Character+analysis

=Character Analysis= The Patel family are the most known characters in the book Sumitra’s story. The family is an Indian family and consists of four children Sumitra, Sandya, Bimla, Ela and their parents Bap and May. But as you can see on the book title, it is Sumitra who is the main character. And I think she is the most important person since the author has written it like we are seeing Sumitra and also knows her inside her what she thinks and her feelings.

In the beginning of the book Sumitra is an 11 years old Indian girl and she is the oldest one of the children in the family. She is just like a regular Indian girl with long black hair. She is very beautiful, very happy and smiles and just loves her life. Many people, including her father, actually thinks she is more beautiful than her sisters. There is an Indian tradition in her family that she hates, which is the arranged marriage. She thinks everyone should married with a person that they love and would share their life with. Sumitra has lots of questions why people are white and black, what the differences between these are and why people are being judged by it. After she arrived England she lived a double life. One side of life at home with the important rules and traditions from India, the other side of life trying to become more like her English classmates and starting to live like an English family. She gets some friends, but after school she infrequent sees them because of the tradition to help her mum in the house. Her dad doesn’t trust the English people and believe that every one of them is a racist and will hurt them.

Sometimes she can’t do her homework because she has to help her parents at home. Her father thinks this is more important than the homework. He doesn’t realize that they aren’t living in India anymore, and thinks that cooking and washing every day makes it easier when she grows up and has a family on her own. And he is just following the traditions he grew up with and wants his kids to the same. But go to school is a very important thing. All the hard work people put into school will help them later in life. They might get a good job with an excellence wages and live a happy life with their own family. All the problems at home make it hard for Sumitra to learn to write and read a new language. School isn’t that important to her anymore than it was before.

She gets tired with the school and all the work she has to do from she comes home after a long day at school to late at night. After some months living like that she just looks at the television, doesn’t look happy and doesn’t talk much. Her smile and the happy face slowly and surely disappear. She is also turning to become more and more like an English girl and isolates her self from the Patel family. So there is no one in the family she actually can talk to about her feelings. At the end of the book, when she is in an age of eighteen she realizes that she finally has to live her own life and writes a note that she has to leave and find herself.