1. What Meena aspires to be when she grows up

“Only the big girls laughed in this way, malicious cackles which hinted at exclusivity and the forbidden”

At fourteen, blonde, aloof and outrageous, Anita is everything Meena thinks she wants to be.

2. Literary device of wring novel from child's point of view

Humour is generated by Meena’s innocence of the situations she is in. Observing her life through the eyes of a child allows her to comment on very serious situations in a comic way. The blissful naivety of her existence is reflected in her questions. For example, she wonders if Mrs Christmas’ cancer is infectious.

3. Meena's growth throught the novel

As the novel progresses, we can witness Meena growing up and maturing. At first, she thinks growing up means being like Sam and his friends “I always had to watch Sam’s gang and their girls. They looked so complete, in on a secret I might never discover”. She wishes that her mother would stand up for her and be rude to the other parents “But mama wasn’t a Yard mama, so I learned early on there were some things I would have to do for myself”.

However, she realises that, in fact, being grown up means enduring hardship with courage and stoicism and remaining calm and composed through even the most difficult of times. “I was a grown up now, I had seen my parents swallow down anger and grief a million times, for our sakes, for the sake of others watching, for the sake of their own sanity”.

4. Meena's developing sense of morality

We also see Meena’s sense of morality developing throughout the book. At the beginning, the reader gets a sense that Meena knows what she should or shouldn’t do, but doesn’t truly understand why. For example, she cites phrases she has heard at Christian Sunday School as reasons for confessing her wrongdoing to her father, “I knew I should tell Papa everything now, Confess said the Lord, and Ye Shall Be Saved”, even though she is Hindu, not Christian. On the other hand, in the final chapter, Meena goes with Tracey to help Anita, risking both her exam results and her parents’ good favour for a girl who has done nothing except insult her family and her culture. She does this because she knows deep down it is the right thing to do.

“But to be told off by a white person, especially a neighbour, that was not just misbehaviour that was letting down the whole Indian nation”

There is a sharp contrast between the reaction of Meena and that of Anita to being told off by Mr Christmas. While Anita feels no shame and says she does not care if he tells her mother, Meena feels the weight of her whole nation on her shoulders. This says something important about their respective upbringings – Mama has successfully instilled in Meena a sense of right and wrong while Anita, who has a troubled relationship with her mother, thinks of no one but herself. Later in the book, Uncle Alan talks to Sam, who is also from a troubled home about “blame and responsibility” – this emphasises again how important it is for our parents to teach us about morality – we are not born with an innate sense of right or wrong.

5. The childhood of Meena's parents

“I celebrated my seventeenth birthday in a refugee camp with only what I stood up in”

Papa’s reflections on his childhood provide a harsh contrast with the childhood that the reader witnesses first hand in the book, that of Meena. While she may have her hardships, she lives in luxury compared to the conditions her father would have experienced in a refugee camp when he was growing up.