Guilt and Shame

Sharma uses both Ram and Anita’s perspectives to emphasize the indissoluble nature of guilt and shame. Ram spends much of the novel navigating—however indirectly—his sense of culpability after his rape of Anita. As he notes after Anita accidentally touches his penis while sleeping, “my mind was adept at reducing its presence when my body did something shameful” (94). Here, Ram separates his actions from his own feelings of responsibility. His acknowledgement that “my body did something shameful” suggests that Ram views his own body as separate, uncontrollable, and independent; in other words, he is not responsible for the abuses that his body perpetrates. Ram thus deals with his guilt by rendering it an other—he understands his “shameful” actions as not his own. Perversely, Anita (the victim of Ram’s horrific actions) suffers many of the same sensations of shame and guilt...