When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine: Motifs 4 key examples

Lilia’s father reminds her that, during the Partition, Hindus and Muslims fought to the point where “eating in each other’s company was still unthinkable.” Dinners with Mr. Pirzada become proof of the opposite. Lilia's Hindu parents embrace their Muslim guest until they become a “single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear.” Through “pickled mangoes” and tea-dipped biscuits, her family weathers the threats of war and grief. To eat is to share, and her family’s culinary creations provide a unity that their fractured world cannot provide.

Not all characters share the same relationships with food, however. As the TV footage surveys the destruction in East Pakistan, Lilia loses her appetite for the fish but notices how Mr. Pirzada is “calmly creating a well in his rice to make room for a second heaping of lentils.” Where Lilia refuses to eat, Mr. Pirzada seeks out food in order to brace himself against tragedy. He invests in his dinner the power to provide solace.

Food’s function extends beyond that of social cohesion. It preserves culture but also invites play, indulging at the same time as it nourishes. If Lilia’s parents bond with Mr. Pirzada over lentils and fried onions, then Lilia’s friendship with him develops through their candy exchange. Mr. Pirzada comes to each dinner bearing “honey-filled lozenges,” “raspberry truffles,” and “sour pastilles” for her, providing Lilia her first taste of pleasure. Lilia ends up attending as carefully to her candies as Mr. Pirzada does to his lentils: she limits herself to one treat a day and makes a ritual of eating them each night, praying for the safety of Mr. Pirzada’s family as she places the chocolate into her mouth. Mr. Pirzada’s treats are a steady source of friendship and delight.

But like their nightly dinners, even Lilia and Mr. Pirzada’s candy ritual is seemingly threatened by the world around them. If not entirely devalued, the meaning of Mr. Pirzada’s gifts is partly eroded by Halloween’s rampant consumerism. Lilia goes trick-or-treating with Dora, collecting candies until her hand turn “chapped” from the weight of her burlap sack. Even in the absence of toppled buildings or refugees, American society’s emphasis on abundance and acquisition poses a unique danger to her relationship with Mr. Pirzada. Immediately after trick-or-treating, Lilia returns to a shattered jack-o’-lantern on her doorstep—an indication that the man with whom she has constructed a world will soon be gone. Lilia barely mentions candy after the Halloween incident, and only in the final few sentences of the story. As Mr. Pirzada leaves for Pakistan, she takes out her sandalwood box and throws the collection away.

For all its charming elegance, though, Mr. Pirzada’s attire is also an attempt to give cover to a more desperate, anxious self. He turns to his wardrobe, if partly as a measure of self-defense. Like a soldier shedding his armor, Mr. Pirzada lets down his guard as he gives Lilia his coat and runs his fingers along her throat “the way a person feels for solidity behind a wall before driving in a nail.” Lilia later wonders whether Mr. Pirzada dresses so nicely to “endure with dignity whatever news assailed him.” She imagines his olive-colored jacket preempting him for tragedy, hinting more explicitly at his clothing’s capacity for self-defense. Clothes—much like food—offer a form of protection that compensates for his extreme helplessness.

At the same time, fashion allows Mr. Pirzada and Lilia to explore the different sides of themselves. Mr. Pirzada’s “plain silver watch”—wound up with ritualistic consistency and set to Dacca time—allows him to imagine a parallel life outside the college town’s narrow confines. He sits at Lilia’s dinner table but also lives in Pakistan, preparing his seven daughters for the school day. He is father and dinner guest all at once.

Lilia tries something similar as she trick-or-treats. She goes out on Halloween—a holiday of costumes—as a witch. Unlike Mr. Pirzada, however, her attempt at dress-up encounters much more resistance. Mr. Pirzada escapes America’s suffocating sense of alienation, but Lilia runs up against off-handed comments as neighbors express their surprise at seeing an “Indian witch.” On this level, clothing also maps itself onto one of the central tensions underlying the story. Mr. Pirzada will leave the country by the end of his grant. Born in America yet never fully part of it, Lilia is denied such a freedom.

Briefer moments reveal clothing’s ability to encompass even vaster forms of the self. Fashion—more particularly, jewelry—defines not only people but entire nations. Mr. Pirzada’s watch connects him to his daughters but simultaneously foregrounds his allegiance to East Pakistan. During her father’s geography lesson, Lilia compares India to an “orange diamond” and then a “woman wearing a sari with her left hand extended.” Through these successive references to jewelry and clothing, fashion comes to form a motif, and it serves a deeper purpose than mere ornamentation; it is the means by which Lilia first grasps the struggle for nationhood.

By displaying the borders that separate her family's country from Mr. Pirzada's country, the map places Lilia within a specific history and heritage; she awakens herself to the religious and political distinctions between the neighboring countries. But she also notices the scribbled lines that trace the course of her parents’ travels and the star over Calcutta that she herself cannot remember visiting. Maps, as the story suggests, honor people and places, even when memory fails. Lilia situates herself culturally and even historically through the very act of looking at a map.

This spatial awareness sets itself apart from the drifting feeling that dominates the rest of the work. Lilia’s family lives in a small college town that she never bothers to specify in the story. At school, her history class retraces the Revolutionary War until she can fill in a blank map of the 13 colonies with her “eyes closed,” but this doesn't seem to make her feel any more connected to her surroundings. After all, the historical maps she studies at school have little to do with her life or her family's history, so the maps themselves become yet another representation of the ways in which Lilia feels estranged from her surroundings. While the world map above her father's desk connects her to her roots, then, the maps at school do just the opposite. In both cases, though, maps in “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” force Lilia to think more meaningfully about her own cultural positioning.

Mr. Pirzada studies the trees during walks to Lilia’s house and arrives in their foyer each dinner with a “birch or maple leaf” tucked in his pocket. Botany has drawn him away from Pakistan but brought him into Lilia’s life. It is the source of his homesickness but also of his newest friendship.

As time passes, Mr. Pirzada struggles to separate the subject of his research from his personal life, so the motif becomes a bit more personal. The scientific and culinary converge when Lilia and Mr. Pirzada make their jack-o’-lantern. Mr. Pirzada, who initially only views the pumpkin as a “type of squash,” ends up carving the jack-o'-lantern with Lilia for Halloween. Her father meanwhile saves the seeds for roasting. At this moment, the pumpkin has become for Mr. Pirzada a botanical curiosity, a cultural object, and a source of food.

Furthermore, the pumpkin incites a certain kind of role reversal, as Lilia finds herself explaining the process of pumpkin-carving to the plant expert. When the looming threat of war is announced over TV, Mr. Pirzada loses grip of the knife and ruins the jack-o’-lantern’s mouth. The dexterity with which he had cut out the pumpkin’s cap devolves into a spasm that creates a lopsided gash. Both of these moments—the turned tables and the botched operation—point to the intrusion of global conflict into the personal realm. Confronted with war’s horrifying reality in a space where he is most vulnerable, the professional botanist loses control over his specimen.