Why a Robin? – Shashi Deshpande

"The talk flows above and around me, leaving me untouched."

At the beginning of the story, I thought the writer was a loser who failed to take control of her life. The narrator was not content with her look, and she believed her 12 years old daughter was prettier and smarter than she was.

  The story illustrated a woman who lacked social skills - a woman who could not communicate with her daughter, her husband, and her husband's family. How could she did all the works, like cleaning and cooking, and let others ignore her as if she was invisible? As a mother, she let her daughter walked away from her with ignorance. The narrator didn't even possess the pride a mother should have.

  The narrator felt like "as if I am, in my own house, confronted with two closed rooms." The two closed rooms were metaphors of her husband and daughter. I could not believe a person with degrees in economics and in law had such a family life.

  The narrator wasn’t satisfied with her life, but the situation started to change once she got out of her bed to comfort her daughter. I saw the hope for the narrator to change her world around her, and she might not be the loser I thought she was after all. Although the story ended without further information of what happened next, I still would think the good things were about to happen soon after the last word of the story.

At the end of the story, the narrator sat besides her daughter, watching her daughter without a word. The scene was touching, and I believe the love inside the narrator was revealed at that point. I suppose the love was what motivated the narrator to write such a story.

  When I was reading the story, I felt like I know those people in the story. The story was so real that I can relate my own experience with that of the narrator’s. The way you feel unimportant, not able to communicate with your loved one, and the memory of the good family time.

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Response Posting

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Synthesis of 'Why a Robin?'

  “Why a Robin” by Shashi Deshpande is a story of a women who does not fit in with the rest of her family. However, she longs to be close to her daughter. The story takes place in India, where people belong to different castes. The narrator was one of those women who married a man above her’ in social status. The narrator considered herself as “a failure – as a wife, as a companion, as a mother.” As far as I can tell, the narrator as a mother was passive and withdrawn in relationship, but she decided to build “a bridge” to pull her family together.

  A homework assignment about a robin opened up the story. With little knowledge about the small red breasted robin bird, the mother failed to give the details about the bird, and she preferred to talk about the big exotic peacock instead. The daughter responded scornfully to her mother’s unsatisfying answer. “You don’t understand. You don’t know anything.” (Deshpande 26) The daughter left her mother an impudent remark before she went for her father.

  The mother was left out in her own house, “confronted with two closed rooms.” (Deshpande 27). The two closed rooms were metaphors of her husband and her daughter, which stated the poor relationship between her and her family. Several people of our class believed the father and the daughter didn’t ‘lock the mother out’, but the mother ’locked herself’ in instead.

  People generally agree the peacock brought nice childhood memories to the mother, for which the mother wanted to share with her daughter. The excitement the mother had had with the peacock and the memory of her beautiful grandmother filled the mother’s mind when the daughter asked her about a robin. Unfortunately, the daughter walked away from her without giving her the chance to share.

   Many people felt sorry for the mother being looked down by her husband, daughter, and family.  The relationship of the mother with the rest of the family was so far apart that she felt like she didn’t even exist. In fact, the self image of the mother within the family was “foolish, stupid, inarticulate…dull and brown.” (Deshpande 27), and she felt like her twelve-year-old daughter knew more than she did.

   Most people mentioned the first period of the daughter was the turning point of the mother and daughter relationship. The mother felt like she did not have anything to get her daughter’s attention until the daughter experienced her first period. “This child a woman?” (Deshphande 29), she asked. Finally the mother found herself important by sharing a secret of her daughter, a secret that her knowledgeable husband did not know much about. They talked about how the mother felt about her first period when she was young, talked about the peacock, and talked about the beautiful grandmother of the mother. After a night of whispering, the mother was filled with warmth and contentment as she put her daughter to bed. The daughter opened up her feeling to the mother, and this represented a new bridge between the mother and daughter had started to be built.

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