Social Class

Within each of the selected short stories’ narrative worlds, the author explores the ways in which social class dictates human behavior. He does so by presenting stories centralizing human relationships, which often falter due to disparities in the characters’ social classes or castes. In “The Cabuliwallah,” for example, the narrator’s and his wife’s regard for the peddler Rahman is inspired by their perception of him as a lowly and impoverished individual. The author reifies this dynamic at the story’s start by placing the narrator and his daughter at a window that “overlooks the road,” where the peddler is passing “in the street below” (10). The characters’ physical locations in this scene exemplify the ways in which the narrator’s family regards themselves as better than Rahman. In a story like “The Postmaster,” because the postmaster perceives Ratan as nothing more than “an orphan...