesh—Like his father, Mahesh is ambitious and wants to be successful in life. He is very determined. But he is also emotionally fragile and suffers from low self-esteem. His imagination and creativity will however ensure that he will become a person of significance in life despite learning disabilities. He lacks the ability to be cruel to others.
Meena—Unlike her brother, Meena can be cruel to people, especially through her use of language. Her words can cut. However, she is also able to use language to capture the beauty of the life around her and to see the good in people. Just as she can make a formidable enemy, she can also be a great friend. Like her brother she is sensitive. She is a sharp observer of the people around her and is able to analyse life at a deep level. She will probably grow up to be an independent-minded woman who values her freedom.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENDING
The story ends positively with Meena achieving an EPIPHANY. Accompanying her brother one day on his climb up 25 stories, she is finally able to see how her brother is a hero in trying to compensate for his learning disabilities. Meena had looked down on his academic abilities but he had found a way to be “no longer insignificant”. The story also ends with Meena seeing the paradoxical greatness of Singapore: though small, it offered her an experience of “living so high in the air”. This similar imagery of living on air and “dancing on the clouds” suggests that Mahesh and Singapore are alike—both lacking in some way but who are nevertheless heroic and inspiring.
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?
What is the significance of Meena’s relationship with the girl and the cat in Block 537? How does it link to the above-mentioned themes?
It marks Meena’s attempt to integrate into the local community by cultivating friendships. Their relationship signifies how easy it is to become friends with someone of another race, nationality or class. The two girls come from different social class backgrounds: the Singapore girl lives in a slab HDB block, has to work in her grandmother’s shop, and speaks poor English, suggesting she is from the working class whereas Meena lives in a point-block flat, has a father who is a professional and is very fluent in English, indicators that she is middle-class. But love of the cat is a common bond or interest that draws the two girls together. The image of the cat, which is said to have nine lives, conveys the idea that Meena will find a way to land on her feet despite all the challenges that she encounters as an immigrant. It thus links to themes of integration of the immigrant into local society, of the richness of Singapore diversity and of the challenges of being a young girl in a migrant family in a new land.
Imagery recurs of shut doors (p28; p34) and roofs and yards (p 27; p40). Are these symbolic? Do they relate to theme?
Reshma, Meena’s mother, will not allow her children to shut their doors on each other, making shut doors a symbol of family conflict and tension that she wants to avoid. But later she and her husband shut their door for privacy because marital conflict has set in. In the story, roofs symbolize social aspirations and personal dreams. The father’s dream of the ideal lifestyle is ownership of a home with roof and yard whereas for Mahesh, climbing to the roof signifies his dreams of conquering Mount Everest.