Games at Twilight

From their own perspective, the children’s play is the most serious and the most real aspect of their lives—what Anita Desai calls “the business of the children’s day” (Paragraph 7). Play is the means by which they develop an understanding of themselves and learn the rules of the world they’re growing into. Their games are thus marked by anxieties and ambitions related to the expectations and hierarchies of that world. For Mira—an older sibling and a girl—this means that she is already taking on the role of a mother, breaking up fights and corralling the children into a semblance of order. For the young protagonist Ravi, it means that his drive to win the game—strong enough to supersede even his fear—is really a drive to prove that he can become the kind of dominating, masculine figure he sees in his brother Raghu.

In the story’s opening, the children’s mother occupies the adult role that “motherly Mira” is in training for. Her domain is the house—a domesticated space in which her role is to perform an endless series of caretaking tasks, which the children mostly greet with resentment. From the children’s perspective, the house on a hot afternoon is a stifling, oppressive space from which they long to escape: “[T]hey had been washed and had their hair brushed, and after the long day of confinement in the house that was not cool but at least a protection from the sun, the children strained to get out” (Paragraph 1). Outside is freedom, though it’s a freedom already shadowed by social pressures that originate in the adult world. When the children’s argument over who will be “It” threatens to devolve into an unruly brawl, Mira imposes order, arranging them in a circle and giving them a clear protocol for choosing an “It”: “‘Now clap!’ she roared, and, clapping, they all chanted in melancholy unison, ‘Dip, dip, dip—my blue ship—’” (Paragraph 15). Even within the freedom of the outdoors, her role is to impose order on chaos—exactly the role her mother filled in the house in the opening paragraphs.

Ravi, too, feels pressure to conform to gender expectations. His fantasy of dominance in hide-and-seek is also a fantasy of competitive revenge against Raghu—“that hirsute, hoarse-voiced football champion” (Paragraph 27). Whacking his stick against the walls to intimidate the hiding children, Raghu is Ravi’s ideal image of masculinity—a masculinity that expresses itself by dominating others. It’s bitterly ironic, then, that Ravi’s moment of triumph is also the moment in which his performance of manhood crumbles. The pent-up emotion of his long day in hiding, combined with the painful anticlimax of its end, overwhelms him and leaves him sobbing openly in front of his whole extended family. It’s his mother who then enforces social expectations: “Stop it, stop it, Ravi. Don’t be a baby. Have you hurt yourself?” (Paragraph 32). He is a boy, and getting older, and such displays of vulnerability are only permissible for babies.