Manorama

Manorama is a slightly older schoolfriend of Parvati’s whose friendship is marked by both an offer of confidences and a long interruption in their correspondence. She wants Parvati to be happy and to share her sadness, but she also recognizes that her friend may have secrets she is not ready to disclose.

Friendship and Distance

Manorama and Parvati are friends, and both attend school. Parvati has not seen Manorama for quite a while when she goes to visit her. Their friendship therefore precedes the strained conversation in which Manorama becomes a confidante whom Parvati cannot quite bring herself to trust.

An Offer of Confidence

Manorama senses that Parvati is holding things back and feels hurt when Parvati turns away rather than explain. She offers to share whatever is making Parvati sad and says that her chief wish is for Parvati to be happy. At the same time, she accepts that Parvati may have secrets she does not want to disclose; what wounds her is the possibility that Parvati is making fun of her.

Parvati denies mocking her and insists that she has told Manorama all she knows: her husband is Devdas Mukherjee, who is nineteen or twenty. Manorama then raises what she has heard—that Parvati’s marriage had been arranged elsewhere. Her question exposes the gap between the limited facts Parvati says she knows and the troubling account circulating around her marriage, without resolving that gap in their conversation.

The Letter and Reconciliation

After a long period without writing to one another, Manorama takes the first step toward restoring their friendship. In her letter, she says that the fault for their silence belongs to both of them and proposes that they acknowledge it and move on. She explains that, as the older of the two, she thought she should write first, and asks Parvati to reply soon.

Manorama reports that she returned to the village the previous month. Her account of her own circumstances is deliberately spare: she remarks that middle-class women are not very good at saying how they are, and reduces her news to the distinction between someone being dead and gone or, if alive, doing fine. She says she is fine, while allowing that Parvati may find the news boring. The letter’s modest self-description accompanies its more important gesture: Manorama breaks the silence and invites their friendship to begin again.