Alexa Gomez

March 7, 2022

English 307

Professor Leslie Bruce

Scholar’s Notebook #2 Entry

7 March 2022: 1-P close reading of "Mrs. Sen'

1. “Eliot, if I began to scream right now at the top of my lungs, would someone come?”
“Mrs. Sen, what’s wrong?” “Nothing. I am only asking if someone would come.” Eliot
shrugged. “Maybe.”

“At home that is all you have to do. Not everybody has a telephone. But just raise your
voice a bit, or express grief or joy of any kind, and one whole neighborhood and half of
another has come to share the news, to help with arrangements.”

By then Eliot understood that when Mrs. Sen said home, she meant India, not the
apartment where she sat chopping vegetables. He thought of his own home, just five
miles away, and the young married couple who waved from time to time as they jogged
at sunset along the shore. On Labor Day they’d had a party. People were piled on the
deck, eating, drinking, the sound of their laughter rising above the weary sigh of the
waves. Eliot and his mother weren’t invited. It was one of the rare days his mother had
off, but they didn’t go anywhere. She did the laundry, and balanced the checkbook, and,
with Eliot’s help, vacuumed the inside of the car. Eliot had suggested that they go through
the car wash a few miles down the road as they did every now and then, so that they
could sit inside, safe and dry, as soap and water and a circle of giant canvas ribbons
slapped the windshield, but his mother said she was too tired, and sprayed the car with a
hose. When, by evening, the crowd on the neighbors’ deck began dancing, she looked up
their number in the phone book and asked them to keep it down.

2. This paragraph is very interesting to see the cultural differences between Mrs. Sen’s

Indian culture and Eliiot’s American upbring. The first passage in quotations has Mrs.

Sen expressed how her Indian community was very tight-nipped and supportive of its

residents. When she asks him if she were to scream if anyone would come by, Elliot is

confused as to what she means and does not quite comprehend how Mrs. Sen is

criticizing how American based culture/people are not integrated. Her last line of “At
home that is all you have to do…But just raise your voice a bit, or express grief or joy of

any kind, and one whole neighborhood and half of another has come to share the news, to

help with arrangements” displays the togetherness of Mrs. Sen’s upbringing as well as

context as to why she feels so homesick throughout the story. This resonates with Elliot

and he begins to think of his own home as he describes an incident where the young

couple that lived next to him and his mother were throwing a party and did not invite

them. As well as the lack of interest from his mother to do anything that isn’t errand

related and eventual use of the telephone to tell the couple to keep noise to minimum. He

sees now how he neither has community in or out of his living space, and his neighbors

aren’t actually “neighbors” but strangers that live next to him. The language used is not

hard to understand, nor is the connection to how Mrs. Sen views the community and

Elliot’s description of the party event, but it is interesting to see how Lahiri uses these

elements to demonstrate how Elliot is maturing from an oblivious child and is able to

distinguish the difference and lack of unity, most notably between himself and his mother.