The In-Between World of Vikram Lall. The extract revolves around the protagonist, Rabba and his younger sister, Deepa when they are attacked by six possible Muslim youths, and then saved by Mr.Bapu.
Shivani Patel
Literary Commentary Task
Paper 1
DP Year 1
Language A: English Literature HL
As time passes, our experiences turn into memories, where one “memory makes monkeys of our enemies” and another can give our friends “a tint of rose.” This is the central thought in the memory piece from The In-Between World of Vikram Lall.
The extract revolves around the protagonist, Rabba and his younger sister, Deepa when they are attacked by six possible Muslim youths, and then saved by Mr.Bapu. Rabba was targeted for his race and religion and the bitter memories remain with him as a souvenir. Parallel to these memories of unnecessary cruelty and violence, the memory of Mr.Bapu transcends by conveying the ideas of acceptance and compassion.
Rabba begins by giving a thorough recount of a particularly cruel event in the narrator’s life, and the exaggeration is evident through the harsh and dehumanizing description of the attackers – this negativity on the part of the narrator is spawned by the fear these attackers created within him and his sister. The very first line, “I felt a tremor in my sister’s arm,” gives an immediate and intense feeling of what is to come in the passage. Without prior knowledge of the text, the first impression set by this line tells the reader that there is some sort of threat nearing that the protagonists felt and feared. The reader is then informed of the setting, a nighttime, empty, secluded, suburban area, adding to this previously imposed threat. The juxtaposition created by the peaceful memory old “Old Mwangi” heightens the surprise as the threat comes into actualization – the attackers reveal themselves and bombard. The language used to depict the actions of the attackers dehumanizes them to the level of beasts, as they were “howling like wild dogs,” and “gesturing like demons.”
