A Real Durwan

One of the story’s most salient formal elements is its third-person cinematic narration, the technique most responsible for the narrative’s ambiguities. Unlike typical third-person limited narration, which grants readers significant insight into at least one character’s interior life (their thoughts, beliefs, emotions, or memories), this story’s narration largely restricts itself to surface-level descriptions of the fictive world. In other words, the narration is “cinematic” because, as in a film, there is no internal dialogue or in-depth omniscient exposition about the characters’ interiority. For the most part, readers are like a cinema audience who see only outward realities; this narrative point of view leaves much up for interpretation, and readers will form their own emotional reactions to the story based on what they personally infer about each character’s hidden psychology.

In Lahiri’s story, the central consequence of such narration is that a reader can’t truly know whether Boori Ma has been honest about her former life. Because readers’ information about Boori Ma comes largely from Boori Ma herself, they are on equal footing with the characters, who know only what they can observe or are told.