28 pages • 56 minutes read
A Real Durwan
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Literary Devices
Third-Person Cinematic Point of View
One of the story’s most salient formal elements is its third-person cinematic narration, the technique most responsible for the narrative’s ambiguities. Unlike typical third-person limited narration, which grants readers significant insight into at least one character’s interior life (their thoughts, beliefs, emotions, or memories), this story’s narration largely restricts itself to surface-level descriptions of the fictive world. In other words, the narration is “cinematic” because, as in a film, there is no internal dialogue or in-depth omniscient exposition about the characters’ interiority. For the most part, readers are like a cinema audience who see only outward realities; this narrative point of view leaves much up for interpretation, and readers will form their own emotional reactions to the story based on what they personally infer about each character’s hidden psychology.
In Lahiri’s story, the central consequence of such narration is that a reader can’t truly know whether Boori Ma has been honest about her former life. Because readers’ information about Boori Ma comes largely from Boori Ma herself, they are on equal footing with the characters, who know only what they can observe or are told. Additionally, readers lack much insight into secondary characters like Mrs. Dalal, and so decisive ambiguities arise: No one knows whether Mrs. Dalal truly intends to buy Boori Ma new bedding; no one knows whether Boori Ma truly was a wealthy landowner before Partition; and at the end of the story, no one knows why the residents show so little compassion to Boori Ma or why they feel so overwhelmingly certain of her complicity in the burglary. Yet even with so much of the characters’ interiority withheld, the concrete, empirical facts show a tragic arc in the story: Boori Ma is an older woman who has been uprooted from her home and now finds herself alone, working in a physically demanding job. Her position only becomes more fraught, its precarity growing in proportion to the other residents’ prosperity and their investment in the building’s upgraded amenities.
Irony
Irony can take on many different forms in literature, but at its most basic, it arises from the gap between expectation and reality. For example, the residents’ eventual hostility toward Boori Ma is ironic. Given the residents’ appreciation for her work, one might expect that those residents, once finally exerting themselves to improve and renovate the building, would come to value Boori Ma even more. But this is the opposite of what happens. Likewise, Boori Ma gives and gives and gives, offering the residents a level of stewardship that far exceeds her job description—yet when the residents are in a position to show similar generosity and grace to Boori Ma (as one might expect them to), they not only do the opposite but also dismiss all she has given them.
Irony is also in the story’s title. Because they have, in Boori Ma, an approximation of “a real durwan” (152), the residents take a sense of pride in their building as though they live in a more prestigious neighborhood. Mr. Dalal expresses this pride when he purchases a private and public basin, an investment that catalyzes the building’s transformation and eventually leads to the burglary, after which the residents decide to hire “a real durwan” (170), not Boori Ma. In turn, this all ties into one of the story’s bitterest ironies: When Mr. Dalal invests in the building as Boori Ma has done, he accidentally sets off a chain reaction that leads to Boori Ma being fired. To top it off, this undoing is the opposite of what was promised to the protagonist; Boori Ma was promised new bedding, yet she is exiled from her sleeping place altogether.
Foil
Mr. Chatterjee is a foil to Boori Ma, meaning that the characters are opposites in some crucial sense, and the opposition accentuates their characterization. In literature, foils most often appear as secondary characters (or antagonists) who sharply contrast with the protagonist, highlighting the differing aspects of their characters. Mr. Chatterjee is an older man who rarely leaves the building—in fact, he seems to do little at all. This differs greatly from Boori Ma, who is always in motion, always working, and always moving about with her broom and rattling skeleton keys.
The two characters’ deeper contrast is in the disproportionate respect Mr. Chatterjee garners from the other residents (the narrator even muses, ironically, that it is perhaps because Mr. Chatterjee remains so inactive on his balcony that he commands this respect). Most profoundly, the residents revere Mr. Chatterjee’s words and pronouncements, while they doubt Boori Ma’s. At the close of the story, it is Mr. Chatterjee’s pronouncement that leads to Boori Ma’s expulsion. None of the residents, Mr. Chatterjee included, listen to her or “believe [her], believe [her]” (169).
Realism
“Literary Realism” can refer either to the literary movement or to the writing techniques that characterized the movement. The movement, which began in 19th-century Europe, was a reaction against the preceding century’s Romanticism, in which artists often idealized or embellished human experience. Realism, in contrast, used more prosaic diction and portrayed life with precise, unadorned detail. Though it began in the 19th century, however, Realist technique often persists into contemporary literature. Lahiri’s plain-language prose, modest protagonist, and tragic-yet-not-melodramatic ending are Realistic.
The details at the beginning of the story, such as Boori Ma’s sleepless nights and the painful swelling in her knee, exemplify the sorts of quotidian concerns that make up Realist literature. Had readers met Boori Ma at an earlier time in her life, (assuming her past was as prosperous as she claims), she would have been an unlikely candidate for a Realist narrative as the luxuries of her life stretched beyond common experiences. Realist fiction does not shy away from the day-to-day struggles of life, such as seen in the plight of an underpaid toilet-parts salesman or a widow like Mrs. Misra, whose single luxury is a telephone (152).
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