A Father by Bharati Mukherjee -- Summary and Analysis

Summary

Mr. Bhowmick wakes up early for work and his wife with him to make him breakfast. His agnostic wife works for an insurance company. His daughter, 26, is an electrical engineer. He is sorry he can't afford a whole room like his mother had in Indian for worship but he took woodworking classes and built a shrine for the family goddess Kali-Mata (and the goddess herself I think). His wife complains that he prays so much that he doesn't have time for all the Indian activities they do, and that he prays to shut her out. She reads psychology magazines and feels he doesn't share enough. She and his daughter were more American somehow. They were right, he didn't want to talk about the sickness he felt that was not of physical origins. He felt that there was something in the dark that could make things happen which his wife would dismiss as paranoia. He thinks the statue of Kali changes on its own.

Husband, wife and daughter nag each other over breakfast and discuss technology and India and cooking. He is sorry that his daughter isn't his dream daughter, feminine like the girls he had loved as an adolescent in Ranchi.

As he is about to drive off to work at General Motors, his neighbor sneezes. Sneezes bring bad luck to beginnings of journeys in Hindu superstition and he debates driving or going back home and restarting his journey and risk angering the gods. He sees his wife being picked up for work by a neighbor. He waits in the car because he doesn't want his daughter to see him acts on his superstitious beliefs. His daughter dismisses Hinduism to her friends but he forgives her because it is a cultural coping mechanism.

He goes back inside when Babli doesn't come out and hears his daughter throw up. He realizes she must be pregnant. This excites him because someone must consider her to be feminine. He decides to stay home and think of his pregnant daughter. He thinks back. His wife back in India challenged the traditions of Indians and was martyred for it. He wished his wife had been prettier but wasn't rich enough to get a pretty wife. They had come to America and she had decided to apply for permanent residency. They moved to Bombay for his job while the papers were being processed and he liked it there. In Detroit he is lonelier.

He tracks his daughter over the week. He imagines himself as a grandfather, and introducing himself to her American partner. He makes clumsy mistakes playing bridge and his wife is upset. Every night as soon as his wife falls asleep he prays to Kali-Mata.

He comes out of the shower one day and finds his wife and daughter screaming at each other. He tries to defend her but then Babli tells him she got pregnant from a donor and then he beats her up and his wife has to call the police. 

Analysis

• Ambition vs grace
• Very commercialized -- "slim fast" etc.
• In contrast, lots of proper Indian nouns are capitalized
• Inferiority to Americans, superiority to other nationalities

He was a metallurgist. He knew about rust and ways of preventing it, secret ways, thus far unknown to the Japanese.

When was Babli meeting this man? Where? He must be American; Mr. Bhomwich prayed only that he was white.

• Second generation finds it hard to assimilate

He's forgiven her. He could probably forgive her anything. .it was her way of surviving high school in a city that was both native to her, and alien.

• Powerful women

Babi would do what he wanted. She was headstrong and independent and he was afraid of her.