The story is about an eight year old Indian girl who is
traveling with her pregnant mother and female siblings to her grandmother's
house, and is told from the eight year old's perspective. The action of the
story is pretty low-key: it tells with some detail about the rail journey of
the family and the trouble the narrator gets into playing pranks on her
siblings. Her mother is especially irritable; in addition to looking after
three children and managing a difficult rail trip, she is pregnant with her fourth
child, which she fervently hopes will be a boy. This introduces the main
thematic element of the story, which is the devaluation of women in Hindi
society. Although the narrator is only eight, it is apparent to her that she is
considered a "pest" primarily because of her sex. For her part, the
mother scolds the narrator because she too must "bend" to accommodate
the males -- the mother's subjugation is explicitly sexual, in that she must
continue to have children until she gives birth to a boy. The narrator
understands that, if things are bad now for her, her mother's example holds
little hope for improvement in the future.
The
story ends with the celebration of Chaitya Shukla Ashtami, a Hindu holiday when
young girls are worshipped as incarnations of Devi, or the divine feminine
spirit. Part of the celebration involves all the girls wearing a red tikka on
their foreheads, but the narrator refuses. Why pretend to worship girls on one
day, she says, when you hate them on all the others?
Bibliography
Pande, Mrinal. Could ypu please summarize the
story "Girls" . Ed. eNotes Editorial. 27 June 2017. 28 January
2020
<https://www.enotes.com/homework-help/could-you-please-summarize-story-girls-by-mrinal-422047>.
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