Childhood is filled with exhilarating moments of joy and glee, moments of vulnerability and innocence, and heartbreaking moments of difficult lessons learned, and Desai reflects all of these in her story "Games at Twilight." I hope those thoughts helped; good luck!
Q2. Choose any character from "Games at Twilight" by Anita Desai, and say how you feel sympathy for him/her.
A2. My favourite character is the main character, Ravi. He is such a vulnerable, imaginative, and hopeful little kid, and I can't help but relate to him. Desai goes into such depth to describe his emotional landscapes that it is hard not to feel like you understand him, and to feel a connection with him.
A good way to feel sympathy for Ravi is to think back to when you were a child, playing hide 'n' go seek, and remember all of the excitement, nervousness, anxiousness, adrenaline, fear, joy and anticpation that went with the entire game. Did you ever cram into a spot and get super nervous as whoever was "it" got closer and closer? Did you feel the burst of speed and adrenaline as you raced as fast as you could to the home base? Did you ever hide in your spot and imagine the victorious triumph you would have if you weren't found and ended up winning? And if not, have you ever felt ostracized and left out by friends? If so, then it is easy to feel for Ravi. He experiences all of these emotions, and then at the end, as he is super excited to have been the winner, and realizes no one cares, he is devastated. Desai describes his feelings very well:
"The ignominy of being forgotten—how could he face it? He felt his heart go heavy and ache inside him unbearably. He lay down full length on the damp grass, crushing his face into it, no longer crying, silenced by a terrible sense of his insignificance."
How can you not be moved by his despair? He realizes, as we all have at some point in our lives, that he is pretty insignificant, and not nearly as important as he thought he was to his friends. Even if you haven't played hide 'n' go seek, it is easy to relate to a time when you have felt alone, left out, ostracized and forgotten by friends or family. So, because there are so many ways in which I can feel for Ravi, he is my favorite character.
Q3 What's an atmosphere of the story "Games at Twilight" by Anita Desai?
A3. The story takes place in India, where a bunch of children are playing inside a house. It is summertime, and the weather outside is so hot that everyone has crowded indoors to try to escape the heat; however, the kids get antsy and restless indoors. They want to go outside and play, and are feeling cooped up and fidgety.
So, the physical location begins in a house, but soon the children are let outdoors and are giddy with the chance to play. The atmosphere of the story is created mainly through the mood of the children. At first, the atmosphere is defined by their stifled anxiety about being cooped in the house. Desai writes that being indoors
"made them feel that their lungs were stuffed with cotton wool and their noses with dust and if they didn’t burst out into the light and see the sun and feel the air, they would choke."
So the story opens with this feeling of tense restlessness, of being oppressed and wanting to be elsewhere. But then, as the children are let out, the atmosphere changes to one of ecstatic giddiness; they run free, screaming and jumping, and the mood is one of excitement and joy. The total abandonment and freedom of childhood games is felt in the atmosphere.
Then, the atmosphere becomes one of chaos as the kids try to decide what to do, what to play, and who is to be "it" in their game of hide 'n' seek. The, the tension increases again as they struggle to find good hiding places, and as Ravi perches in the garage, that tension increases until Raghu passes by.
Throughout the story, the atmosphere changes moods as quickly as the children change moods, which is often. It reflects beautifully the transient and intense joys and miseries of childhood, chronicalling the moods of it well. I hope that those thoughts help; good luck!
