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Chapter 12
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Vendor of Sweets, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Communication vs. Fear
Generational Difference
Commerce, Taste, and the Good Life
Religion
India vs. the U.K. and the U.S.
Summary
Analysis
Back in the present, Jagan has fallen asleep while thinking about the past. Birds wake him where he has been sleeping by the statue. He looks at his house and thinks that Mali and Grace have failed to brighten it the way his own mother and Ambika did during happier times. He consoles himself with the thought that he is already 60 and won’t have to live much longer in the house. Then, imagining Mali living in the house all his life, he wonders where Grace will be when Mali is 80—still in the same situation? Jagan concludes that Grace should return to America unless Mali agrees to marry her quickly.
Jagan has religious and generationally characteristic objections to Mali and Grace’s cohabitation. To fix what he views as their inappropriate relationship, he wants them to get married. Yet he is willing to accept Grace’s return to the U.S. if it will protect her from Mali’s long-term refusal to commit, which suggests that he has come to care for Grace’s wellbeing even though he now knows she isn’t his daughter-in-law.
Themes
Recalling how Mali rejected the idea of a quick marriage, Jagan concludes that he no longer has a place in his family home and decides: “At sixty, one is reborn.” He recalls how people used to ritually celebrate their 60th birthdays—and then decides to take a page from Mali’s book and eschew rituals, “bonds,” “links,” and “responsibility.” He recalls how Grace and Mali sat together with their legs touching in the green car and feels an exhausted confusion—but he decides not to try to figure it out anymore.
Previously, Jagan tied the concept of rebirth to his experience in the bearded man’s shrine, which suggests that he wants to be “reborn” in a religious or spiritual sense. Yet his previous religious practices have been tied up with social and familial “bonds” and “responsibility,” e.g. the intense responsibility he felt for Ambika during their traditional Hindu wedding. As such, his rejection of “bonds,” “links,” and “responsibility” in this scene hints that his supposed religious rebirth is just another way to avoid communicating with and trying to understand Mali. The confusion Jagan feels at the memory of Mali and Grace in the green car, a commercial status symbol, emphasizes that Jagan does not understand the younger generation’s commercial or sexual culture.
Themes
Jagan enters the house and packs a few things, including his charka so that he can continue spinning as he vowed he would in front of Gandhi. Then he tries to figure out where to leave the back-door key. He considers leaving it with his older brother, recalling how his family saw him off when he went to jail for the National Struggle even though they disapproved of the movement. Jagan wonders whether his brother would see him off on his new journey now. But then he thinks that his brother will have heard the rumors about Grace and Mali and scorn Jagan as a result—so Jagan decides he’ll keep the key.
A charka is a spinning wheel. Jagan’s decision to continue his daily spinning during his religious hermitage out of respect for Gandhi emphasizes again how intertwined his Hinduism and his Indian patriotism are. Meanwhile, Jagan’s alienation from his older brother emphasizes how utterly alone he is as a result of the breakdown of communication between him and Mali.
Themes
As Jagan walks away from the house, the cousin speeds by on a bicycle and then falls off. When Jagan exclaims, the cousin gets up and explains that he borrowed the bicycle because he was rushing to see Jagan. Jagan announces that he is leaving home forever. The cousin, struck by his brusqueness, says that Mali needs immediate help: the police found him with alcohol in his car and have put him in prison. Jagan shouts that he warned Mali against purchasing “that horrible car,” which must have given him ideas.
At first glance, Jagan’s claim that Mali’s “horrible car” is what led him astray seems humorously backwards. Yet insofar as the car represents Mali’s Americanized materialism and commercial aspirations, Jagan may be right. Alcohol was illegal in Tamil Nadu, the region of India where the novel is implied to take place, until 1971. Due to Mali’s Westernized contempt for Indian social norms and his materialistic confusion about what will make him happy, he has flouted local law to drink—with legal repercussions.
Themes
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The cousin says that Mali is in jail and that they could have bailed him out the previous night, if only the cousin had been able to find Jagan. Jagan explains he was sleeping outside. He moans that he knows how awful the jail is—but he and the cousin conclude it must be better now than it was in the colonial period. The cousin goes on to explain that Mali was in the green car with two friends when the police stopped them, searched the car, and charged them under the Prohibition Act with possessing alcohol.
Jagan and the cousin’s agreement that the jail must be better after India’s 1947 independence than it was under the UK’s colonial rule emphasizes their Indian patriotism. It also contrasts with Mali’s contempt for Indian law and his Western materialism, as represented by his green car.
Themes
When Jagan admits that he didn’t know Mali drank, the cousin says under Prohibition they can charge you even if you just smell like alcohol—but that a doctor can swear he gave Mali medicine with “an alcoholic flavour” before Mali was caught. When Jagan asks which doctor will do this, the cousin tells him the lawyer will handle it. Jagan asks where Mali was going in the green car, and the cousin says he was meeting with “foreign collaborators” and that a hitchhiker brought the alcohol into the car and left it there. Jagan is reassured by the possibility that this could be the case.
Mali was meeting with “foreign collaborators,” presumably Americans, when the police caught him with alcohol in his car. This emphasizes the symbolic connection between the green car and American capitalism’s empty promises of happiness, which ultimately leave people worse off than they were before. (The cousin’s story about the hitchhiker seems overwhelmingly unlikely to be true.)
Themes
The cousin goes over possibilities for Mali’s defense: the lawyer—who is thinking of buying stock in Mali’s story-writing machine company—is investigating the possibility that the arresting officer might have a grudge against Jagan or Mali for some reason. Jagan says that if Mali’s defense is true, then he’ll be acquitted—but either way there is nothing Jagan can do. When the cousin protests that they must help Mali, who could be sentenced to two years, Jagan again says that the truth will decide. The cousin points out that the lawyer will have to establish the truth with “proper evidence.”
Mali’s lawyer plans to buy stock in the story-writing machine company, which symbolically associates him with commerce over art and with the ultimate breakdown of communication between Jagan and Mali. As such, it is unsurprising that Jagan refuses to cooperate with the lawyer in establishing “proper evidence,” insisting instead that if the lawyer is telling the truth, Mali will be fine.
Themes
Jagan—feeling that he has come to an epiphany—wishes luck to everyone involved in the case but says he won’t be involved: he is going away with nothing but the bag he’s carrying. When the cousin asks where, Jagan tells him about the retreat. Horrified, the cousin asks whether the bearded man who sells hair dye has been trying to pawn off the place on Jagan—and warns Jagan off the bearded man, whom he describes as dangerous.
It is unclear from Jagan’s under-described epiphany whether he is having a genuine religious rebirth or whether he is simply using religious piety as an excuse to avoid further conflict and difficulty with Mali—as he has been avoiding difficult conversations with Mali the whole book. Either a sincere or an ironic reading of Jagan’s actions seem possible.
Themes
Jagan insists that he plans to see a goddess carved from stone—and then stay or go as he sees fit. He encourages the cousin to think of him as a dead man from now on, gives him the keys to the shop for Mali to inherit eventually, and says that the cousin can always visit him at the retreat if he has questions. He gives the cousin a check for Mali’s bail. Finally, he asks where Grace is. The cousin begins to explain that Grace’s friends have found her a job in a hostel, but Jagan interrupts to say that he’ll buy her a plane ticket if she wants—it’s his responsibility, as she was “a good girl.”
Jagan may be using his religious retreat partly to avoid difficult conversations and interactions with Mali, as he has been avoiding such conversations and interactions for the entire novel. Yet he is not only avoiding Mali: he has also decided to give up his business. Given the conflict that the novel poses between commerce and religion, Jagan’s final choice suggests that he is definitively siding with religion over commerce as the path to a good life. Finally, Jagan’s conclusion that Grace is a “good girl” suggests that he has come to believe her over Mali: she really did want to marry Mali and assimilate into the family, and Mali turned against her partly because he was interested in Americanizing India rather than having an American partner assimilate to Indian culture.
Themes
