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Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Henna Artist, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Choice, Independence and Women’s Freedoms
Family and Responsibility
Societal Hierarchy vs. Unordered Intimacy
Care and Communication
Creativity vs. Possession
Summary
Analysis
When Radha arrives at Lakshmi’s rented room, she is amazed by the various saris she sees. Radha wants to touch the fabrics, but she holds herself back—the night before, Lakshmi warned her not to touch anything, lest it be perceived as stealing by the wealthy henna clients. As the sisters discuss the saris, Radha notices bruising on Lakshmi’s ribs. “So much remained unspoken between us,” Lakshmi reflects.
Internally, Lakshmi pays lots of attention to her sister, noticing her pain and fretting about how to care for her. Externally, though, Lakshmi leaves this care “unspoken”—which means Radha will eventually confuse her sister’s lack of expressed care with callousness.
Themes
Lakshmi outfits Radha in a light green sari and steps back to admire her work. Already, Radha looks clean and much more beautiful than she did when she arrived. Radha wants a brighter-colored outfit, but Lakshmi explains that bright saris—not to mention saris with mirrors embedded—are tacky. This hurts Radha, as their mother’s wedding sari, Radha’s prized possession, has mirrors all over.
Lakshmi’s urban sophistication stands in contrast to Radha’s naïve fascination with her mother’s sari. Even as Lakshmi wants to feel connected to her family, she is also discovering just how different she has become after so many years in Jaipur.
Themes
The milk-walla arrives, and Lakshmi is grateful—both for the interruption, and because she needs the milk to make treats for her ladies. Malik also arrives, and Lakshmi introduces him to Radha, playfully chiding him for chewing tobacco. “Today’s market day,” Malik replies, “no ladies to swoon over me.”
Malik’s charm is one of the reasons he makes such a good assistant to Lakshmi, further proof that social skill and flexibility are important tools to survive in such a rigidly hierarchical society.
Themes
Lakshmi tells Malik to burn Radha’s old clothes, which are infested, and Radha is embarrassed. Lakshmi vows to be more careful with her sister and notices that—again, following her advice from the night before—Radha has taken a frangipani blossom for her hair. Lakshmi reviews the “ten things” she taught her sister (sit up straight, keep your mouth closed, and other rules of etiquette). Radha wonders about Lakshmi’s henna bowl, but Lakshmi feels protective of it—the bowl came from Lakshmi's saas, after all.
Again, Lakshmi focuses on Radha’s external presentation more than she tries to learn about her internal life. Lakshmi also struggles to explain her own history (like her time with her saas) to her little sister, perhaps wanting to protect Radha from all of the most painful episodes in her past.
Themes
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Lakshmi takes Radha to the seamstress to get some clothes made. Though at first the interaction with the seamstress is tense, Lakshmi smooths it over, slipping the seamstress some oil to make her hair grow. On the way out, Lakshmi explains that she gets good prices because she has helped the once-balding seamstress grow her hair back.
Though Lakshmi has goods and services with real material value, the main thing she uses to barter is personal knowledge—and a sense of the things women desire, even when those desires are not spoken.
Themes
Malik picks the women up in a tonga, and Lakshmi nags him for spending money—until he explains that he got a discount on henna products and salaams Radha. As the tonga drives, Radha marvels at the Hawa Mahal (Palace of Wind). There are so many windows, Lakshmi explains, so that the women inside can look out without being seen. Lakshmi muses that she will “have to keep an eye” on Radha, who is bubbly but “untamed.” Malik reminds Lakshmi that she has not yet given him or Radha food, and Lakshmi feels bad but assures them there is lots of food at home.
Malik’s salaam (greeting) shows that he is Muslim, unlike the rest of the characters in the novel; because Muslims were not part of the Hindu caste system, they were often reduced to low status in post-Partition India. It is also important to note that Radha’s bubbliness and appeal are potentially dangerous, as she has not yet learned all the ways she might be exploited in this new city.
Themes
Lakshmi flashes back to a decade ago, when she was living in Agra and learning henna from Hazi and Nasreen. The elaborate designs she practiced with these “pleasure women” reminded her of drawing with Munchi, the old man in Ajar. It was with Hazi and Nasreen that Lakshmi first met Samir.
Henna and sex are deeply intertwined in the lives of these “pleasure women,” who make their living in sex work. Lakshmi’s connection to Munchi is another invisible thread that links her to Radha.
Themes
Once Samir learned of Lakshmi’s skills, he invited her to come back to Jaipur. “There are many gentleman in Jaipur who would like to start digging a well before their houses catch fire,” he had explained. Samir himself had a penchant for widows, and he (like many of his friends) wanted Lakshmi’s help preventing unwanted pregnancies.
Samir loves proverbs, and this saying is no exception: by engaging Lakshmi in contraceptive work, Samir hopes to have extramarital sex without consequences. It now makes sense that the sachet Lakshmi was giving Samir had to be kept secret from Parvati, as it was enabling him to cheat on her.
Themes
Best of all, Samir could give Lakshmi a “respectable cover,” introducing her to all the high society of Jaipur. And indeed, after Lakshmi fed Parvati fertility treats and her youngest son was conceived, Lakshmi was in demand from all the city’s richest ladies. In other words, Samir turned Lakshmi’s existing “independence” into an opportunity for wealth and a real business.
Lakshmi’s bond with Parvati may seem like a bond between women, but it is fact catalyzed and mediated by male needs and desires. Again, Lakshmi’s trajectory in Jaipur sees her craving for independence morph into a longing for wealth, status, and ownership.
Themes
Back in the present, Lakshmi arrives at the British address Samir has given her. After an awkward interaction with her client’s racist mother-in-law, Lakshmi is welcomed inside by Joyce Harris, the young woman who has called for her. Joyce explains that she is pregnant, but she is not sure if the baby is her white husband’s or her Indian lover’s. Lakshmi wonders if the father might be Samir but decides he isn’t, as Mrs. Harris is not his type.
Despite the longtime presence of the British in India, racial divides were supposed to remain stark and clear-cut (as the elder Mrs. Harris rants about in her racist speech). But the clear hierarchies of public life are muddied in private, and Joyce Harris’s affair shows how little bodily instincts like sexual desire correlate with societal expectations.
Themes
Lakshmi makes Mrs. Harris promise that she is no further than four months along—if she is, the treatment will be dangerous for her. When Mrs. Harris panics, realizing that there is “no place in English society” for a mixed-race child, Lakshmi gives her three herbal sachets and tells her to boil them. Mrs. Harris should only need two of the sachets, Lakshmi explains, but the last one is there as insurance. Even so, the procedure does not always work—especially because Mrs. Harris should wait to call her doctor, so he believes she’s had a miscarriage and it is too late to save the baby.
Just like in her relationship with Radha, Lakshmi associates care with a clear set of instructions. Mrs. Harris’s anxiety about her child’s lack of a “place” displays the extractive view of British colonizers: though these men and women were happy to claim Indian resources, even a decade after Independence, they are unwilling to treat Indians as equals.
Themes
When Lakshmi gets home that night, she immediately notices that something is amiss. Sure enough, Mrs. Iyengar arrives, frustrated that Malik—a Muslim—has been “polluting her hearth.” Radha explains that she accidentally set her clothes on fire when she was cooking, and that Malik merely came to her aid. Radha is frustrated that Mrs. Iyengar is being an “old crow,” but Lakshmi is angry that Radha would describe their landlady in this way.
The subtle prejudice Malik faces indicates, once more, how stratified (along lines of class, caste, gender, and religion) Jaipur in the 1950s really is. While Radha rebels against these forms of differentiation, Lakshmi would rather find a place within these existing structures.
Themes
Muslims—like the Rajput Singhs—eat meat, which the pious landlady does not approve of. To patch things up with Mrs. Iyengar, therefore, Lakshmi will have to hire a Brahmin pandit (priest) to purify the hearth. This will cost 40 rupees, and Lakshmi frets about all the money she’s spent—first Hari, now this.
The Brahmin group of castes are considered to be priests and teachers. Just as Rajputs are expected to be rulers and Shudra women are often henna artists, caste dictates occupation even at the most sacred level.
Themes
A few hours later, Lakshmi basks in the midnight silence. She, Radha, and Malik spent many hours making all kinds of treats and lotions for their clients’ aches and desires. Now, she makes a list of her payments and credits in her notebook. Overall, the day is a loss. She hopes that soon the match between Sheela Sharma and Ravi Singh will come through, or that Parvati will actually make the introduction to the palace and the maharani.
Lakshmi’s practical mindset is frequently on display, but here, her rigid commitment to earning as much as she can makes more sense. If wealth depends on ever-shifting social winds (i.e., who marries, who makes an introduction), tallying her gains and losses is the only way lower-status Lakshmi can gain any measure of control.
Themes
Lakshmi notes that there are three types of karma: accumulated karma from past lives, the karma of this life, and the karma that would reveal itself in future lives. Lakshmi wonders how karma has played into her marriage with Hari, and her abandonment of her parents. At that moment, Radha cries out, having a nightmare. Lakshmi tries to comfort her, but Radha is clearly traumatized by something—which makes Lakshmi recall her time with Hari.
Hindus believe in reincarnation, or the idea that each person has many lives. Karma dictates that good actions in one life can create good fortune in the next—and that bad actions can lead to future unhappiness. Here, Lakshmi wonders about how her actions in this life will impact not only her immediate future but also the future lives she has yet to be born into.
Themes
After singing their father’s nursery rhyme, Lakshmi is able to get Radha to calm down and wake up. Radha explains that in her dream, she is responsible for holding their father up before he falls in the well—but he is too heavy, so she lets go. For the first time, Radha reveals just how difficult the last few months have been: how she cowered alone in her father’s old schoolhouse, afraid to tell anyone that their maa had died. “So many times,” Radha tells her sister, “I wished you would come and help me.”
Radha’s sense of responsibility for her family, even as a child, reflects the difficulties of interdependence. In this dream, family becomes quite literally a weight that Radha struggles to hold up. Lakshmi has not had to carry that weight for a while, and though her independence allowed her to prosper, Lakshmi now sees the consequences of her own freedom—namely, the extra weight she inadvertently added to her sister.
Themes
Finally, Lakshmi tells Radha how Hari beat her, how she had to leave Ajar entirely (once married, Lakshmi was considered her husband’s property, so her parents could not ever welcome her home). Lakshmi also explains how she had learned to use herbs as medicine from Lakshmi's saas, which came in handy when the “pleasure women” welcomed her in Agra. The only thing Lakshmi leaves out is the contraceptive sachet—though she feels no shame in this work, Radha will not yet understand.
Even as Radha feels alone, it is clear that Lakshmi needed to leave to escape Hari’s abuse. Ajar’s unforgiving views on gender conflate women with property—and so perhaps Lakshmi’s desire to own her own home stems from a reflexive need to invert these gender expectations. It is also worth noting that even as Lakshmi begins to describe her healing practice to Radha, she does not feel that she can be fully transparent or communicative.
Themes
When Lakshmi finishes her story, Radha wonders why her sister has taken on work usually associated with the Shudra caste. “It was better than being a whore,” Lakshmi replies, and the two sisters lapse into tense silence. Lakshmi moves on by asking how their pitaji died, and Radha explains that he drowned—but that his real illness was prolonged alcoholism.
Though Radha chafes against societal hierarchies, the caste system is ingrained in her, too. Lakshmi’s heated retort suggests that sex work holds a particularly shameful place in this class system, even though some of Lakshmi’s happiest times were spent with prosperous sex workers Hazi and Nasreen.
Themes
Lakshmi then fills her sister in on their family’s past. Before Radha was born, they lived in Lucknow, where their father was a successful teacher in the British school system. When India gained its independence, their pitaji sold their maa’s gold jewelry to support the movement, horrifying her. Worse still, when the British learned of their dad’s freedom fighting, they demoted him from his post, sending the family to Ajar. And looking at her bare wrists, which were supposed to be filled with gold bracelets—her insurance against poverty—their maa saw that her husband “had put politics over family.”
Independence means two things in the novel: it is both a political shift that allows India to escape colonization and a sought-after personal goal that only some people are able to dream of. In his quest for political independence, Lakshmi’s father sold his wife’s jewelry, thus depriving her of the material independence (and self-sufficiency) that her jewelry was supposed to provide her with. This tension between national independence and women’s lack of bodily and economic freedom is one of the novel’s central ideas.
Themes
Radha tells Lakshmi that their mother never mentioned her name—in her anger, she had erased her daughter from memory. Lakshmi is overcome with grief, but she realizes that Radha might be her “salvation.” Lakshmi promises herself that she will help Radha grow up well, and the two bond over their shared love of Munchi-ji, back in Ajar. Radha reveals that although she has no painting skill, she is great at making paint, which will come in handy for a henna artist.
As the sisters discover what they have in common, they are also learning how their differences might be complementary. Radha is not an artist, but she is a skilled scientist of sorts, meaning that she can add a new talent to Lakshmi’s henna business.
Themes
In the middle of the night, Samir bursts through Lakshmi’s door, carrying Joyce Harris. Behind him is Dr. Kumar. Clearly, something has gone very wrong with Lakshmi’s sachet procedure. Samir takes his leave right away, and immediately, Dr. Kumar presses Lakshmi to explain what she gave Mrs. Harris. Clearly, he is suspicious of her herbal medicine.
The fact that Samir leaves right away shows that he is uncomfortable with the contraceptive, apparently even abortifacient, processes he hires Lakshmi for. Dr. Kumar’s reliance on Western medicine is a sign that India’s independence is complicated: though the British are no longer occupying the country, their medicinal and scientific ideas are still considered (by some) to be superior.
Themes
Using his stethoscope to listen to the baby’s heartbeat, Dr. Kumar has realized that Mrs. Harris was five months along, meaning she lied to Lakshmi. She collapsed while out to dinner with friends, one of whom phoned Samir. Dr. Kumar wonders why Mrs. Harris didn’t go to a hospital—“she’s English,” he remarks, “she has all the options in the world”—and Lakshmi explains the affair. In the corner, Radha watches, shocked by her sister’s work.
Mrs. Harris’s lie puts her in mortal danger, demonstrating one of the novel’s most critical themes: that communication and honesty are essential parts of even the most straightforward biological care. Though Dr. Kumar believes Joyce Harris has endless options, her gender complicates (though by no means erases) her white privilege.
Themes
Dr. Kumar continues to attack Lakshmi’s treatment as “poison,” until she explains that her herbs make the womb “slippery.” Kumar realizes that Lakshmi is talking about managing the hormone progesterone. Just then, Mrs. Iyengar barges in, wondering what all the fuss is about at two in the morning. Quickly, Radha slips next to Mrs. Harris on the bed and starts to cry. Lakshmi is able to claim simply that her sister is sick and that she has called a doctor.
Dr. Kumar’s initial belief in the supremacy of Western medicine is shaken when he realizes that, though Lakshmi does not possess the same English terms, she is just as knowledgeable as the Oxford doctors who taught him. Radha’s cleverness demonstrates that she has the flexibility and social intuition to thrive in Jaipur society, just like her sister.
Themes
Mrs. Iyengar reluctantly accepts this excuse, and she leaves. Impressed with Radha’s quick thinking, Lakshmi instructs her to gather chamomile pollen and make a paste. Kumar warns against using more herbs, but Lakshmi stands her ground, using the paste to draw out Mrs. Harris’s infection. Sure enough, her breathing quickly grows more regular, to Kumar’s amazement.
Lakshmi’s knowledge of herbs is systemic—she knows what plants might counteract each other, and she is ultimately able to bring Mrs. Harris back from the brink. Even the skeptical Dr. Kumar must take Lakshmi’s healing seriously as both scientific and profoundly effective.
Themes
Samir rushes back in with the news that they can bring Mrs. Harris to his friend’s private hospital. Kumar notes that she will be okay, but that she will lose the baby—it “can’t be helped,” Samir says. After promising to update Lakshmi on Mrs. Harris’s status, the two men leave, and Radha wonders why any woman would want to get rid of her baby.
Now, it becomes clear that Dr. Kumar did not understand Mrs. Harris’s strong desire to abort her baby, which suggests that he is not part of the same adulterous behavior that Samir engages in. Radha’s lack of understanding of what has just witnessed is another testament to her naivete.
Themes
When Radha implores Lakshmi to explain why she does this abortive work, Lakshmi will only repeat Lakshmi's saas’s words about these women: “they have no one else to turn to.” Then, after swearing Radha to secrecy about all she has witnessed—which could end Lakshmi’s business entirely—the two sisters get to work, cleaning up the mess.
Even as the story supports the need for abortion, Lakshmi never takes it lightly. As she tells Radha, Lakshmi believes that abortion is always a difficult decision—but also that she is the person allowing women to take agency over their bodies, and their futures, which they would otherwise be denied.
Themes
