Gloria Patal

Gloria Patal is Sanjay Patal’s wife and Mausami Patal’s mother, and her story links intimate family devotion to the Colony’s public unraveling. She endures failed pregnancies and a perilous labor before Mausami’s birth; years later, her accumulated worries take shape in a dream, and her fury at the gate exposes a forcefulness others had not recognized in her.

Identity and Family

Sanjay regards Mausami as the reason for everything in his life, even though he has sometimes imagined that having a son might make his life feel more complete. Gloria cannot carry a pregnancy to term through the couple’s earlier attempts, and her bleeding eventually fades. When she becomes pregnant with Mausami, the pregnancy itself appears precarious: she spots nearly throughout, and labor lasts two days. Sanjay waits outside the Infirmary, listening to her suffering and fearing that both mother and child will die.

Prudence Jaxon brings the newborn to Sanjay after the birth. He has been sitting with his head in his hands, so exhausted and frightened that he has already surrendered to the expectation of loss. At first, the swaddled child seems to him like his dead baby; Prudence tells him that the child is a healthy girl and that he has a daughter. The realization takes time to reach him. When he sees Mausami’s face, her tiny mouth, dark hair, and eyes, he experiences love for the first and only time in his life. That memory helps explain the intensity of the protection he later wants to exercise over her, as well as how deeply her choices can unsettle him.

Marriage, Anxiety, and the Dream

Gloria’s concerns are not limited to her daughter. In a dream, bees cover her body, and she understands them as worries accumulated across a lifetime. Some are small and ordinary: whether rain will spoil a day’s work outdoors, or whether Mimi, the widow of her only real friend Raj, is angry because Gloria did not visit. Others concern Sanjay and Mausami, the pain in Gloria’s lower back and her nighttime cough, and the pregnancies she could not carry to term. The swarm gathers many different fears into one image without making them interchangeable: family love, bodily vulnerability, friendship, and everyday uncertainty all press upon her at once.

The dream’s setting draws directly on an ordinary moment in Gloria’s life. After failing to wake Sanjay, and after Jimmy, Ian, Ben, and others come seeking his counsel about Caleb, she dozes at the kitchen table. In the dream, her own snoring becomes the bees’ sound; they settle over her like a blanket, and she fears that moving or even breathing will provoke them. Her stillness gives the dream its shape: worry has become something that immobilizes her. When she hears Sanjay descend the stairs, senses him in the room, and then hears him leave through the screen door, a silent scream jolts her awake, but she remembers neither the bees nor Sanjay’s departure. The episode makes visible the mental burden that her outward persistence conceals.

Mausami and the Threat of Separation

Sanjay sees Mausami’s involvement with Theo Jaxon as a danger to his daughter and wants her removed from the Watch, away from Theo. Mausami and Gloria both try to hide the relationship from him, apparently to spare him the knowledge, but Sanjay recognizes what is happening. He fears that Mausami will choose Theo, whose resemblance to his father intensifies Sanjay’s resistance. When Gloria tells him that Mausami is to pair with Galen Strauss instead, Sanjay feels relief. Galen is not his preferred match: he would have chosen someone sturdier, such as Hollis Wilson or Ben Chou. But Galen is not a Jaxon, and Sanjay can see that he loves Mausami, even if that love seems to him weak or desperate.

This choice sits within the larger atmosphere of distrust in the Colony. Sanjay suspects that knowledge of the guns is spreading among residents, and he tries to trace who knows what and who has confided in whom. The question is no longer whether the guns will be used, but when, under what circumstances, and which people are bound to one another. His wish to keep Mausami away from Theo therefore belongs both to his personal fear for her and to his anxious reading of the Colony’s alliances.

The Girl, Sanjay’s Crisis, and Gloria’s Resolve

During the Colony’s crisis, Sanjay orders the guard at the lockup doubled and steps outside. The stillness around him leads his thoughts back to the sleeping girl, whose face reminds him of Mausami as a Little waiting in her cot for a good-night kiss. He feels as though the girl’s mind might be seeking his, and concludes that there is something unusual about her eyes. Gloria later enters carrying a lantern when Sanjay wakes in distress and calls for Jimmy. She tells him that Jimmy is dead and asks whether he remembers. The exchange places her beside Sanjay at a moment when his grasp on events has faltered, though the available account does not establish the full nature or cause of his condition.

Later, after Mausami has left with the girl and the others, Gloria stands at the gate in a rage. Galen, who had not thought of her as forceful, recognizes that he has seen only part of her. Gloria demands that her daughter be brought back and that the rest of the group be killed. Her words reveal a stark change in how she appears to others: the woman associated with domestic worry and patient endurance now speaks as a parent willing to endorse lethal retaliation. They do not resolve the conflict or secure Mausami’s return; instead, they become part of the crowd’s rising anger.

Character and Narrative Significance

Gloria’s arc is built from a contrast between what she carries privately and what she makes public. Her dream translates years of losses and everyday fears into a swarm that leaves her unable to move; at the gate, grief and fear no longer appear as private apprehension but as an explicit demand for violence. The difference is not that her love for Mausami has changed. Rather, the same attachment that Sanjay’s memories describe as central to their family becomes, under pressure, a source of fury at separation.

Her scenes also complicate Sanjay’s view of her and of their daughter. He measures Mausami’s relationships against the threat of losing her, while Gloria’s dream reveals the quieter accumulation of anxieties behind the family’s public decisions. The narrative then lets Galen register the distance between Gloria’s familiar appearance and her anger at the gate. Through that shift, Gloria is not simply a background figure in Mausami’s story: her private history of motherhood, loss, and worry helps show how the Colony’s collapse turns family protection into a demand for punishment.