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Satire
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
“When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” is set in an unspecified New England college town during the lead-up to the Bangladesh War of Independence. Lilia plays the story against a quintessentially American, suburban backdrop that is somewhere vaguely "north of Boston"—a town in which the college buildings share “narrow brick walkways” and school-age children trick-or-treat on the streets. The absence of any further specificity contributes to an insistent sense of estrangement, as though Lilia herself is never quite sure of her own place in this country.
But beyond loneliness, Lilia’s treatment of American suburbia doubles as a portrait of necessity. The supermarket does not carry “mustard oil,” and Mr. Pirzada must make do with a graduate dormitory that lacks a “proper stove” and “television set.” Absent the comforts of walk-in doctors and friendly neighbors, America’s foreignness is defined partly by an awareness of austerity. Immigrants, such as her own parents and Mr. Pirzada, occupy a liminal space in this narrative. They are forced to consult phone books each semester and care for one another in a nation where such connections are both far and few between.
These hazy contours of Lilia’s hometown contrast against the timeliness of the story’s historical context, whose effects on Mr. Pirzada and Lilia's family the story unflinchingly chronicles. Lilia's friendship with Mr. Pirzada lurks in the shadow of the 1971 Bangladesh War of Independence, a conflict caused by simmering tensions between the eastern and western halves of then-Pakistan. Fraught with political, religious, and cultural differences, the war eerily replays the bloodshed and violence of the Partition. History mirrors itself: as her father explains to her on the kitchen table, “‘one moment we were free and then we were sliced up.’”
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